Barnett Waddingham

How Barnett Waddingham made their existing parking go further - and save 15 hours per month

At a glance

More use from the same spaces: 231 extra on-site parking sessions came from the same 29 spaces in November 2025.

Time back for the office team: 15 hours less parking admin each month.

A perk staff actually feel: More people could park on-site more often—reducing the need to pay ~£11/day for nearby public parking.

About

Attendance got flexible. Parking got trickier.

Barnett Waddingham is a UK professional services consultancy with more than 1,700 people across 11 offices. It joined Howden in April 2025.

This story is from Cheltenham, where Ann-Marie Powell runs the office and facilities. Smart working gave people flexibility. Then parking became the daily variable.

The motivation

29 spaces. One spreadsheet. And no easy way to share spaces at scale.

Cheltenham’s staff parking sits in a shared building. Everyone has a fob, and demand beats supply. So the rules have to be clear — who parks where, what happens when someone parks without a booking, and how unused spaces get back into circulation quickly.

Parking on-site is free. The closest public car park is around £11 a day — so a spare space doesn’t stay “spare” for long. And on busy days (especially Wednesdays and Thursdays), up to 30 people could be on the waitlist, so the process needed to hold up under pressure.

Before Parkable, parking management lived in a homegrown spreadsheet. Staff keyed in the days they wanted. Reception ran the weekly allocation and emailed it out.

It worked, but because it was manual, every tweak created more back-and-forth. Once you include changes and troubleshooting, it took around an hour a day of reception time: swaps, cancellations, and parkers in the wrong spots.

And when it went wrong, it went slow: report it upstairs, then back down to sort it out — all before anyone’s even opened their laptop.

The fix

Same rules. Easier sharing. Less reliance on reception.

Cheltenham didn’t run a vendor bake-off. Barnett Waddingham’s Amersham office was already using Parkable and was happy with it. So they followed.

They kept the same allocation logic that everyone was used to: partners have a fixed space, principals and associates get priority when they’re in, and everyone else goes into the pool for what’s left. What changed was where the day-to-day happened.

Cheltenham shifted bookings, sharing, and exceptions into the Parkable app — so it didn’t have to run through reception. Staff book what they need. Partners release their space when they’re not in. Most issues get handled there.

The change wasn’t “convincing people to share” — it was removing the friction that made sharing slow. Sharing moved from “email reception and wait for a manual reshuffle” to a quick in-app release, so spare spaces were easily used — without creating another mini-process to manage.

Exceptions got simpler too. If someone arrives and there’s a car in their space, they can report it in the app. Often, they get reassigned without leaving the car. And when someone parks without a booking, there’s a clear record — so it can be resolved without a long chase.

“The real change was taking sharing out of reception and putting it in the app. In just one month, we saw 231 extra parking sessions from the same 29 spaces — and admin dropped from about an hour a day in reception to around 15 minutes.”

Ann-Marie Powell, Office & Facilities Supervisor, Barnett Waddingham

The impact

More parking from the same 29 spaces — plus time back.

By making it faster to release and reuse spots, Barnett Waddingham got more parking from the same 29 spaces. In November 2025, that meant 231 additional parking sessions — extra days of on-site parking that helped more staff avoid paying for expensive town-centre parking.

It also freed up time for the reception team. Before Parkable, reception spent about an hour a day managing parking. Now the admin load is light and mostly sits with Ann-Marie: around 15 minutes a day at most — roughly 15 hours a month saved versus the old rhythm.

Same car park. Same constraints. But more utilisation, less admin, and a process that’s easier to stand behind. Day to day, Ann-Marie does a quick check — and reception only gets pulled in for the odd exception.