If you’re running a venue of any kind, whether it’s ideal for weddings, concerts, professional conferences, or some combination of those events, venue management software is a must.

Several options exist to help meet your budget guidelines, but when you’re strapped for cash, it can be hard to justify making the investment.

The truth is, investing in the right venue management software can help you save money, making you more successful in the long run.

Keeps You More Organized

When you’re running a single event, there are a lot of details to keep up with and manage. When you’re running multiple events at the same time or planning several events together, it can get hectic to keep all the information where it needs to be.

Software helps you keep the right information for each event, from contacts to contracts, menu selections, budgets and every other detail. When the data you’re looking for is readily accessible and easy to find, you save time, which saves money.

Many of the event management software options out there are joining the Software as a Service (SaaS) revolution to become available “in the cloud”. This adds even more flexibility because the data can be accessed from anywhere there’s an active Internet connection.

Make a connection with someone while you’re out grabbing your morning coffee? Use your phone to add their contact information right then and there, rather than waiting to get back to the office. You never know when you’ll get busy and distracted and forget to add the contact.

With cloud-based access, anyone on your team can get the information they need. Your sales team can add new contacts, and your event planners can follow up with ease. From there, caterers and other important players can access and edit data as needed, to ensure the entire team stays on the same page.

By using venue management software, you will you be more organized and positioned to provide better quality service to your customers. 97 percent of global customers say customer service is either “very important” or “somewhat important” in their choice and loyalty to a brand. With better service, you’re more likely to see an influx of referrals, allowing you to book more events and increase profits.

Helps Improve Your Efficiency

Your event management software can also help improve efficiency because organizational workflows can be adapted in the system to fit how your venue runs. Creating functions in the program and adding resources to those functions enables you to automatically generate event run sheets you can use in multiple variations, internally with other employees, with your clients, and with vendors.

You can customize the interface to keep all the most important details front and center, such as:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): there are many standalone solutions on the market today not designed specifically for event and venue management, but event management solutions include this feature.
• Marketing activity: how well is your social media campaign translating to new prospects?
• Quotes: how much prospective revenue do you have coming in? Which clients have accepted their quotes? Which clients have requested revisions?
• Payments: keep everything PCI complaint, and keep the IRS happy. Checklists, what needs to be done for this client? For this event?

Quality event management solutions offer lead-routing technology that works with your website to send web inquiries to the right person for follow-up.

Quickly and easily get a bird’s eye view of what’s going on at your venue or restaurant for the day or the week, so you can make sure everyone is on the same page and nothing slips through the cracks.

Let everyone on your team see the information, and when one person makes a change, it’s all automatically updated for everyone else. But, to avoid potential confusion, only one person can make edits to a specific task at a time.

Gives You More Freedom in the Overall Budget

We all know how your venue looks plays a role in attracting quality events. When you save money in other areas because of your event management software, you can afford to invest more into the aesthetics of your venue.

With the savings you get from the software, you’ll be able to afford to shift money around. Whether you want to invest it in a new paint job, more décor, additional staff to support the event volume, new furniture, tableware, or something else entirely. You don’t have to sweat investing in upgrades to the venue, use those improvements to draw an even bigger crowd.

Article Written By: Gail Gardner of Business.com