What free parking management software costs a car park that takes money

Free parking management software is space allocation software. It knows which bay belongs to whom, and it has no opinion whatsoever about money.

There is no free ParkAgenda plan, and we are not going to bury that in the last paragraph. Our prices are published: 199 EUR per parking per month, less as you add parkings. The question worth answering is what the free option costs a car park that takes money, because it is not zero, and the number is calculable with your own figures.

What free actually gives you

A grid of spaces, a name in each one, and a booking calendar. For an employee car park where nobody pays anything, that is the whole problem solved and you should stop reading here.

The free tiers in this category come from workplace parking. Skedda, Parkable and Sharvy are good at their job, and their job is allocation: a known population, a known badge, a space that costs nothing either way. Nothing arrives from a third party. Nobody hands over a key. Nobody takes 40 EUR in cash on a Sunday morning from a customer who is 19 hours late and annoyed about it.

A paid off airport car park is a different business with a similar-looking calendar.

The four jobs a free tool does not do

Money at the desk, commission by channel, no-shows and overstays, and the handover between two shifts. Every one of those ends up in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is where the loss lives.

Money at the desk

Allocation tools have no ledger. There is nowhere to record that Sofia took 45 EUR in cash at 22:40 from the customer in bay 112, that the note went in the drawer, and that the drawer was counted at 06:00 by somebody else. Without a named operator on every line and a count that does not show the expected figure first, a variance is a mystery rather than a question you can ask one person.

Commission by channel

A free tool records a booking. It does not record that this booking came from a reseller at 22 per cent, that one at 18 per cent, and the third from your own site at zero. Which means net revenue by channel does not exist, and the decision about whether to keep a channel gets made on gross volume, which always flatters the expensive channel. Attribution on the booking is what makes that comparison possible, and what a parking booking system has to do when you do not own the sales channel covers how a booking gets its source in the first place.

No-shows and overstays

The car that never arrives and the car that comes back a day and a half late are the two events that break a space plan, and neither has a home in an allocation tool. An overstay in particular needs a rule: a grace period, an hourly rate, a calculated figure, and a human who confirms it, adjusts it, or waives it because the queue is six deep.

The handover at 14:00

The morning operator knows that the Volvo in row C has a key in the second drawer because the customer's brother is collecting it. A free tool has nowhere to put that, so it lives in a person's head, and at 14:00 that person goes home.

Price the spreadsheet with your own numbers

Take a 400 space car park at 70 per cent average occupancy, average stay 8 days, so roughly 35 arrivals and 35 departures a day. Sixty per cent of bookings come from three resellers, the rest direct. These numbers are an example, not a customer's, and the arithmetic below is worth redoing with yours.

Line one: reconciliation time. A manager on 45,000 EUR gross costs the business roughly 63,000 EUR once employer contributions are in, and works about 1,600 hours a year. That is about 39 EUR an hour. Fifty minutes a day, six days a week, is five hours a week, near enough 21.7 hours a month. Call it 846 EUR a month spent copying three reseller statements into a sheet and arguing with the differences.

Line two: overstays never charged. Three per cent of 35 departures is about one a day beyond the grace period. At an average 14 EUR that is 425 EUR a month you were entitled to and did not collect, because nobody knew the rule and nobody had a figure to show the customer.

Line three: balances that leave with the car. One per cent of departures with an average 60 EUR outstanding is about 630 EUR a month. In a spreadsheet a balance is a cell somebody has to remember to look at, at 05:40, with a queue behind them.

That is roughly 1,900 EUR a month against a 199 EUR parking licence. The total is not the point. The point is that three of those four lines are invisible in a spreadsheet, because a spreadsheet contains exactly what somebody remembered to type into it.

The three leaks a spreadsheet cannot catch

A spreadsheet records what was typed. Everything that leaks does so precisely because nobody typed it, which is why the loss never shows up in the sheet you are using to look for it.

• Cash that leaves in a pocket. Not because your staff are thieves. Because a 40 EUR line taken at 22:40 by a driver covering the desk gets written on the back of a parking sheet, and the parking sheet goes through the wash. A blind count at the end of the shift makes that gap visible the next morning instead of at the end of the quarter.
• The overstay nobody argued about. The car came back 19 hours late, three customers were waiting, the operator waved it through. That is often the right call. You should still know how often it happens, at which hours, and on which channel, and today you do not.
• Commission you accepted without checking. You cannot audit a reseller statement against a sheet you built by copying that same statement. You need your own record of the booking, attributed to its source, created on the day it arrived rather than on the day the statement did.

When free is genuinely the right answer

If no money changes hands on your site, buy nothing. A free allocation tool is the correct product and anything else is a waste of a budget line.

• An employee car park with more staff than bays, and a waiting list to manage.
• A small lot with no shuttle, no valet, no keys held and no third party sending you bookings.
• Any site where one person does the whole job on every shift, and there is no handover to get wrong.

The threshold is not a number of spaces. It is the moment a second person has to know what the first person did. That is when an allocation tool stops being enough, and it can happen at 80 spaces or not until 300.

What ParkAgenda costs, and what that does not buy

199 EUR per parking per month, dropping to 179, 159 and 139 as you add parkings, with two months free when you pay yearly and no set-up fee. Up to two managers and ten operators. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

Here is what that price does not buy, stated plainly because you will find out anyway.

• It does not buy a payment processor. ParkAgenda records what your operator collected, in cash or on your own card terminal. It never touches your customer's money and it does not process a card.
• It does not buy a price list. There is no rate engine and no tariff grid in the product. Prices arrive on the booking or get typed by an operator.
• It does not buy invoices or fiscal receipts for your customers. That is not in the product.
• It does not buy hardware. No cameras, no barriers, no plate readers.

What it does buy is the four jobs above. One queue for every channel with the source recorded on each booking. An append-only cash ledger with a named operator on every line, blind counts, handovers, deposits and a per parking recap you can export. An overstay surcharge calculated from your own grace period and hourly rate, then confirmed by a person. Revenue, commission by source and net revenue after commission in the analytics, with a comparison against the matching previous period.

If channel economics is the part you care about most, parking revenue management for an off airport car park starts with channel mix goes through it properly.

The one number to work out before you decide

Work out the loaded cost of one manager hour at your site, then count the hours a week that go into reconciliation and re-typing. That single figure decides this question and nothing on a feature comparison table will.

1. Gross annual salary, multiplied by your employer contribution factor, divided by annual worked hours. That is your hourly cost.
2. Hours a week spent reconciling statements, chasing balances and retyping bookings, multiplied by 4.33. That is your monthly hours.
3. Multiply the two. Compare it to a licence. If the licence loses, keep the spreadsheet with a clear conscience.

Plenty of small car parks come out on the side of the spreadsheet, and they should keep it. The ones that do not are usually the ones with resellers, because reseller reconciliation is the line that grows fastest and never shrinks.

Questions we get asked about this

Is there a free version of ParkAgenda?

No. There is one plan, billed per parking licence, monthly or yearly. Everything is on the pricing page and there is no hidden set-up fee.

Can free parking software handle reseller bookings?

It can hold them, in the sense that you can type them in. It cannot attribute them to a source with a commission rate, deduplicate a booking sent twice, or quarantine an email it could not read. Those three are what makes a reseller statement checkable.

What is the cheapest honest set-up for a car park that takes money?

A spreadsheet, a printed sheet per car, a cash box counted at every handover and one person who owns the discipline. It works, and it works right up to the day that person is on holiday. There is more on the move away from it in leaving the spreadsheet without dropping a booking.

What to do next

Do the three line calculation above with your own payroll figure this week. If the answer says a licence is cheaper than the sheet, the pricing page has the numbers and the FAQ has the terms, including what happens to your data if you leave.