Transport Times UK operates a leading transport media and events organisation, managing conferences, awards ceremonies, and industry publications. As their events portfolio expanded, the team struggled with fragmented operational workflows spread across manual processes and disconnected tools. Event creation, ticket sales, awards submissions, payment collection, and reporting all required significant administrative effort. Different event formats demanded different pricing models, VAT calculations were handled manually, and awards nominations lacked a centralized digital workflow. Preparing judging packs required manually collecting and organizing dozens of file uploads, while editorial content updates depended entirely on developer involvement.

To design and develop a scalable event management platform that centralizes conferences, awards, ticketing, payments, content management, and operational reporting into a unified ecosystem. The objective was to eliminate manual administrative processes, automate payment handling and VAT calculations, provide flexible booking options for attendees, streamline awards management, and empower non-technical staff to independently manage both events and website content.

Toolshed built a two-surface architecture featuring a Next.js admin panel and a Framer public frontend, backed by serverless backend logic:

Unified Event Management Platform: Engineered an administration portal in Next.js that enables the team to create, manage, and publish multiple event types from a single interface. The platform supports both conference events with individual seat pricing and awards events offering seat-based and full-table bookings, maintaining a consistent operational workflow for administrators.

Flexible Booking & Payment Workflows: Developed a public booking experience integrated with Stripe and custom invoice workflows. Attendees can complete purchases using secure online card payments or submit purchase order requests for offline invoicing. Server-side business logic automatically calculates VAT, validates pricing, creates booking records, and tracks payment status throughout the lifecycle, using Stripe webhooks to handle real-time synchronization.

Awards Submission Portal: Built a dedicated submission portal allowing entrants to upload nomination materials directly against specific awards events. The system securely stores submissions while linking them to the correct event and nominee.

Automated Judge Pack Generation: Engineered a PDF compilation tool within the admin panel. When activated for a selected awards event, it invokes a Supabase Edge Function that retrieves all submission files from storage, processes them server-side, and produces a structured PDF document containing all entries in an organized format ready for distribution to judges.

Operational Dashboard & Order Management: Built a centralized dashboard providing real-time visibility into event performance, bookings, revenue, and customer orders. Administrators can monitor ticket sales, review payment statuses, and manage attendee information from a single interface.

Framer Website & Content Management: Developed the public-facing website in Framer and integrated Framer CMS for independent content management. The editorial team can publish news articles, update blogs, and manage website content directly, removing the bottleneck of developer involvement for routine content updates.

Serverless Backend Architecture: Architected all backend operations using Supabase Edge Functions to handle payment processing, VAT calculation, order management, and PDF generation. Keeping business logic within Supabase Edge Functions reduced infrastructure complexity while improving performance and maintainability.

By centralizing event management, ticketing, awards submissions, payments, and reporting into a single platform, Toolshed transformed Transport Times UK's operational workflows into a scalable digital ecosystem. The platform enables the team to independently create and publish events, automate VAT calculations, manage bookings across multiple payment methods, and generate complete judging packs with a single action. With real-time operational dashboards, secure submission management, and a Framer-powered CMS, the platform now serves as the operational backbone supporting Transport Times UK's expanding portfolio of conferences and awards