For venue and hall booking software
Venue bookings already run through your software. Your platform can earn on the payments.
Synapto is the embedded payments partner for UK venue and hall booking software. Hall hire fees, regular hirers booking the same evening every week, and a bond held against damage. Your software runs the diary and the money. Whether it should earn on the money is worth a conversation.
How the money moves
The hire schedule your software already runs for every date. Each stop is a hold deposit, staged balance or damage deposit your venues take today, through a provider each hall arranged separately. We move venue hire onto payments inside your product: each venue is settled in full, and your margin is paid monthly.
Charging nothing on the money was the honest choice. It is not the only one.
Village halls, community centres, sports pavilions and church halls are run by volunteers and part-time managers on tight budgets. If your product decided early on to take no commission on hire fees, and told your venues so, that was a fair position and it built trust. We are not asking you to walk it back.
It does mean that the hire money moving through your diary earns for the gateway your venues connected, and nothing for the product that made the booking possible. Those two facts can both be true, and the second one is worth examining without breaking the first.
The commercials
Better terms for your venues, a revenue line for you.
Most of your venues already take hold deposits and staged balances, each through a provider the venue arranged on its own. We move them onto payments inside your product, in your name and in planned groups of venues, and build the deposit, balance and damage-deposit products that keep them there. Each venue is settled in full for every hire, and your margin follows monthly.
A single hall negotiating its own card rate has almost no bargaining power. Your whole base has considerably more. Pricing agreed across your venues is the route to them ending up better off than the default rate each of them signed up to individually, while the volume also earns for you. That is the only version of this worth doing, and if the numbers for your base do not support it, we will say so before you build anything.
- Your own subscription revenue on agreed terms
- A share of the hire volume your diary already moves
- Terms agreed across your base, not venue by venue
- Commercials in writing before you build anything
The weight
Payment support for volunteer bookers, from us
A hall treasurer who cannot find a payment is not going to work through a help centre at nine on a Sunday evening. They ring someone. Today that someone is probably you, about a gateway you do not control. With us they ring a named person here who can see the payment and explain it.
- Venues get an account manager, not a ticket queue
- Boarding and verification handled by us
- Checks at onboarding, not mid-season
- Your support queue stays about the diary
The rails
Regular hirers on Direct Debit
A great deal of hall booking is the same group in the same room every week, year after year. Today that regular hirer almost certainly pays by standing order, which the hall cannot vary, cannot see fail and has to reconcile by eye against a bank statement. Direct Debit on UK rails is the same money with the control the other way round: the hall sets the amount, the hall gets told when one fails.
One-off hires and the damage deposit go on card. That second one matters, because the bond is still routinely taken as a cheque held uncashed in a drawer, which is a security no volunteer treasurer can actually enforce. A card held against the booking can be.
- Direct Debit for regular hirers, on UK rails, replacing the standing order
- Card payments for one-off hires
- A damage bond held on card instead of an uncashed cheque
- Refunds when a booking is cancelled
- One settlement, one statement, one person to call
From first call to first revenue
Book a payments review
Bring the rough hire volume moving through your diary. We show you what it is worth, in writing.
Scope the integration
Your team builds against our SDK, around your release schedule, with a payments engineer here for the payments questions.
Board your venues
New venues payments-native from the day they join, existing ones moved when it suits them.
Earn on the diary
Your revenue line grows with their bookings, and an account manager looks after both of you.
Questions
It does if you keep saying it word for word once a charge reaches the venue, so that line would have to change. The version that is honest is this: terms agreed across your whole base are how a hall ends up better off than the rate it gets on its own, and the message becomes that you negotiated on their behalf. That only works if the venues genuinely are better off, so we work the numbers for your base first. If they do not support it, we will tell you and you should not do this.
Small and seasonal is normal here, and it is exactly why underwriting matters. Your venues are boarded as part of your base rather than assessed as if each were a standalone applicant, and checks happen at onboarding rather than the first time a summer fete produces an unusual week.
You do. They are your customers inside your product. We are the payments partner underneath: we run onboarding, risk and support in your name, and between payment and payout the money sits in a balance in the venue's name with our regulated acquiring partner. Neither you nor Synapto holds it.
A thirty-minute payments review
Bring your hire volume and your questions. We will tell you what moving your venues' hire payments is worth and whether we are the right fit, including if we are not.