Why Doris exists

My wife manages the room diary for a therapy charity. Four rooms, about twenty-five therapists — volunteers and people on training placements. For years that diary lived in an Excel spreadsheet. Recurring weekly sessions meant blocking out the entire year rather than counting individual cells, because that was faster than the alternative.

I tried to fix it properly. I built a Google Form that populated a shared calendar. It was technically fine. Nobody used it. We went back to the spreadsheet.

That is when it became obvious the problem was not the spreadsheet. It was that nothing right-sized existed. Every room booking tool I looked at was built for hotels, or for enterprises, or cost more per month than a small charity’s entire admin budget. None of them understood that the person managing the bookings is probably also doing three other jobs, that the people making the bookings are volunteers, and that the organisation cannot justify a five-figure annual software contract.

So I built Doris. The brief I gave myself was simple: do exactly what it says, and nothing more. Let the people who need to book rooms see what is available and book it themselves. Let the person managing the diary stop managing it manually. Price it so that no committee needs to approve the purchase.