Fancy Forts

The problem

A party business looks like one job and is actually three.

The first is booking: an enquiry on social media, a phone call to pin down the address, a text about the theme, and a screenshot saved in case it matters later. It works right up until two families book the same Saturday.

The second is paperwork. Terms need agreeing and a waiver needs signing, because children will be sleeping in something you built. Chasing that by email is unpleasant for everyone, and the honest failure mode is doing the party anyway, unsigned, and hoping.

The third is packing. Every theme needs a different set of kit, and the cost of forgetting one piece is discovered at the customer’s house, an hour away, on a Saturday afternoon.

What Fancy Forts does

Requests come in through a multi-step form on the site and arrive as real bookings — theme, package, extras, date, address, and contact details, required up front so an incomplete booking cannot quietly reach the diary.

Terms and the waiver are then sent as private signing links. The customer signs in their browser without creating an account, and the signed record sits on the booking. Deliberately, there are no customer logins: families booking a party once a year will not remember a password, and asking them to make one only loses bookings.

Once confirmed, the system produces the packing list for that booking, built from the theme and package rather than from memory — so loading the van is a list to work through instead of a thing to remember. A print-friendly summary goes out with it for the day.

Money is handled in the same place. Deposits and payments are taken by card online rather than chased, and a confirmed booking is pushed straight through to the accounts — so the year-end is not an archaeology project. Gift cards are sold through the same flow.

Around that sit the rest of the business: a record of every message sent to a customer, and email campaigns to past customers that stay on the right side of Canadian anti-spam rules.

The public website is part of the same system. Themes, packages, prices, photos, FAQs, and testimonials are all edited by the owner — so changing a price does not require a developer, which is the difference between a website that stays current and one that quietly goes stale.

How it is built

Laravel 13, Livewire, and MySQL, with tokenised signing links instead of customer accounts and a built-in CMS driving the public site. Card payments run through Stripe, confirmed bookings sync to QuickBooks Online, and the owner gets web push notifications when something needs them.