Why Doris exists

Hello, I'm Phil. I'm the founder of Book With Doris.

I created Doris because of a problem close to home. My wife is the clinical lead at Beyond Counselling (you can read our case study), and I watched her lose hours every week just keeping the room diary straight. I sat down with the team to work out how they actually wanted to book rooms - and the more I looked, the more I realised it wasn't only them. CICs, charities, village halls, co-working spaces: all wrestling with the same diary, and every tool built to fix it was made for hotels and corporate venues, and priced to match.

I'm lucky enough to have professional software engineers in the family, so we built it ourselves. That let us be uncompromising about the parts you never see - how bookings are stored, how two people never end up double-booked, how your data is kept safe - while staying just as ruthless about the part you do see: keeping it simple, with nothing on the screen you don't need.

We named the app Doris, but we didn’t expect what happened next. Almost immediately, the team at Beyond started talking about the app as if she were a real colleague. Instead of saying "I've logged a slot in the system," they'd say "Doris has sorted it" or "I'll check with Doris." She developed her own personality in the office, and that's why we still talk about Doris as a helper in the first person today.

Small venues and non-profits don't have a spare £100 a month for booking software, and they shouldn't need one. Because we run Doris as a lean, independent family business, we can build it to a standard we're proud of and still price it so that no committee has to approve the purchase.