Toowoomba Regional Council

Unifying community venue management across a major Queensland region: one platform, one source of truth

About Toowoomba Regional Council

Toowoomba Regional Council serves one of the largest and fastest-growing inland communities in Queensland. Home to a population of approximately 186,000 people, the region spans the vibrant Toowoomba city centre, affectionately known as Australia’s “Garden City”, together with a network of surrounding towns including Highfields, Oakey, Crows Nest, Pittsworth and Millmerran. It is a region known for landmark events such as the Carnival of Flowers, and its community life revolves around its cultural centres, libraries and open spaces.

As one of OptimoGov’s key councils within Queensland, Toowoomba Regional Council manages an extensive and diverse property portfolio on behalf of its residents. From heritage cultural centres and modern conference facilities to community meeting rooms, library spaces and a dedicated cycle hub, the breadth of what the Council offers its community is significant, as is the operational challenge of managing it well. The Council needed a single, trusted platform capable of bringing these venues together, standardising how they are booked and paid for, and giving staff and customers a consistent, professional experience.

The Challenge

Like many large regional councils, Toowoomba managed its community-facing venues across a patchwork of processes. Different facilities carried different booking rules, pricing structures, paperwork and points of contact. For the community, securing a hall for a wedding, a meeting room for a not-for-profit group, or a cultural centre for a conference could mean navigating inconsistent processes. For Council staff, it meant manual administration, fragmented records and limited visibility of activity across the portfolio.

Council set out to transform this experience, to consolidate its community venues into one configurable system that could handle the full diversity of activities taking place across them, enforce consistent pricing and terms, capture the right information at the point of booking, and feed clean, reliable data back into the organisation’s reporting and finance systems.

The OptimoGov Solution: Phase One, Community Venues

OptimoGov was implemented to manage Council’s Community Venues business area. This is the first phase of a broader, multi-phase journey. This initial phase brought 12 community venues onto the platform, covering the full range of activities that take place within them: weddings and dinners, conferences and corporate functions, community group meetings, special events, library room hire, outdoor space hire and the Council’s cycle hub membership programme. Across these venues, the platform manages 229 bookable assets, of which 60 are bookable spaces, the remainder being keys, equipment and other resources.

Crucially, OptimoGov was configured to reflect how Toowoomba actually operates. It is not a generic template, but a tailored configuration spanning hundreds of bookable assets, structured pricing, event packages and information-gathering questionnaires, all governed within a single source of truth.

Venues brought live in Phase One

The 12 active venues onboarded in this phase include:

Depth and Breadth: Configured for Real-World Complexity

What sets this implementation apart is the operational depth captured beneath those 12 venues. OptimoGov is not simply a calendar: it models every layer of how a venue is sold, booked, priced and serviced, all governed within a single source of truth. The configuration below gives a sense of the scale and variety the platform manages for Council today.

A facility breakdown that reflects real operations

Across the venues, OptimoGov manages 229 active assets. Rather than a single undifferentiated list, these are organised by facility category, so the platform handles a function venue, a meeting room, a managed key, a piece of equipment and a cycle-hub resource each according to its own rules, availability and pricing. The breakdown below shows how that estate is composed:

This is exactly the point: a single platform comfortably accommodates everything from a function venue or conference-ready meeting room through to managed keys, hireable equipment, asset-lighting resources and individual cycle-hub bays, each treated correctly within the same system.

A growing client and contact base

The system holds 550+ active clients supported by 1,300+ contacts. This base is made up of both commercial and community clients, and it continues to grow as more of the community transacts with Council through the platform. This mix allows Council to apply the right pricing, terms and communications to each audience automatically rather than manually.

Items, packages and questionnaires

Beyond the rooms themselves, OptimoGov manages 370 sellable items, including catering, products, staffing, linen, bonds and administration fees, so a booking can capture the complete customer experience and its true value, not just the space. These items are bundled into 25+ event packages that mirror how each venue is actually marketed and sold, and are supported by 14 questionnaires that capture the right details for each venue and event type at the point of booking. Together they ensure staff gather consistent, complete information every time, removing back-and-forth, reducing risk, and meaning each booking arrives ready to deliver.

Early Results: Strong Adoption from Day One

Toowoomba Regional Council went live on OptimoGov on 22 April 2026. Booking activity recorded before that date represents historical records migrated into the platform during implementation; the live-usage story therefore begins at go-live. Remarkably, despite being live for just over a month, the Council’s teams adopted the system at pace.

In the first month of live use alone, Council staff created more than 430 new bookings on the platform, a strong, sustained rhythm of activity that reflects rapid, organisation-wide adoption. In total, including migrated history, OptimoGov now manages over 1,300 bookings for the Council. For a system live for barely a month, this level of throughput is a clear signal that OptimoGov became the embedded, day-to-day tool for managing community venues from its very first weeks.

The trend through the first weeks of live use showed a steady, sustained booking rhythm: a clear signal that OptimoGov had become the day-to-day tool of choice for managing community venues, rather than a system staff were still warming to.

Connected to the Council’s Wider Ecosystem

OptimoGov does not operate in isolation. At Toowoomba Regional Council it is integrated into the organisation’s core enterprise systems through OptimoGov’s standard, proven integration suite:

• TechnologyOne: connecting bookings and charges directly to the Council’s enterprise finance and ERP environment for accurate, automated financial processing.
• Infor Pathway (receipting): OptimoGov integrates with the Council’s Infor Pathway income and receipting system, the platform Council uses to generate receipts and process all monies received with full audit control across transactions. The integration means payments taken against bookings flow straight into Pathway, keeping revenue, receipting and reporting reconciled in a single, trusted record rather than across disconnected systems.
• Power BI: OptimoGov integrates natively with Power BI for a live reporting experience, feeding booking and venue data into the Council’s reporting environment and giving leaders genuine visibility of utilisation, revenue and demand across the portfolio.
• Azure (Entra) Single Sign-On: staff access OptimoGov securely using their existing Council Azure credentials, simplifying access and strengthening security and governance.

Together, these integrations ensure that the data captured in OptimoGov flows seamlessly to where the Council needs it, across finance, receipting, reporting and identity, without duplication or manual re-keying.

This Is Only the Beginning: The Phases Ahead

It is important to recognise that everything described above represents Phase One, the Community Venues business area, delivered across 12 venues. It is the first step in a deliberate, staged rollout. Having proven the platform’s depth in this complex business area, Council is now looking to extend OptimoGov across further areas of its operations, including:

• Parks and Sports Fields
• Parks, Open Space and Events
• Key Properties
• Libraries

The significance of this is simple but powerful: OptimoGov can accommodate all of these diverse business areas within one system. Rather than procuring, integrating and maintaining separate tools for halls, parks, sports fields, events and properties, Toowoomba Regional Council can manage its entire bookable estate, and the full diversity of activity across it, on a single, unified platform, with one set of integrations, one source of truth, and one consistent experience for staff and community alike.