How to price snooker and pool table time

Add up everything it costs to keep the doors open for a month, apart from the bar stock: rent, electricity, heating or air conditioning, staff wages, software, insurance, and an allowance for cloth, balls and cushions. Snooker tables in particular are expensive to light and keep at the right temperature, so don't leave that out.

Then work out how many table-hours you have to sell. That's your number of tables, times the hours you're open each day, times the days in the month.

Nobody sells every one of those hours. Weekday afternoons are quiet and a table sits empty while the next group finishes their drinks. If this club sells 35% of its table-hours, that's 1,008 hours a month. $9,000 divided by 1,008 hours is about $8.93. So at $9 an hour, the tables just about pay for themselves, before a single drink is sold.

Here's the part most owners underrate. Raising the price by a dollar feels like the obvious fix, but filling more hours usually does more.

The second club charges less and earns more, and it sells more drinks too, because there are more people in the building. That's why it's worth knowing your utilisation (the share of available hours you actually sold) table by table and hour by hour. If table 6 sits empty until 8pm every weekday, that's where a cheaper rate or a league night should go.

Evenings and weekends sell themselves. Weekday afternoons don't. A lower afternoon rate gives students, retirees and shift workers a reason to come in when you'd otherwise be paying to light empty tables.

Keep it simple: two or three rates, not seven. A common pattern looks like this.

• Off-peak: weekdays until 6pm
• Peak: weekday evenings from 6pm, and all day at weekends
• Late: after 11pm, if you're open late and want to push or pull people towards it

The awkward case is a game that starts at 5:30 and ends at 7:00, across the changeover. The fair way is to charge each part at its own rate. With $8 off-peak and $12 peak, that's 30 minutes at $8 an hour ($4) plus 60 minutes at $12 an hour ($12), so $16. Charging the whole game at the starting rate loses you money every evening, and charging all of it at the peak rate starts arguments. Doing the split by hand at the counter is where mistakes creep in, so it's worth having a till that does it for you.

Snooker is nearly always charged per table, since two players is the norm. Pool is more mixed. Some halls charge per table, others charge per table for two players and add a small amount for each extra player, which stops a group of six sharing one table for the price of two.

Whichever you choose, put it on a sign at the counter. Most disputes about price aren't really about the amount. They're about a customer not knowing how it was worked out.

A minimum charge covers the cost of turning a table over: brushing the cloth, racking up, the few minutes it sits empty. Thirty minutes is common. Someone who plays a single 12-minute frame pays for 30 minutes, and anyone who plays longer than the minimum pays for the time they actually played.

Don't set the minimum so high that it puts off the quick-game crowd. If your minimum is an hour, the person who only has 20 minutes on a lunch break just won't come in.

Rounding up to the next 15 or 30 minutes feels like it earns more. In practice it causes more arguments than it's worth. A customer who played 61 minutes and gets charged for 90 remembers it.

Billing for the exact time played is easy to explain and hard to argue with, especially when the timer started when the table went live and was paused when play stopped. It also means a long session is never undercharged because someone at the counter guessed the start time.

A full-size 12ft snooker table takes up far more floor space than a 7ft pool table and costs more to keep in shape. Most venues that have both charge more for snooker. Look at the cost per table rather than an average across all of them. If your pool tables are always full and your snooker tables aren't, a price gap can move some players across.

Tables bring people in. The bar is usually where the margin is. A club that only looks at table income will price its tables too high and wonder why the room feels empty.

Track how much the bar takes for every hour of table time sold. If each table-hour brings in a few dollars of drinks and snacks on top, you can afford a cheaper off-peak rate than the cost sums above suggest. To see that number, the drinks have to go on the same bill as the table, not through a separate till.

• Change one thing at a time, so you can tell what worked.
• Tell your regulars a couple of weeks before. A notice at the counter is enough.
• Give it four weeks, then compare utilisation and bar takings for the same hours before and after.
• If a cheaper rate filled the quiet hours without emptying the busy ones, keep it.

In playdesk each table has its own hourly rate and a minimum charge in minutes. Peak and off-peak rates are set by time of day and day of week, either for one table, for a type of table such as all snooker tables, or for the whole venue. A game that crosses a changeover is billed at each rate for the right part automatically, and paused time isn't charged.

The reports show utilisation and idle time for every table, and the bar orders go on the table's bill, so you can see what a table-hour is really worth.