How to Automate ROLLER

Every booking is a slot that cannot be sold twice

ROLLER is venue management software for attractions: trampoline parks, family entertainment centres, axe throwing venues, water parks, museums, climbing gyms and the rest of the places where people book an hour.

The economics are brutal and simple. A venue has a fixed number of lanes, targets, bays or jump slots, each one exists for an hour, and then it never exists again. A Saturday two o'clock that goes unsold is gone. A birthday party booked six weeks out is worth more than the walk-in it displaced, and a group that arrives without waivers signed holds up everyone behind them.

So ROLLER carries the things that decide the day: what is booked and for when, who has signed a waiver, how much capacity is left, what the till took, who holds a membership, and what the guest thought on the way out.

Admin happens between the rushes, or not at all

Nobody at a venue gets a quiet morning to do the office work in.

The manager is on the floor at three because a party arrived early. The rest happens in the gaps: cashing up against what the payment processor actually settled, checking whether the roster covers Saturday now that two people have called in, reading the review that came in overnight and deciding whether it needs an answer, working out whether the group whose deposit was due on Friday has paid it.

Then there is the follow-up nobody ever gets to. The corporate group who came in March and has not been asked back. The guest who left a two-star survey and never heard from anyone. The booking that got as far as the payment page and stopped.

All of it matters. All of it competes with a queue at the front counter, and the queue wins every time.

Waivers, ticketing and guest surveys already run themselves

ROLLER covers the guest journey thoroughly, and a venue paying for it should be running all of it before adding anything.

Online ticketing sells the session, packages and party bookings sell the bigger stuff, and a self-serve kiosk takes the walk-ins so the counter is not the bottleneck. Waivers are digital and can be signed before arrival, mobile check-in and access control move people through the door, and capacity management keeps a session from being oversold. Cashless wallets, gift cards, guest tabs and mobile food and beverage ordering handle the spend once guests are inside. Memberships and loyalty bring them back. Guest surveys go out automatically after a visit and roll up into a Guest Experience Score, which runs from minus one hundred to one hundred, and HQ compares that across venues. Reporting and analytics, stock control, staff permissions and payments sit underneath it all.

Every part of that operates on bookings, guests and transactions ROLLER handled itself.

The other half of the venue is elsewhere. The payment processor's settlements are elsewhere. Reviews on Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor are elsewhere. The rostering app is elsewhere, and so is the food supplier's ordering site and the school holiday calendar that quietly decides how busy next Tuesday will be.

Yesterday's takings and this morning's reviews can arrive together

The night between closing and opening is long enough to read every site the venue depends on.

Yesterday's takings from ROLLER set against what the payment processor actually settled and what reached the bank, with the difference named on the day instead of discovered at month end. Gift card liability tracked, because a venue that has sold two years of gift cards is carrying a number it ought to know.

New reviews collected overnight from the sites guests actually read, with anything under three stars pulled to the top and a reply drafted for a manager. Guests who left a low survey score matched back to their booking, so somebody can call the right person about the right visit.

Shifts on the rostering app checked against tomorrow's booked sessions, so a Saturday that is two staff short becomes a Thursday problem. Group and corporate bookings from last quarter surfaced with when they came and what they spent, which is the win-back list every venue means to build and never does. Abandoned bookings listed each morning while the guest still remembers wanting to come.

Guest contact stays supervised. A message to somebody who had a bad visit gets drafted, read and sent by a person, never by a schedule.

Closing time is when the second job starts

The duty manager cashes up at eleven, and every one of those checks is still waiting for whoever opens tomorrow. The real question is whether any of them need a person.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the payment processor, the review sites, the rostering app or ROLLER itself, reads what is on each screen, and leaves one summary with the differences and the exceptions called out.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it mid-way. Nothing reaches a guest without a person reading it first, because at a venue that lives on reviews a badly aimed message is expensive.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.