Partner · Integrated service provider
Mercantus Timeworks: a municipality's bookings, and the doors that go with them
Timeworks gathers a municipality's spaces, places, resources, services and service channels into one system — and the access rights that follow a booking are part of it, not a separate errand.
Mercantus is a Finnish software company in Helsinki; Timeworks is its booking platform, productised for cities and municipalities and sold as a service. One system covers the different booking processes a town actually runs: rooms and halls, pitches and courts, equipment and devices, people, events and services — plus the receipt and processing of sports facility shift applications, which is the part that usually has its own ageing system of its own.
The resident's side
The booking service is where residents and groups such as sports clubs do their business. It supports Suomi.fi identification and payment, a search across bookable resources and services, and bookings of places as well as spaces — market stalls, boat berths, parking spaces and allotments among them. Memberships are handled there too, gym and boat-berth memberships for instance, along with event registration. The interface meets the WCAG accessibility requirements of the accessibility directive, works across devices, and is multilingual.
The administrator's side
- Calendar views and search across the whole booking position, with several resources — spaces, equipment, people, services, products — attached to a single booking.
- User roles and permissions per group: administrators, municipal staff, guides and instructors, sports administration, a sports club's own administrator, the restaurant.
- Single, recurring and open bookings; spaces divided into parts, or combined.
- Space-specific approval rules, extensive pricing, messaging for confirmations, and reporting and logs over the booking history.
Where access control comes in
Mercantus has built integrations across the municipal estate — finance systems, school administration, course management, facility management, info and door-side displays, visitor management, single sign-on and Suomi.fi identification and payment — and, among the access control and locking systems, Bitwards.
That is what makes this the service-provider pattern rather than a resale: the resident books and pays in the municipality's own service, identifies themselves with the national identification they already use, and the door opens because of the booking. Nobody involved thinks of it as access control.
Timeworks is in use at a number of Finnish cities and municipalities, among them Espoo, Tampere, Turku, Järvenpää, Kangasala, Pirkkala, Uusikaupunki, Mäntsälä and Pornainen.
Summarised from Mercantus's own description of Timeworks for cities and municipalities. Mercantus Oy, Helsinki.