How to run a box cricket venue without constant phone calls

Box cricket is a business of short slots and many small teams. The busy hours are evenings and weekends, which is also when you are standing at the ground. Every call that comes in during a match is either a booking you miss or a double booking waiting to happen.

None of the fixes below need special equipment. They need one calendar, a few rules you decide once, and a habit of sticking to them.

Keep one calendar and let it fill itself

Set your week once: which days you open, the slot length, the price for each time band. Then slots should appear on their own for the coming days, so you are not typing next Saturday into a register on Friday night.

Everything that books a slot goes into the same calendar. That includes the captain who booked online, the regular who called, and the team that walked in at 6 pm. If you can block a slot for maintenance and change a price for one evening in a couple of taps, the calendar stays true.

When a company or a tournament takes the ground for an evening, block those slots straight away. The public page then stops offering them, and nobody has to remember to say no to the next caller. The same goes for a net or a bay that is out of use: a calendar that shows only what you can really sell is worth more than one that shows everything.

Decide what confirms instantly, and put a clock on the rest

Not every slot needs your approval. A short slot at a quiet hour can confirm the moment a captain asks for it, because the risk is small. A prime evening slot, or a match that needs the ground prepared, is better as a request that you confirm yourself.

Decide this for each pitch or net once, so that you are not making the same call forty times a week. The captain should see the difference in plain words on the booking page: Book now for the first kind, Request for the second.

A request nobody answers is worse than a no. The captain waits, you forget, and the slot stays locked for a team that may never come.

Give every request a confirm by time. Reply from your phone with one tap, and send the captain a short message on WhatsApp so they are not left guessing. When the time passes without a reply, the slot should open again by itself, so it can go to the next team.

Take an advance without a middleman

An advance is the simplest way to make a booking mean something. The easiest version has no payment gateway at all: after booking, the captain sees a UPI link and a QR for the exact amount, and the money goes straight to your UPI ID. You then check the payment in your own UPI app.

Decide the amount once, for example a part of the slot price, and say it on the booking page so nobody argues at the gate.

Decide the cancellation rule in the same sitting. Say plainly what happens to the advance if a team cancels the same day, and what happens if they cancel earlier. A rule that is written down before the money moves is easier to enforce than one you invent while a captain is on the phone.

Know your regulars

Most of a box cricket ground's evenings come from the same few dozen teams. Bring in the contacts you already have, from a file or by pasting them, so your regulars are in one list. Mark anyone who has asked you to stop messaging them, and respect it.

A short message to regulars about a free slot works better than a post to a group of strangers, because those teams already know your ground.

What Yuvo does, and what it does not

Yuvo for Venues is in beta. It covers the calendar, the instant or request choice for each pitch or net, the confirm by countdown, the UPI link and QR, and the regulars list described above, on a booking page at your own link. It does not take a cut of every booking.

It does not fill your slots for you yet. Automatic slot filling is Coming soon. For now you decide who gets a message.

To see how the pieces fit before you try them on your own ground, start at Yuvo for Venues (opens in a new tab) and open the demo. The demo runs on Yuvo Sports Park, a made up venue, so no real ground is shown.