The per-member problem
Almost every platform in this market prices per member. It is a pricing model that works beautifully for the vendor and badly for you: the month you finally fill the building is the month your software bill peaks. Grow from 60 members to 120 and you have doubled a cost that did not get twice as useful.
WorkHub charges a flat monthly fee. Starter is £249 a month and Professional is £449, and neither moves when you sign another member. Fill every desk and the number on the invoice is the same.
The same applies to room hire. Where other platforms take a percentage of what you earn from meeting-room bookings, WorkHub takes no commission. Revenue from your space is yours.
Members, companies and the records behind them
Coworking sits somewhere between hospitality and property, and the data model has to cope with both. A freelancer on a hot desk and a twelve-person company in a private suite are the same kind of record in WorkHub — a contact, attached to a company where one exists, attached to the space they occupy.
That matters because everything else hangs off it. A service request knows who raised it and which desk or office they sit in. A booking knows whether the person making it is a member on member rates or a walk-in paying the external rate. An invoice knows which agreement it belongs to.
Bookable space, and getting paid for it
Meeting rooms and desks are set up once with their rates, and each rate is priced two ways:
- Member rate — what your members pay
- External rate — what someone off the street pays
Rates are also either public, meaning bookable by members and through the booking widget on your own website, or internal, meaning only your team can book them on somebody's behalf. That is how you run a room that is open to the public at one price and held back for members at another, without duplicating the room.
With Stripe connected, external customers pay at the point of booking. You are not invoicing a stranger for a two-hour room hire and then chasing it.
Self-service, so reception stops being a helpdesk
Members get their own portal. They raise a request, book a room at their rate, see their invoices and keep their own details current, without emailing anyone.
On Professional the portal carries your logo, your colours and your domain, and installs to a phone home screen with push notifications. Members experience your brand rather than your software supplier's.
When something breaks
Requests become tickets — raised in the portal, emailed in from your support address, or logged by your own team. Each ticket carries a category, a location down to the floor and room, and its own response and resolution targets.
A cleaner can be assigned a ticket directly, which for a spillage or an empty dispenser is faster than routing it to a contractor. Costs recorded against a ticket are what later tell you which parts of the building are expensive to run.
Finance that your accountant recognises
WorkHub does not try to replace your accounting system. It connects to Xero and pushes what happened in the building into it, posting each kind of income to its own account: membership and rent separately from room hire, because they are different businesses with different margins.
Contacts are matched on email address first, so an established ledger does not gradually fill with near-duplicate members.
Growing past one location
Professional covers single or multi-site operations, up to 80 offices. Beyond that, Enterprise is priced on enquiry with unlimited offices and admin users. Either way you are not running each site as a separate island with its own login — see multi-site workspace management.
What is not built yet
Visitor management and telephony appear in the product menu but are placeholders describing planned work, not working features. Both are on the public roadmap where you can vote on them. We would rather tell you here than have you find out during setup.
WorkHub is pre-launch and currently taking early-access enquiries. Nothing described above is a mock-up, but you would be joining before general availability.
Is WorkHub right for a coworking operator?
It is a good fit if you run space as a business: you have members or tenant companies, bookable rooms, a building to maintain and invoices to raise, and you are currently doing that across several systems.
It is a poor fit if you want community features — event feeds, member directories, social networking. WorkHub is built around the operation of the building, not the community inside it, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.