“We’ve designed Deskworks so you can build your community and not have to worry about the tech in the background. You want your operations to be seamless so you can do the community building part. That’s what we want to help people do.” — Satellite Deskworks founder and CEO Barbara Sprenger
Workspace software provider Satellite Deskworks was recently awarded a patent for its comprehensive coworking software that connects member information, membership plans and products, members usage, and member and customer billing.
In the works since 2014, the patent is for the Satellite Deskworks comprehensive system, which includes members, plans, usage and billing.
“I’m so excited to have been awarded this patent,” says Sprenger, who explains that the patent is for the “tying together and automating of all the pieces of running your coworking center.”
Satellite Deskworks connects member information, membership plans and products, members usage, and member and customer billing. The patent is for the software that consolidates multiple sources of information about how someone is using a workspace.
“The patent is about tracking who is in the space and on wifi; tracking reservations to see which areas of the space people are in; tracking movement through motion-sensing access systems, and tying that into a comparator,” says Sprenger. “We’re tracking multiple sources of information to develop usage from members, and tying that to their plans and pricing to automatically generate billing which goes straight through to credit card processing.”
What sets Satellite Deskworks apart is that no other coworking software platform is doing workspace management this comprehensively. Having a comprehensive system is important because no single channel of information gives operators everything they need to know to operate a workspace.
The Satellite Deskworks patent is another sign that coworking—and the workspace industry—is maturing.
“Our industry is growing up,” says Sprenger. “We are an industry that is on a very tight budget, and we also have a lot of different requirements for different people. Some spaces are home to freelancers on a limited monthly budget; some are home to telecommuters who are only in your space a few times a week, and some cater to teams—some of them full-time, some on a drop-in basis. If you are not automatically tracking this stuff, you have leakage, and you’re not capturing the revenue you need to capture to stay in business.”
