All-in-one venue management software that streamlines event bookings

Planning Pod is at the core of a smooth-running facility, enabling you and your team to stay organized with 20+ tools in one easy-to-use platform

White Laptop

Our online venue management software centralizes how you manage your events, sales, billings, floor plans, communications and client details

Vendor List

Easily keep tabs on your events and people in real-time

Never again struggle with juggling spreadsheets, emails, calendars and stand-alone apps. Our event venue software gives you and your team a centralized, organized solution to access information instantly and collaborate.

Planning Pod Dashboard with Alerts

Introduce processes that save time and effort

Our Web-based tools integrate with each other and allow you to create workflows that make venues like yours more efficient. In fact, we save our venue customers 62+ hours of busywork every month with features like templates and dashboards.

Planning Pod Event Listing

Simplify how you manage event bookings and clients

Always know where you stand with your venue bookings and event space availability. Deliver high-touch service to clients. Make a lasting impression with prospects. Our user-friendly venue management software gives you the power to do all this and more.

FOR FACILITIES OF ANY SIZE - FROM WEDDING HALLS & UNIQUE VENUES TO MULTI-LOCATION SETUPS

Created for all types of venues and facilities


4.89 out of 5 stars

See why more venues rely on our event management and booking system to build their businesses!

See All Reviews

All the tools a venue needs to thrive ... and save 62+ hours/month

Contract Signatures
SALES, BILLING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Simplify how you manage your business and make it easier to work with you

Our business tools form a smooth system for interacting with customers and creating seamless processes for your staff. Streamline email communications with a centralized inbox that works with your existing email addresses. Capture leads and online bookings via webforms and track your pipeline with lead management and event CRM tools. Impress customers with branded, professional proposals, contracts and invoices. Build BEOs in minutes. Track food-and-beverage packages and catering orders. Collect electronic signatures and online payments via client portals. And tie it all together with custom automations and workflows to create timesaving processes.

"Does everything from coordination of proposals to contracts and invoicing ... it’s pretty amazing!"
- Tim Paradise, Villa Del Paraiso

Tim Paradise, Villa Del Paraiso
EVENT BOOKING AND SCHEDULING

Manage event bookings + appointments with ease and view your availability

Our drag-and-drop, user-friendly bookings calendar puts all your booked events at your fingertips. Instantly add new venue bookings and track function space availability for single venues or multi-location operations (including timeline views). Receive time conflict alerts so you never, ever double book your spaces. Sync with other popular e-calendars like Google and Outlook. Temporarily reserve dates and spaces for prospects. Schedule appointments for meetings, calls, walkthroughs and site visits. Coming soon - Give clients scheduling links and forms to set appointments with you on the fly.

  • Booking Conflict Alerts
  • Sync with E-Calendars
  • Hold Date/Space for Leads
Abbey Brown, The Brownstone Topeka

"Perfect for scheduling our events and verifying that we do not overbook group sales."
- Abbey Brown, The Brownstone Topeka

Calendar Event View
Planning Pod To-Do Tool
PRODUCTIVITY AND COLLABORATION

Stay on top of every detail and keep everyone in the loop

Whether you have a staff of 1 or 101, our productivity tools keep you and your team on task and on schedule. Assign tasks and set appointments. Manage files and build timelines. Share messages and notes. Send out forms to collect input from clients. See the big picture with at-a-glance dashboards and comprehensive reports. Track one or multiple venues inside a single account. And if you offer event planning services or host your own events, inquire about our event manager tools for tracking budgets, event webpages, attendees, ticket sales and event registrations / RSVPs.

"I love that my team and I can access many tools in one place to stay on track."
- Laura Motes, Barber Museum

Laura Motes, Barber Museum
EVENT LAYOUTS AND SETUPS

Design detailed event floor plans that clarify your vision

A great way to sell your event spaces is to literally show customers what they can expect. Our event floorplan builder lets you create to-scale layouts, room diagrams and seating charts ... no design or CAD experience required. Build reusable templates for every room and setup, including room boundaries and fixtures. Create table and chair setups in minutes with auto-generated grids. Choose from hundreds of elements, customize your own and save your favorites. And share your designs with custom weblinks or via full-color PDF documents.

Polly Zel, Vista Hills Vineyard

"The floorplans tool is so helpful, both for clients and for our staff."
- Polly Zel, Vista Hills Vineyard

Floorplan Layout
Planning Pod Layout Options
BRANDING AND CUSTOMIZATION

Save time plus build your brand with customizations

There are many ways to fine tune your account to give your business an edge. Stand out among your event industry peers by branding your account, client-facing documents and emails with your logo and colors. Connect your existing email addresses to send/receive email from our communications tool. Build timesaving templates for proposals, contracts, invoices, floorplans, emails and more. Connect to other applications like Evernote, Google Drive, MailChimp, Quickbooks, Salesforce, Trello, Xero and hundreds more.

  • Reusable Templates

"Planning Pod makes us look great while keeping our events organized."
- Roxanne Kopelcheck, Rusty Rail Brewing

Roxanne Kopelcheck, Rusty Rail Brewing
MAKING IT EASY TO USE OUR TOOLS

Everything you need to get up and running fast

Mobile-friendly version that is fully responsive so it works great via the Web browser on any tablet or mobile device

White-glove onboarding that includes adding your logo, brand color and existing data to your account *

Customized live training over the Web so you and your team can get up to speed quickly and start getting things done *

Mobile phone displaying Planning Pod contacts list

Comprehensive help center with hundreds of articles and how-to videos that walk you through every function and feature

Customer support to answer your questions quickly - includes live chat, email and phone support

Secure data transmission and storage including Secure Socket Layer encryption, data-at-rest encryption, server-side firewall protection, daily remote backups and PCI compliance for online payments*

*Included with all yearly subscription packages; inquire about data porting details

Take control of your event bookings with our top-rated venue management system

GET STARTED! Plans and Pricing

RECENT POST
Jeff Kear · Owner, Planning Pod

How to evaluate the best venue management software for your needs


Running an event venue or facility is a labor of love, as most venue owners and managers have a deep passion for seeing events come to fruition but are faced with many challenges in running their business and managing all venue operations. This includes finding and serving clients, hiring and overseeing employees, coordinating with vendors, managing inventories and handling the hundreds of details involved in every event.

Thankfully, cloud-based venue management systems are helping event facilities of all kinds - from restaurants, conference venues, banquet halls, wedding venues and golf clubs to unique venues like vineyards, museums and estates - address these challenges. In addition, these platforms help entrepreneurs who are opening a new event space get up-and-running faster and shorten the time to profitability.

Whatever kinds of events are hosted at your venue - from parties and weddings to classes, meetings and conferences - most facilities benefit from Web-based programs because they:

  • Create efficiencies by helping them establish new processes and refine old ones.
  • Centralize their information into one place so it isn’t scattered across multiple apps and spreadsheets.
  • Provide instant access to big-picture data so they can make informed decisions on-the-fly.
  • Simplify how they communicate and collaborate with staff, clients, prospects and vendors.
  • Increase their bookings, revenue and repeat business through all the above.
  • Offer event booking engines that automate many processes and workflows by integrating with other tools and applications

The venue management software market is a smaller and highly specialized niche of the overall event management solution space, offering a number of tools that appeal to a wide variety of professionals working at event venues and caterers, from venue managers, sales managers, food-and-beverage managers and event planners to head chefs, kitchen staff, wait staff and hosts.

First, let’s take a look at the best venue management software tools available today for the hospitality and events industry.

Top Venue Management Software and Event Booking Engines

Planning Pod

The only true all-in-one event management tool, Planning Pod offers 20+ tools that include event booking calendars; sales and lead management; online contracts and electronic signatures; banquet event orders + food-and-beverage management; invoicing and payments; event floor plan layouts; consolidated email communications; and much more.

It also includes event management solutions for those venues that have event organizers or managers on staff. Plus it integrates with hundreds of other applications via the Zapier platform and is mobile friendly for use on smartphones and tablets.

Event Temple

Event Temple specializes in hotels and hospitality groups and offers lead management, booking management, proposals and invoicing tools with mobile app integration.

Ivvy

Ivvy offers solutions for hotels, caterers, restaurants and stadiums with tools for lead CRM, quotes/contracts, booking calendars, invoicing and BEOs.

Priava

Based in Australia, Priava serves businesses mainly in the hospitality industry with tools for managing lead/client CRM, booking calendar, proposals and invoices.

Skedda

Skedda specializes in offering a mobile-friendly booking calendar solution for venues, studios, conference centers, classrooms and community facilities.

Tripleseat

Tripleseat focuses on hospitality clients by specializing in sales and lead management tools, including CRM, proposals, billing and payments; learn more about Tripleseat pricing and competitors .

EventPro

EventPro offers a cross-section of tools for both venues and caterers, including booking management, sales and lead management, invoicing and payments.

Thundertix

Ideal for concert and music venues, Thundertix provides tools for managing event ticketing, online event registrations, reserved seating, box offices and subscribers / patrons.

Ungerboeck

Based in Germany, Ungerboeck offers large-scale, enterprise solutions for arenas, convention centers, universities and performing arts centers.

Artifax Event

Focused on serving museums and galleries, Artifax Event provides tools for room bookings, event management, resource management and customer/attendee/artist CRM.

Function Tracker

Function Tracker provides venue software tools for managing bookings, staff, quotes, contracts, run sheets, invoicing and payments.

What Is Venue Management Software and What Does It Do?

In a nutshell, most online venue applications offer some combination of the following capabilities.

Event Scheduling and Booking


The number one feature most venues are looking for in a venue management platform is an event booking software system that lets them take care of all their event scheduling, including creating event reservations, tracking booked events and viewing current availability - all in real time in a centralized booking calendar - for every event space in the facility. This includes ballrooms, corporate meeting rooms, event halls, breakout rooms, boardrooms, exposition halls and the like.

Typically most venue booking systems let users view by date, week and month and drill down to a client’s desired date to see if the time and space are both available. Such room and space management tools also alert users to if a time or space is already booked so as to avoid double booking. A big plus is the ability to integrate with other electronic calendars like Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook so you can view your event bookings on other calendars your venue might be using.

Event Sales, Invoicing and Billing


Keeping a handle on your leads, proposals, invoices and payments is pretty much a full-time job itself, but most venues also need for multiple people to be able to view and manage venue-wide information for group sales and banquet sales. And some venue managers also need to track this data across multiple venues.

Top event management software applications offer, for starters, CRM and lead management functions to give your business development staff the sales management tools they need. Included in this are the ability to generate proposals / quotes as well as contracts and collect electronic signatures for both. Invoicing capabilities are also part of the package, as are the ability to collect online credit card payments and schedule future payments. Any solid sales CRM should provide the functionality to manage a wide variety of current event sales best practices as detailed here .

Finally, it’s useful to have pricing automation features like templates for line items, menu items and food-and-beverage packages and settings for creating standard tax rates, markups, discounts, service fees and the like.

Catering and Food-and-Beverage Management


While not all venues offer full-service catering, many of them do, and many others will offer discrete food-and-beverage options or work with external food service providers. As such, venue software often includes food and beverage software tools for tracking on-premise or offsite catering orders; collecting online bookings, orders and requests; building banquet event orders (BEOs) and custom event menus on-the-fly; and managing recipes and portion sizes. It can also include proposal and invoicing features that streamline how you bill for catered items and F&B packages as well as for tracking packing lists and delivery instructions.

Event Design and Layout


Most venues use some type of room layout or event floorplan design software tool, and usually for two reasons:

  • To help prospects and clients visualize what they can expect regarding their proposed event, including how their event would be laid out and where their attendees would sit, dine and interact.
  • To guide staff members as to how to set up the event (tables, chairs, floors, stages, A/V equipment, etc.), how to direct attendees during the event and what meals to serve to guests for plated dinner style seating.

Many event management software solutions for venues include an event design tool as part of their product offerings to help venue staff create layouts for meeting spaces, banquets, exhibit halls, auditoriums and even restaurant setups. Often this tool integrates with guest list and registration / RSVP tools for things like assigned seating.

Event Planning


Typically, event planning software programs fall into their own category of tools reserved for professional event organizers and corporate planners. However, for venues that offer event management services, these features are vital for tracking client details for parties, weddings, galas, performances, seminars, workshops, small meetings or larger meetings, and they include functionality for managing budgets, tasks, timelines/schedules, checklists, files, forms and even event marketing tools for event websites and social media sharing.

Resource and Inventory Management


Many venues offer rental items like tables, chairs, plateware/glassware, silverware and linens as well as audio/visual and other equipment as another service to their clients. With that said, some event venue software platforms provide inventory management options to track rental items allocated to events as well as any breakage and items out for cleaning or repair.

Staff and Operations Management


A key need of many event venue professionals is to be able to manage their staff members and keep all employees on the same page regarding their responsibilities as well as overall specifics and requirements for each event. Conveniently, most software programs for venues offer features such as collaborative/shared staff calendars, internal messaging, email communications, task management and tools for sharing files and important data such as contracts, proposals, invoices, BEOs and timelines.

Contracts and Electronic Signatures


Nothing can be more frustrating than having to ask a client repeatedly to sign the proposal or contract for their event. Without such signoffs, this leaves special event venues open for potential liability as well as for disagreement regarding the terms and pricing verbally agreed upon by the venue and the client. So the top event management software includes a contract management module with the ability to create and email online contracts to clients as well as collect e-signatures to documents that require signoff.

Reporting, Dashboards and KPIs


Having all your data in an all-in-one tool does you no good if that data isn’t presented in a way that lets you know the status of all your events at-a-glance and helps you make quick decisions. This is where dashboards and comprehensive reports are a huge asset, and you should certainly look for event management systems that include these features for reviewing and assessing key performance indicators and aggregate data points.

Attendee Management and Ticketing


Although not all venues manage event attendees, some do plan and promote their own for-profit events (like wine tastings, multi-course dinners, concerts, sporting events for sports venues, and the like). For these in-house events, it is necessary to have some sort of attendee management system that collects online event registrations or event RSVPs, sells tickets, processes credit card payments and allows for day-of-event attendee check in or sign in. Check to see if the venue management system you are reviewing includes such features as well as extras like event mobile apps and virtual event tools like video conferencing.

Client and Event Communications


Most venues have multiple staff members who regularly communicate with clients and prospects via email. However, tracking these communications and determining who said what to whom and when can be frustrating when lead and client emails are spread across the inboxes of multiple staff members. As such, it is critical to have a platform that offers a single, consolidated inbox for all event, client and prospect communications and lets you and your team integrate your existing email addresses into that tool for sending/receiving emails.

So how does one evaluate venue management software based on all these criteria? The process is fairly straightforward.

  1. Assess your needs - You probably don’t need all of the features mentioned above (with the exception of venue booking software tools), so create a list of the must-have features you require and prioritize them.
  2. Research the platforms that align with your needs - Use Google and industry sources like directories (like Capterra) and online reviews to compile a list of potential candidates from the venue software market segment, which includes Planning Pod as well as the aforementioned tools Skedda, Priava, EventPro, Tripleseat, Gather, Event Temple, Function Tracker, Ivvy and Ungerboeck (or Artifaxevent or Thundertix specifically for performing arts venues).
  3. Get a demo or free trial of the software - You must see and experience the software before you commit to it, so have the company provide you with a guided online demonstration and even provide a free trial if possible.
  4. Consider solutions that grow with you - Even though most platforms will have features you don’t currently need, make sure the ones you are considering can expand and provide additional features as your needs grow.
  5. Make sure onboarding and training is included - Most venue and event managers don’t have tons of time to import their data into a new platform or self-train themselves so they can then train their employees. So look for top venue management systems and solutions that will help you get onboarded as well as train you and your staff.

Ready to take control of your events?

GET STARTED! Plans and Pricing