Workplace Parking
Booking Software
Anyone driving to the office reserves a space first — at the site they choose, with a charging point if they need one. Administration sees days ahead which site is going to be tight, instead of finding out at the barrier on Tuesday morning.
The situation
Hybrid working did not solve the parking problem — it moved it
Three days a week the garage is full, two days it is half empty. Whoever decides whether to rent more spaces or give some back has no number to work from.
Circling the block
Colleagues drive in without knowing whether a space is free. The unlucky ones spend twenty minutes looking — every Tuesday again. No system that cannot answer the question in advance fixes this.
No defensible occupancy figure
Should you rent more spaces or hand some back? Without booking data there is only the caretaker's estimate — and that is a different number on a full Tuesday than on an empty Friday.
Scarce bays with no visible rule
Charging bays, accessible bays, visitor bays: precisely the scarce ones get handed out informally. That is the most uncomfortable answer to have to give a works council.
How it works
Book a space in three steps
No call to reception, no spreadsheet on the intranet. Booking takes less time than the email people used to send.
Pick a window
Date, from, until. Optionally filter by site, charging point or cover. The system offers only spaces free for the whole window — not the ones that are free at the start of it.
Take a space, or let it assign one
Anyone who needs a specific space picks it. Everyone else taps 'book any free space' — the normal case, and one click. Anyone with a permanently assigned bay is offered their own first.
Confirmed — or sent for approval
Usually the booking is confirmed on the spot. Scarce car parks can require approval without subjecting the outdoor lot to the same rule.
The actual lever
"I'm not coming in after all" — one tap and the space is free again
Every parking spreadsheet fails at the same point: reservations get made and never given back. After two weeks the list is full and the car park is half empty — and nobody trusts it any more.
So the prominent button on "My parking" is not "cancel", it isrelease space. The space is available again immediately, and the booking stays in the history as completed — occupancy reporting still shows the space was needed, but the capacity is back in the pool.
The same logic covers leaving early: checking out at eleven frees the afternoon without anyone having to do anything.
What the system does about it
- Availability is computed from the real end of a booking, not the scheduled one.
- A running booking with no check-out keeps occupying — the car is demonstrably still there.
- Cancelled and rejected bookings never occupy, not even for a minute.
- Two simultaneous bookings for the last space are resolved at the database level, not by luck.
Not every space is the same
Seven space types — counted separately, searched separately
A single "free spaces" number hides exactly the shortage that matters. So every space carries its type — and so does the reporting.
Standard
The ordinary car bay.
EV charging bay
With charging power in kW and connector type, filtered and counted separately.
Accessible bay
Its own type, so a full car park does not report itself as full while the accessible bays stand empty.
Visitor bay
Booked by staff in the guest's name — with company and number plate for reception.
Motorcycle
Its own capacity, never netted against car spaces.
Oversized
For vans, flatbeds and trailers, with optional length and height limits.
Bicycle
Cargo bikes included — same booking logic, same occupancy statistics.
Multiple sites
Three sites, three realities — one installation
One site catalogue for everything
Car parks hang off the same site catalogue as vehicles, drivers and equipment. A site is maintained once — not three times in three separate tools.
Rules per car park
Booking horizon, maximum booking length, approval requirement and visitor bookings are properties of the individual car park. The scarce garage can require approval without the outdoor lot doing so.
Site-level access control
A role restricted to one site sees only that site's car parks — in the search, on the occupancy board, in the reports, and when a URL is opened directly.
Data protection
Parking data is attendance data. Treat it that way.
Who booked a space and when is, in effect, a record of who was in the office and when. That is where a works council is right to look closely — and why the software has to have clear answers.
- The data sits on your infrastructure. There is no vendor analysing it and no cloud contract permitting that.
- Private number plates are free text and never joined to the fleet — they are the employee's own data, not a fleet master record.
- Access to other people's bookings is its own permission and is restricted by site; the self-service views only ever show your own.
- Every change to a booking runs through the platform's audit trail — the same tamper-evident logging as the rest of the fleet.
A works agreement does not become unnecessary — but it is considerably easier to reach when the answer to "where does the data live" is not "with a vendor in another country".
FAQ
Everything you need to know about parking booking
What is workplace parking booking software?
It models an organisation's individual parking spaces and makes them reservable. Staff pick a time window and get a specific space — or let the system assign one. Administration sees occupancy per site instead of guessing. MobilityManager distinguishes standard, EV charging, accessible, visitor, motorcycle, oversized and bicycle spaces, and keeps permanently assigned spaces separate from the bookable pool.
We have several sites. How is that handled?
Every car park hangs off the same site catalogue used by vehicles, drivers and equipment, so a site is maintained once. One site can hold several car parks — an underground garage and a surface lot with different rules. The product's site-level access control applies here too: a role restricted to one site sees only that site's car parks, in the search, on the occupancy board and in the reports.
What happens when someone books and then does not come in?
They release the space with one tap. The booking is completed and the space is immediately bookable again for the rest of the window. That is the real difference between a list and a booking system: an unreleased reservation is a space nobody could use — and the reason occupancy figures taken from spreadsheets are consistently too high.
Can we model permanently assigned spaces and visitor bays?
Yes, both are their own allocation modes. A permanently assigned space — the board, the works council, a pool car's charging bay — never appears in a search and is never counted as free capacity; only the assigned person can book it. Visitor bays are booked by staff in their guest's name, with company and number plate, so reception has the list of who is expected.
How are EV charging bays handled?
A space can carry a charging power in kW and a connector type. EV drivers filter straight to charging points, and the dashboard reports free charging bays separately. That separation matters: a headline occupancy figure of 70% hides the fact that all eight charging bays have been taken since eight in the morning.
Do we have to create every space by hand?
No. A whole numbered run is generated in one step: prefix, from and to number, digits, level and type. A 64-space garage is captured in under a minute. Individual spaces — the charging bay, the accessible bay, the permanently assigned one — are adjusted afterwards. Existing numbers are skipped, so the operation is safe to repeat when a car park is extended.
Can we close spaces for building works?
Yes. A closure is its own record with a start, an optional end and a reason — line painting, a wallbox install, a skip. It blocks bookings for the period, applies to permanently assigned spaces too, and stays visible on the occupancy board. An open end is allowed: 'until further notice' is what a caretaker actually knows on the morning it happens.
Do we need vehicle booking and driving licence control for this?
No. Parking management is its own module and works on its own. It shares the site catalogue, the driver file and the role and permission system with the other modules — so anyone running vehicle booking, licence control and parking together maintains sites, people and permissions once instead of in three separate tools.
Can we run it on our own servers?
Yes. MobilityManager is built to be self-hosted and sold as a perpetual licence — on your own hardware, in VMware/Hyper-V, in Docker or Kubernetes, or at a cloud provider of your choosing. For parking data that is not an academic point: who was in the office and when is a particularly sensitive report, and this data never leaves your infrastructure.
Book a demo
See parking booking in action
Leave your details and we will walk you through space management, booking and the occupancy board on a multi-site example. Free, no obligation, about 30 minutes.
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