About the project
The Netball Kids Booking System is the bespoke booking and franchise-management platform we designed and built from scratch for the Netball Kids coaching network. Off-the-shelf booking tools couldn't handle the brief: search by postcode, filter classes by a child's age, handle sibling discounts automatically across a single booking, manage waiting lists with one-click conversion, support multiple franchises with their own venues and capacity rules, and roll all of that into franchise-level reporting with royalty calculation for head office. It's now in production, taking real bookings from real parents.
Three audiences, one platform: parents who book classes, franchise admins who run their local operation, and a super admin (head office) who oversees the whole network and tracks royalty income. Each role gets a tailored UI and the right permissions — everyone sees the right thing, nothing more.
What we delivered
- For parents — postcode-based class finder with distance search (venues auto-resolved to lat/long), age filtering, venue cards with prices and availability, single free-trial booking, full-term booking, multi-child registration with automatic sibling discounts across the basket, Stripe Checkout for card payment, waiting-list join with one-click conversion later, a personal "My bookings" area for outstanding balances and reschedules
- For franchise admins — per-franchise control of terms, venues, age groups and classes with capacity limits; full booking visibility; waiting-list management with promote-to-booking; class duplication into new terms (auto-emails existing parents to re-enrol); manual booking entry for phone customers; promotional discount codes; income reports with royalty and net breakdowns; CSV export of parent/child contact lists
- For super admin (head office) — everything a franchise admin sees, plus the ability to switch between franchises, manage franchises and user accounts, cross-franchise reporting (turnover, registration-fee income kept by HQ, 10% royalty per franchise), and a Diagnostics page for live SMTP and Stripe health checks
- Engineering details — branded transactional emails (booking confirmation, free trial, waiting list, re-enrolment) via SMTP; age-band overlap matching; atomic capacity guards preventing over-booking under concurrent load; Stripe webhook verification; sibling-discount calculation applied across the full basket; automatic pro-rating for late joiners mid-term; in-system Help centre with searchable topics
See it live
The platform is in production with parents actively booking classes across multiple franchises. Browse the parent-facing class finder to see it in action.
Why it works
SimplyBook, Bookwhen and Calendly all have their place — but none of them know what a franchise is. None handle a sibling discount that needs to span a single basket of two children booked together. None calculate a 10% franchise royalty separately from a registration fee retained by head office. None auto-resolve a venue postcode to coordinates so parents can search by distance. Off-the-shelf would have meant manual royalty spreadsheets every month, manual sibling-discount maths at the till, and a Frankenstein of two tools stapled together. The bespoke build does it all in one, and pays back the development cost every month it replaces the per-booking SaaS fees it would otherwise be paying.
Could we build your project next?
Jabu Designs is a website design and bespoke software development agency based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. We build production software — not prototypes — for ambitious businesses across the UK. Alongside website design, we offer custom booking systems, custom CRM development, bespoke software, web application development and mobile apps — making us a genuine one-stop digital partner.
