For soft play & play centres
Booking software for soft play and play centres on Shopify
A play session has one number behind it, and it counts the grown-ups too. CapFlow Booking sells that number per session through your existing Shopify checkout, prices adults and children as separate lines in the same booking, and gives the front desk a short code instead of a name search on a wet Saturday.
The way it actually goes wrong
A centre has a main frame, a toddler area and a party room. Ninety-minute sessions run on the hour from 09:30, and the safe number for the building is 80 people counting adults. On Shopify the tempting approach is a product per session with inventory set to 80.
Two things break. Inventory sits on a variant rather than on a Saturday at 10:00, so somebody rebuilds dozens of variants a week. And the number itself quietly stops meaning anything, because inventory counts tickets rather than bodies. Forty child tickets sell, forty adults walk in with them, and the building is at capacity with the booking system reporting it half empty. On the first wet Saturday of half-term the fire officer's number and the till's number are not the same number, and the person on the door is the one who finds out.
Capacity counts people. A booking for one adult and three children takes four of the 80 places, priced as four lines, because adult and child are two price bands on one booking rather than two separate products. Set the frame to 80, write one weekly rule, and CapFlow Booking generates the season from it. The 80th person closes the session, and holds during checkout are atomic, so the last two places cannot both go to two parents refreshing at once.
One cap, counting everybody
The building is a resource, the weekly rule that fills it carries the number, and party size is the sum of every person on the booking. Two adults and three children is five places. That is the number your fire officer cares about, and it is the number the widget stops at.
Adults and children priced apart
A service carries its own price bands, adult and child by default, and you can rename them or add more, such as toddler or under-ones. Each band points at its own Shopify variant, so the prices are yours to set, and all of them count toward the same cap.
Grip socks in the flow, not at the till
A service can carry one per-person add-on, with separate adult and child prices, offered inside the booking flow. For most centres that is grip socks. It lands in the same Shopify cart as the session, so selling them before arrival is the difference between a moving queue and a five-minute transaction per family. One add-on per service, not a hire catalogue.
Parties and quiet sessions cannot collide
A birthday party or an SEN quiet session runs as an event with its own capacity, price and access rules, and it blocks the room, so an ordinary session cannot be sold into the same space at the same hour. Each event gets its own signup link you can send to a class WhatsApp group.
One-off days without rebuilding the week
An inset day, a bank holiday or a hired-out morning does not need a new schedule. Override the cap on a single session with a note explaining why, or block out places for a nursery group so the public sees only what is really left.
A desk that moves at half-term speed
The check-in dashboard lists today's arrivals with a short code like gold-rose-0427, plus party sizes and a running count of who has arrived. Read the code, tick the family in, move on. No-shows are recorded rather than guessed at.
The number is bodies, not tickets
Every play centre has a headcount for the building, and it came from somebody with a clipboard rather than from marketing. What breaks when you sell sessions on plain Shopify inventory is not the number, it is what the number is counting.
Sell forty child tickets and you have sold eighty people, because children under a certain age do not arrive alone. The till says the session is half full. The frame says otherwise, and so does the queue for the coffee machine.
CapFlow Booking counts people. A booking has a party size, that party size is the sum of everybody on it, and capacity is checked against the total. Adults being priced differently from children does not make them invisible, because the price band and the head count are two separate things. You set the band prices. The cap counts heads.
What a centre setup looks like
| CapFlow concept | In play centre language |
|---|---|
| Resource | The main frame, the toddler room, the party room |
| Service | 90 minute play session, toddler morning, after-school hour |
| Price bands | Adult, child, toddler, under 2 |
| Schedule | Term-time hours and a separate holiday schedule, each rule carrying its cap |
| Timeslot | One session on one day |
| Add-on | One per-person extra per session, usually grip socks |
| Event | A birthday party, an SEN quiet session, a private hire |
| Membership | Season pass, monthly pass, clip card |
Two schedules doing term-time and holidays is usually cleaner than one schedule you keep editing. A season is a date range with weekly rules inside it, so half-term can be its own thing that starts and stops on its own dates without touching the term-time pattern.
Half-term, and the days that are not like other days
Most of the year the weekly rule is the whole answer. The trouble is always the exceptions: an inset day that behaves like a Saturday, a morning hired by a nursery, a session where half the frame is closed for a repair.
You do not need a new schedule for any of those. A single session’s cap can be overridden on its own, with a note saying why, which is the part that matters three weeks later when somebody asks. Places can also be blocked out, which takes them off public sale without pretending they were sold, so a nursery group of fifteen shows up as fifteen places gone rather than as a mysteriously smaller session.
Honest limits
Where a play centre will feel the edges:
- No waiver, no date of birth, no custom fields. First name and last name is the whole form.
- No age checking. Price bands are chosen by the parent and verified by nobody.
- No party sequencing. You can sell a party and block the room. Food choices, guest lists and run sheets are not here.
- No waitlist. A sold-out Saturday has no queue.
- Rescheduling keeps the booking shape fixed. Customers and staff can move the same booking to another available time, but a different package, duration, party size, or resource still means cancel and rebook.
- Uncounted adults are not possible. If a person is in the building, the app has to know about them.
- Single language. One language for the widget and the emails.
A centre whose real product is parties will want a party system alongside this. A centre whose real problem is a Saturday session that oversold because nobody counted the grown-ups is looking at the right tool. The comparison pages cover the alternatives honestly.
Questions from play centres
Do adults count toward the session cap?
Yes, and this is the thing worth getting right before you set the number. Capacity is people, not tickets. If your safe number is 80 bodies, put 80 in, and a family of five takes five places whatever mix of adults and children they are. If you would rather cap children only and let adults in free and uncounted, CapFlow Booking cannot do that: an uncounted person is a person the app does not know about.
Can I price under-twos free but still count them?
Yes. Add a price band called Under 2, point it at a Shopify variant priced at zero, and it counts toward capacity while charging nothing. What the app will not do is check the age. The parent picks the band, and nothing verifies it, so if a free band is being abused you will find out at the door rather than in the booking.
Can CapFlow Booking collect the play waiver or a guardian's consent?
No. There are no custom booking fields at all. The widget asks for a first name and a last name and nothing else, so there is no waiver tick box, no date of birth and no guardian question anywhere in the flow. Your waiver stays wherever it lives now, whether that is a kiosk in reception, a link in the confirmation email or a clipboard.
Can I run a proper party package with food and a room slot?
Partly, and it is worth being plain about the gap. A party is an event with a capacity, a price, a shareable signup link and the ability to block the room, which covers selling the party and keeping the space clear. What it does not do is sequence a party: no food choices per guest, no named guest list, no timed run sheet for the room, no invitation tracking. Centres that sell parties as their main product usually want a party system as well as this.
Is there a waitlist when a session sells out?
No. A full session shows as full, nobody is promoted automatically when a booking drops, and a cancelled place simply goes back on general sale. On a rainy Saturday that means the place goes to whoever refreshes first.
A child is ill. Can the parent move to next weekend?
Yes. A parent can move the same booking to another available time from the manage link until your customer cutoff, and staff can move it from the admin. The service, duration, party size, and resources stay the same. For a different package or party size, cancel and rebook instead.
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