The challenge
Nimbus isn't a single coworking floor — it's a campus. Three buildings in East Austin hold 412 members from 60 companies, plus a café, a small retail corner selling local goods, and an events terrace. By 2024 the operation ran on six disconnected tools: one for room bookings, one for the café till, a spreadsheet for desk assignments, an accounting package for invoices, a separate payroll bureau, and a paper visitor log at each front desk.
Month-end was the worst of it. Pulling booking hours, café tabs, and plan charges into one invoice per company took the finance team the better part of three days, and mistakes still slipped through. A member who booked twelve meeting hours would get billed for nine, or a café tab charged to the wrong company. Every correction meant another email thread.
“We were paying for six tools and still running the business on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was the real system of record, and that terrified me.”
Maya Chen
Community Lead, Nimbus Company
One platform instead of six tools
Nimbus started small: Meeting Rooms and Hot Desks, switched on in a single afternoon. Members booked desks straight from the floor plan — pick a building, tap a desk, done — and the room schedule replaced the shared calendar the same week. Real-time conflict detection meant the front desk stopped refereeing double-bookings entirely.
Then the expansion began. The café moved onto the POS module, so every latte landed on the member's tab instead of a separate till. The retail corner and an online storefront followed, selling day passes and Nimbus merch from the same inventory. Visitors got QR check-in at all three buildings. And when the finance team saw that member charges were already sitting in one place, they turned on Billing: one Generate run now produces every month-end invoice — plan fees, booking overages, café tabs, storefront orders — in about twenty minutes.
The last holdout was payroll. Nimbus's 23 staff moved off the external bureau and onto the Payroll module, including salary advances with a proper approval chain — a barista requests an advance from their phone, the GM approves it, and the deduction schedules itself against the next run.
“The moment that sold everyone was the first Generate run. Three days of invoice assembly became a twenty-minute job with a progress bar.”
Maya Chen
Community Lead, Nimbus Company
The results
Month-end closed from three days to twenty minutes, and invoice disputes fell to near zero because every line item traces back to a booking, an order, or a tab the member can see themselves. The front desk reclaimed roughly two hours a day previously spent on booking admin and the paper visitor log.
Revenue got more visible, too. With the café, retail corner, and storefront reporting into the same platform as memberships, Nimbus discovered that non-membership revenue was 22% of the total — higher than anyone had guessed — and started programming the events terrace accordingly.
“Opening building four used to sound like a year of tooling decisions. Now it's a checklist: add the floor plan, add the rooms, hire the team, go.”
Maya Chen
Community Lead, Nimbus Company
What's next
Nimbus is now piloting the Asset Manager to track the campus's 300-plus chairs, monitors, and AV kits across buildings, and using Expenses to route facilities spending through the same approvals that already handle salary advances.
The bigger plan is a fourth building. Because every process — from desk booking to payroll — already lives in one system, opening it is a configuration exercise rather than a software project.