Onside Coaching was set up in 1997 by Mark Morrey, Tom Sidwell and Richard Butler, whilst they were still at college and university. It soon established itself as a provider of good quality and reliable childcare, meeting a demand for children’s sports courses during the school holidays.
This quickly developed into working with local primary schools, teaching PE as part of the school day, as well as offering after school activity clubs. Onside Coaching have been successfully delivering children’s activities and Ofsted registered childcare throughout Warwickshire and the surrounding areas ever since.
Our booking system and processes have changed a lot over the years.
Before the website age, our customers were using Royal Mail to book our holiday courses. Back then all of our processes were manual and extremely labour intensive. As the company grew we spent more and more time focussing on admin. When providing services for children, information such as contact details, medical and SEN information are vital. Making sure that this information was correct and to hand when needed required constant work. From dealing with bookings, telephone calls, payments, questions, edits and cancellations all prior to the activities starting, right through to making sure staff had easy to use registers that contained all relevant information needed to safeguard each child at the time of delivery was extremely labour intensive. Reconciling each day was no mean feat either. Whether it was passing on messages, incident reporting or following up payments, it all took lots of time and effort.
We are proud to be Ofsted registered and refused to cut corners with the admin that supports running childcare or children’s activities. The choice was a simple one, we had to use some booking software to reduce the pressure and the rising cost of making sure the admin was correct.
For over 20 years our mission has been to provide primary aged children of all abilities the opportunity to participate in planned and supervised activities. Our approach is centred around child protection and ensuring that our activities are delivered in a safe and enjoyable environment.
Because we have been operating for so long it is safe to say that we have been there, done that, and seen it all before. We know exactly what we want from a booking system and we know exactly what it needs to be able to do.
The trouble was that although there are lots of booking software options out there, some good, some not so good, there are none that do exactly what is needed. Instead we decided to develop our own and the result was Onside Live.
We use Onside Live to run our own business today.
6,000 customers use it to book, thirty members of staff use the interactive registers and it’s all controlled remotely by one system.
We understand what it is like behind the scenes and how stressful, time consuming, expensive and important getting things right can be. For that reason we have made Onside Live available to other organisations, enabling them to benefit too. Onside Live now powers organisations all around the UK; including childcare providers, children’s activity companies and primary schools. You can check out case studies on our 'News & Reviews' page; they are all happy to talk on our behalf about how they are benefitting, so feel free to get in touch.
