Choosing parking management software in France when every result sells office parking

Search parking management software from France and the first page gives you four directories and a row of vendors who allocate office parking to employees.

If you run a paid car park with shuttles, valet and reseller bookings, none of those results is about your business. Here is what to ask instead, and how to eliminate a wrong-fit product inside the first two minutes of a demo.

What the French results actually contain

Half of page one is comparison directories: getapp.fr, appvizer.fr, hellopro.fr, capterra.fr. They are paid on referral, so their ranking is a media business rather than an operator's verdict.

Underneath sit the vendors: Ronspot, Moffi, Sharvy, Wayleadr, Deskare, Parklio. They sell workplace parking. Allocating sixty spaces to two hundred and ten hybrid-working staff, running a waiting list, booking a bay from Teams the evening before.

Those products are good at that, and the problem is a real one. It is not your problem. Workplace parking has volume, IT budgets and a short sales cycle, so it paid for the pages you are reading. The operator of a paid car park is a smaller and more demanding market, and almost nobody writes for it. The same thing happens in the UK results for car park management software, with a different cast.

The three question test

You do not need a forty line comparison grid. Three questions sort the field, and they fit in the first two minutes of a demo.

1. Where do I enter the flight number, outbound and return? A product built for offices has no flight, so no field, and the salesperson will offer you a custom field.
2. Where is the shuttle? Not the map, the list: who is waiting, at which door, for how long, and who has picked them up.
3. Where is commission by reseller? If the product has no concept of a reseller, it will never tell you what a channel actually costs you.

If the demo stumbles on any of the three, the product is for offices. That is not a fault in the product. It is the wrong aisle.

The vocabulary, and why it costs money

A vendor who translated their product is exposed by the words. This matters if you are buying for a French site, or buying in English for a group that runs one, because the wrong word costs you in training and in trust on the shop floor.

• Poste and planning, not shift. A supervisor builds a planning de postes, with roles: chauffeur, regulateur, preparateur, agent d'accueil.
• Prestation, not option or add-on. A wash, a fuel top-up and valet service are prestations, each with an amount on the booking.
• Encaissement and remise en banque, not payments. Taking the money and banking it are two operations at two different moments, and the second one has to be provable.
• Fiche, not ticket or receipt. The fiche goes on the dashboard of the car and has no fiscal status at all.
• Apporteur or revendeur, not channel. An apporteur has a name, a contract and a commission rate.

Watch how the product writes a plate, a date and a euro amount as well. Software that shows 08/12 without saying which parking's timezone it means will lose you a car on the Sunday the clocks change.

Five questions to ask, in order

These come after the sort. None of them is about a feature. All of them are about a situation you already live through.

1. How does a Parkos booking arrive at 23:00 on a Saturday with nobody at the counter? If the answer is that somebody types it in on Sunday morning, price the typing across a year and add it back to the quote.
2. What happens when the reseller writes Dupond and the customer is called Dupont? A booking that cannot be matched should be held aside with the raw email and the reason, then decided by a person. It must never disappear quietly.
3. Who took the 340 euros in cash last night, and how do I prove it on Monday? You want a name on every line, a correction that voids rather than edits, and a blind count with the variance frozen at the moment of counting.
4. How many cars are physically on site right now, and is that the same number as the occupancy rate? They are two different things, and only one of them should ever block a car at the entrance.
5. If I leave in three years, what do I take with me and in what format? This is the question everyone forgets and it is the expensive one. It has its own piece: your barrier supplier now sells software.

A worked example: what one point of commission is worth

Take a 260 space car park near a regional airport, with 58 per cent of volume arriving through resellers. The figures are constructed as an example rather than measured at a real site.

At 72 per cent average occupancy and a 5.9 day average stay, that is about 11,600 stays a year. 58 per cent through resellers is 6,700 stays. At a 74 euro average basket, that is roughly 496,000 euros of intermediated volume, and at 20 per cent average commission, about 99,000 euros a year that never reaches your till.

One point of commission on that volume is worth around 5,000 euros a year. To go and get it you have to walk into the meeting with real commission per reseller and per period, not a monthly total that blends everybody together. That is a software question before it is a negotiation question, and the rest of the arithmetic is in parking revenue management starts with channel mix.

What ParkAgenda does, and what it does not

It would be inconsistent to demand this level of directness and then not offer it.

What it does. One queue where reseller bookings, your own website and the counter all land, with the source on every row. Booking capture from Parkos and AlloPark, including in the reseller's own email format, without asking them to change anything. Anything that cannot be matched safely goes to a review queue with the raw email, and a person decides. A six step vehicle check-in with damage markers on a diagram, photos, a customer signature and a PDF report. The shuttle board. An append-only cash ledger with an operator's name on every line, blind counts and bank deposits. Analytics with commission by channel, occupancy, average stay, cancellation rate by reseller, and booking pace against the same lead day last year. And several car parks under one organization, each with its own timezone, capacity and licence.

What it does not. No rate engine and no tariff grid: prices arrive on the booking or are typed by an operator. No built-in ANPR: we connect to the one you already run, through our API, with a connector our team builds with your supplier and installation handled by a local partner. No online payment: we do not process any of your customers' money, and Stripe is only there to bill your own subscription. No booking engine for your website: your website is a booking source like any other. No app to download: the console is a website, and the pages laid out for a phone screen today are bookings, agenda, analytics, settings and profile.

The team is based in Belgium. Support runs in French and English, and there is no other language on the desk today. If you operate in Spain or Italy, say so before the demo rather than after it.

Questions we get asked

Can workplace parking software run a paid car park?

For a staff permit and a waiting list, yes. As soon as there is a dated stay, a flight, a shuttle and a reseller commission, no. Those objects are not in the data model, and a custom field does not put them there.

Do city car parks and airport car parks need different software?

Usually yes, for one reason. In a city, turnover is measured in hours and the customer arrives unannounced. At an airport, the stay is measured in days and booked weeks ahead, which changes everything downstream. What an airport car park needs that a city car park does not goes through it.

What does parking management software cost in France?

With us, one licence per car park, billed monthly or yearly, with the rate stepping down by number of car parks and two months free on yearly billing. The amounts are on the pricing page. With anybody else, always ask whether set-up, history migration and support are included, because that is where the quotes diverge.

Where to start

Take one week in July and count three things: time spent re-typing bookings, time spent working out who took which payment, and the number of calls about a shuttle. Those three numbers are your specification, and they are worth more than any grid filled in by a vendor.

Then look at tools. The features page is written in the same spirit as this piece, and the six screens that matter tells you what to ignore in the lists you get sent.