Online Gift Card Sales

As I wrote back in June, the Spa/Salon Manager program makes it easy to sell gift certificates to your customers without dealing with the per-transaction fees that banks and credit card processors charge to load and redeem their gift cards. We have extended that same ability to your website allowing your customers to print beautiful gift certificates directly from the web. Best of all your employees don't have to handle the checkout process or the shipping!

To make all of this work you'll need a few services in place first. Online gift certificate sales are part of our Online Booking service so you'll need Online Booking to start selling gift certificates online. You'll also need a shopping cart account from CartManager - we'll help you get signed up for an account with them, get everything set up correctly, and you're ready to go. Finally, you'll need a way to process the payments that come in to CartManager - Accelerated Payments/X-Charge is a great choice that also integrates with the Spa/Salon Manager point of sale features.

Once you're set up with these three pieces in place we'll work with you to prepare custom artwork for your printable gift certificate. It's even possible to use more than one gift certificate picture which allows you to switch up your artwork with the seasons or with special offers that come up. A good web developer will be able to design a site for you that includes different gift card packages with different artwork for the cards or you can have us make your web site for you.

We also offer the ability to sell discounted or bulk gift cards. You could set up a sale of five $20 gift cards for $80. You could offer a free $20 gift card with the purchase of a $100 gift card. The system is flexible enough where you just decide a final bill amount and a face value for each gift certificate and your web developer can easily make that special available to your customers.

Call us today to get started with Online Gift Card Sales.

Getting More with Less Paper

Our owner Kent's wait for his new electric car got me thinking about ways you can use features in our program to cut your paper use, help the environment, and at the same time make it easier to use the program. We have a lot of features that help reduce paper usage - I'd like to cover some of them here.

We have many salons that print a Close Day Summary every day. You can print these reports at any time though - there's no need to print the report for a paper record. Also, our Cloud owners could get access to the report from their home computer any time from any of their connected devices. While it's just one piece of paper a day it's one piece that a lot of salons end up throwing away once they print it.

Printing work tickets takes a lot of paper. Some salons will want to continue printing these as they do provide valuable information. However, it's possible to work around the need for these work tickets - especially if you have extra computers on the floor for staff to use. Rather than using the work tickets to look up customer history, employees could use an extra computer on the floor to look up information as they need it. In addition, the Pre-Price feature allows service providers to enter any add-on services or pricing changes from a walk-up computer instead of writing them in on the work tickets. It saves paper and prevents mistakes at the front desk.

Printing schedules takes up a lot of paper as well. We offer a few ways you can do without paper schedules. First, walk-up stations allow employees to see their appointments - including new changes that a printed schedule could miss - without paper and without walking to the front desk. In addition, the Paging feature of the program allows employees with text-capable phones to receive notifications for any schedule updates. Finally, both the Cloud and Online Booking features allow employees with smart phones to see their schedule directly on their phones. These options are far more powerful than a printed schedule and give another opportunity to cut your paper use.

Lastly, the powerful Send Email feature in our program can help you cut both costs and paper usage by replacing some of your print advertisements with email marketing. You can easily send out your email marketing to all customers with email addresses and then target your print marketing to only go to people you couldn't reach by email.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head for reducing paper usage with the program. There's so much you can do now without using paper. Between our Online Booking, our Cloud program, and the Paging feature you can extend access to the program to a variety of devices which will reduce your reliance on printing. You'll save money and in a small way help the environment as well.

SpaSalon Manager - Now on Facebook!

Ever since we rolled out our new website back in May we've been looking to put more and more information about our program and our company where our customers can see it.  We want you to get to know us as well as how the program operates. That entire time we've worked hard on something behind the scenes and I'm very happy to announce that we're now ready to unveil our company site on Facebook!

When we first discussed creating a Facebook page we were hesitant. We have so much great content on our new web site that there were questions about whether we could create something for Facebook that could add anything to what we already had. Once we got started though the answer became clear - we had a lot to say that didn't lend itself well to showing on a traditional web page.

Our Timeline page allowed us to tell the story of our company in a way that a simple web page could not. You can see the story of our company from its founding in 1985 to the present day illustrated in pictures. We have our newsletters, pictures of manuals and other materials from the early days of the business, as well as pictures of our employees and business owners that worked with us at our trade shows. They work together to tell a complete story of our business as it grew from Kent Crabtree writing a program for his parent's salon in 1985 to the business it is today.

Our Home Page section pulls together parts of our current web page like the blogs, the sign-up for a free trial, and links to our support and sales pages. This should make it easier for everyone to find exactly what they need. In addition there is a Training Videos section there where we give the same type of step-by-step support we offer over the phone to everyone on Facebook. Our growing list of videos give simple instructions that both teach new users how to use the program as well as show what each part of the program can do for you.

I hope you enjoy our new Facebook page! Give it a look, Like us, and feel free to leave comments! I'll personally be very active on the site and look forward to hearing from you there.

Last minute addition: We now have a business twitter account, @spasalonmanager. Feel free to contact us there!

New Email Feature - Email Footer

The Send Email feature of our program has always allowed you to send links and pictures. With a bit of work outside the program first you could even send full web pages. What the program lacked though was a way to automatically include certain links and pictures on every email that you send out. That's why we've added our newest feature to email - the Email Footer.

The Email Footer page, which is available under Maintenance -> Internet Marketing, makes it easy to create an attractive email footer. First, we've given you space to type in a slogan, extra information, current specials - whatever text you'd like to add to every outgoing email. Next, we've pulled together a custom set of logos for various social media sites - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Yelp, and LinkedIn - as well as logos for your Home Page and Online Booking. These logos are all sized so they can fit together on a single line and link to any of these sites that you use. You enter the address for each desired site and the Spa/Salon Manager takes care of the rest. Finally, we added space for up to three text-based links. These could be links to other partner businesses, your own newsletters hosted on the web, or any other links you'd like included at the end of every email.

With just a few minutes of setup you'll be sending attractive emails that tie your social media presence directly to your emails as well as providing more options and information to your customers. Best of all, this is another free service included to all Cloud and Maintenance Contract customers! As always if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact support.

Aveda Master Spreadsheet

Filling out paperwork takes up a lot of time for most businesses. There are tax forms, employee reviews, accounting information, as well as information required by various partners and distributors. We're always looking for ways we can save our customers time in that area. That's why we're very excited to unveil the Aveda Master Report.

We created the Aveda Master Report to make filling out this important information for Aveda much easier. In the past getting the information on this report required several different reports from our program as well as several different time frames for each one. It also required manually entering this information into Aveda's spreadsheet. With the new Aveda Master Report you just need to select your dates (Aveda requires a full year, 1/1-12/31), click Continue, and wait for the program to generate the data for the Aveda Master spreadsheet. When it's finished generating the data the program will pop up instructions for getting the results to the Aveda Master spreadsheet. Basically this just involves opening the Aveda Master spreadsheet, selecting the Paste Here tab at the start, clicking on the first cell (A1), and clicking Paste. Once you paste the information the Aveda Master spreadsheet will automatically fill in all the information on the DATA Entry Page.

If you don't have the Aveda Master spreadsheet available when generating the report our non-Cloud customers can use the file c:\salon\aveda0.xls on their main computer to do the same steps. Our Cloud customers can email themselves a copy of the file from the Send button under Customer Display by choosing Attach File and selecting aveda0.xls from the file list.

Whatever steps you use, our new Aveda Master Report will save you a ton of time! As always, don't hesitate to contact support with any questions.

New Cloud Feature - Taskbar Replacement

Our Cloud software has been very popular but many of our existing customers that recently converted to Cloud brought up an important question - How do we switch windows like we could with the installed version? Unfortunately the Cloud version of our program removed the Windows taskbar that allowed users to switch between open windows. We made changes to make it easier to use the program without that option but the frequency of that question lately made it clear we needed to make a change.

So we pushed up our sleeves, got to work, and created something that in many ways will work out better for our Cloud customers than the old Windows taskbar. Our taskbar replacement targets the specific main windows we feel are the most critical to our program - the main screen, Appointment, Appointment Detail, Check In/Customer Display, Check Out, Customer Payment, Verify Monies, Close Period, Paging, Inventory, Salon Use, Reports, and Maintenance. A few important that users can't minimize such as Close Day were left off of the list but we feel that the above list will allow users the flexibility they had to switch back and forth between the various windows in our program without having that list cluttered with all the extra windows that the Windows taskbar added. As an added bonus the tabs on the taskbar will always show in the order I listed above regardless of what order you open them in. This makes it easier to find the window you need and to quickly switch between all open windows.

We will be updating all our Cloud servers over the course of the next week or so with this great new feature. Please contact us with any questions or problems. This option will also be available to our customers that are using their own in-house servers - simply give us a call and we'll be happy to help you set this up for your own server.

Email in The Spa/Salon Manager

We've added several new features to The Spa/Salon Manager lately that need email support. When I went back in to look at our records though we had many salons that hadn't taken advantage of everything our software offers to people with email accounts. This seems like a good time to explain how our email service works, how to tell if you have email set up through us, and list many of the great features that our email service can open up to your business.

Email support within the program is a free service we offer to all customers that have either an active Maintenance or Cloud Contract. In order to allow you to send emails to your entire customer list at once we create an email account on our own email server. This prevents issues with various email providers refusing to send out your emails due to some arbitrary limit on the number of people you can send an email to at one time. We set up each business with an email address that ends in @spasalon.com and then offer a choice of either checking that email address directly or having all responses forwarded to one or more of the employee's current email addresses. Your customers will see the emails coming from your business name @spasalon.com and can reply to those emails. It's a seamless process that ties our software's email capabilities to whatever email addresses you plan on checking.

Checking whether you've set up email with us already is an easy process. Simply go to Maintenance and then hit More Choices until you see Internet Marketing. If you have the Internet User Name complete then you're ready to try your email. To test whether your email is functioning correctly you can go to Customer Display, pull up your own name, make sure your email address is on the correct line, and click Send Email on the screen. You'll then be able to write an email to yourself and check your email to verify that Spa/Salon Manager is sending the emails successfully. If you're not yet set up or have any problems sending the email contact our support department and we'll be happy to get you ready!

The Spa/Salon Manager has an extensive list of features that it now supports for our email-enabled customers. This list keeps growing as we see further opportunities to use this no-cost feature to improve the way our program helps you manage your business.

• Email marketing is a snap with Spa/Salon Manager. You can easily send emails out to all of your customers with email addresses. Adding a picture is as simple as clicking a button and selecting the picture from your computer. You don't need to export customer lists, integrate with other products, or place extra phone calls to another company. Simply click the Send Email button, select Send Email to All Customers, and click Continue...then you're ready to create your email!
• Our email marketing also uses our powerful Mailing Reports to make it easy to do targeted emails. It's easy to create an email list directed to one specific group of customers based on a variety of filters.
• Spa/Salon Manager sends many emails out for you automatically. You can set up the program to send nightly emails including appointment confirmations, reminders, birthday greetings, new customer thank you's, and text message reminders for appointments.
• Once you've set up an email address with us it's easy to start using our paid service Email Artwork by IBCS to send out professional quality advertisements to your customers.
• The Paging section of Spa/Salon Manager (discussed in the first part of this blog post) offers the ability to use employee's existing cell phones to create a robust paging service that replaces expensive pagers or mood-killing audio paging systems.
• For our online booking customers a variety of emails will now be sent out directly from the online booking. This includes messages to the customers to confirm successful booking of appointments as well as full integration with the paging system. For all of our Cloud customers we've already set this up for you. For our non-Cloud online booking customers please contact our support department so we can ensure you have these new features available to you.

As you can see, the email features in the Spa/Salon Manager program offer a lot of powerful tools to your business. It's included with your Maintenance/Cloud Contract, it's easy to set up, and there are no per-email fees associated with it. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with your customers while saving money. If you haven't already set it up call us today to get started.

Touch Screens and Spa/Salon Manager

I just finished my first cut at a standing desk and the process of working on putting together a comfortable and easy-to-use workstation reminded me of an important point we don't spend enough time talking about - from the very beginning we designed the Spa/Salon Manager program to work well with touch screen monitors.

Now any program will 'work' with a touch screen monitor. A touch screen simply allows you to replace the motions and left-click actions of a mouse by touching the screen with your finger. A mouse allows for far more control than touching a screen allows though. The design of Microsoft Windows itself shows this expectation of control - small buttons, tiny drop-down menus (File, Edit, View, etc. along the top). Most Windows versions of salon software follow that same model - they're designed to look like a Windows program. That means that unless you're very careful it's easy to miss what you're trying to click with a touch screen - the buttons are just too small and touching the screen too inexact to make the touch screen a time saver or even a comfortable option at a standing work station.

Our program isn't designed following those Windows standards that are unfriendly to a touch interface. We used a button-based menu system for all of our screens rather than Windows drop-down menus. All of these buttons are far larger than you'd find in a typical Windows program. We've made sure to avoid any small data entry boxes and as often as possible have offered drop-down boxes as an alternative to typing in information. The effect is that our program not only makes it easy to use a touch screen in place of a mouse - for many operations we avoid a need for a keyboard as well.

So who should use a touch screen? The same people that are trying to do what I'm doing right now - standing at a desk rather than sitting. While reaching toward a touch screen while seated can be cumbersome, reaching toward a touch screen while standing is often easier than using a mouse would be in that same position. I've seen some wonderful ergonomic desks built to use a touch screen - one even had the touch screen built in to a slanted standing desk similar to a podium! However you set up your ideal desk though our program is designed to make it comfortable and easy to touch the screen.

Storms - Another Reason for Cloud Software

In my previous posts Why Cloud? and Switching to Cloud I covered quite a bit of ground about our Spa/Salon Manager Cloud software. The recent rash of storms have illuminated some other benefits that I didn't cover though that definitely deserve attention. Specifically, I'd like to take some time to look at how a Cloud salon would deal with the storms versus a non-Cloud.

When the power goes out for a non-Cloud business there's only one option available - move the main computer to somewhere that has power. Sometimes this is feasible. Occasionally it's possible to use a generator or UPS power backup device to power the main computer temporarily. Beyond that though there would be no Online Booking access for customers, no Employee Access for employees, and no way to send out an email to customers letting them know that your salon is closed due to a power outage. As a best-case scenario you would keep your power to your main computer long enough to write down phone numbers for customers, then call them back with a cell phone to let them know you're closed. As a worst-case you would have no access to your information.

When the power goes out for a Cloud business you have many more options available to you. Because your main computer does not store your information it's still available to anyone that still has working internet. This could be an iPad, Android Tablet, or even a smartphone. Worst-case you could call us to have us look up your information for you. If you needed to send an email to customers notifying them of a closure you could do it from anywhere and even if you had no access we would be able to send the email for you.

We just had this exact situation come up on a tech support call yesterday. We had a customer that had no power and wanted to let their customers no they would be close through Thursday. Unfortunately, we couldn't help them. They didn't have Cloud, we didn't do Online Backups for them, and they couldn't bring a copy of their backup to a computer that had power. Because we had no access to their current information as we would have with Cloud or even a copy of their information as we would have with Online Backup there was nothing we could do to help.

These situations are obviously rare. They're a small part of the decision-making process when it comes to choosing the right software option for your business. But when the lights go out in your salon, knowing that your software will still be running will make the entire situation less stressful and give you one less problem to fix.

Exciting Changes for Paging and Online Booking

There’s been a lull since my last post and with good reason. I’ve been working on some exciting additions to the Online Booking for the past week and I’m very excited to unveil them here!  I’d considered making multiple posts as there’s simply a ton to cover. However, since all the changes are so tightly tied together I’ll cover them in sections here. The first section will cover changes made to the operation of Employee Paging within our base software. The second section will cover changes made to both the Paging and Emailing within the Online Booking. The third and final section will cover our exciting new Online Booking feature – Customer Reviews. As always, please contact us with any questions and we’ll be happy to help you get started with these great new features!

Employee Paging

Our Employee Paging feature is a great part of our base software that allows employees to receive text messages notifying them about events within the salon.  As I mentioned in last week’s post employees can now receive text messages when they receive an intercom message, when same day appointments are booked, when customers check in, when any appointments are booked, as well as a message each morning with their starting time and earliest appointment. 

In addition I’ve now added the ability to receive a text whenever a customer cancels. This cancellation option is tied in to the appointment notifications so if you opt for same-day messages only then you’ll only get same-day cancellation notices. If you opt to receive notification on all appointment changes that will extend to cancellations as well.

Employee Paging was a wonderful feature but the more I thought about it the more concerned I became that certain employees might miss out on these great benefits because they didn’t have a cell phone that allowed them to receive text messages. To address this problem I’ve added an ‘Email’ option to the list of Text Carriers in Paging. Choosing this option will allow you to enter an email address rather than a Cell Phone Number. You’ll then receive all the same notifications in your email instead of as a text message.

Online Booking Emails/Text Messages

I’ve added a feature that was honestly long overdue – the ability for Online Booking to send out emails. Using this new ability I’ve extended the Paging feature to Online Booking. Now when customers are checked in, when intercom messages are received, and when appointments are booked and cancelled employees that have set up their Paging options will receive the appropriate notifications.

In addition, Online Booking will send notifications to clients confirming that they have successfully booked and cancelled appointments. There won’t be any more guesswork about whether they finished their booking or not – they’ll get an email right away letting them know that their changes were saved.

Customer Reviews

I can’t say enough about how excited this change makes me. The most important thing any service company can do is listen to their customers. The new Customer Review section of Online Booking makes it easy for your customers – and only your customers – to leave feedback for your business, for your employees to respond to that feedback, and for your web site to reflect the praise your customers give you! In my most recent post I covered the technical aspects of this feature. As a more simple explanation, once you contact us and turn on the Customer Reviews section your customers will see a Purchase History / Customer Review link instead of the old Purchase History link. They can click there and leave reviews for any services in their history. Employees to whom you grant access can then log in to their Employee Access and reply to those reviews, approve them, or in the case of inappropriate comments delete them. Lastly, I’ve added a highly customizable web site plugin that will allow your web site to display the reviews you’ve approved in a variety of attractive formats.

As I mentioned, I’m very excited about these changes. The ability for the Online Booking to send emails when appropriate greatly extended what we can provide to our Online Booking customers. I see that as an area that will continue to grow as we identify more needs for our salons and spas. Extending the Paging to more and more situations as well as providing the opportunity to use that service for non-cell phone users will also allow us much more flexibility in how we keep your staff plugged in to the software. And I’m hoping the Employee Reviews takes your customer service and retention to new levels. These are all exciting changes and I look forward to your feedback as I’d love to see them pushed even further - offering more and more ways to stay in touch with your customers and in control of your business!

Keeping your Employees Plugged in with Paging

I'd like to take some time today to explain a great feature we've had for some time but relatively few of our customers use - the Paging feature. Salons and Spas can use the Paging feature to keep their Employees informed about a variety of events in the salon without the noise of in-salon intercom systems, the cost of expensive pager systems, or having your receptionist running back and forth through the salon to talk to your service providers. If you have a Spa/Salon Manager email address - free for our Cloud and maintenance contract customers - and your employees have cell phones that can receive text messages then you're ready to get started with Spa/Salon Manager's Paging system.

It's a snap to set up Paging in our program. Simply click the Paging button at the top of the screen and click Assign Pager. After that select the employee that you're setting up. You'll then see a screen that allows you to fill in that employee's cell phone number and cell phone carrier. We ask for the carrier so that we can send the text messages out through your email system. This makes the process of sending the text messages completely free to you - the only costs would be for the employee receiving the text message if they did not have an unlimited texting plan.

In addition to the cell phone number and carrier our newest version has the following options:

• Send Pager Messages - This option is the 'master switch' that determines whether the employee should receive any pager messages at all. If an employee only wants pager messages while they're at work they could go into Paging and Assign Pager and turn this option off when they leave each day and back on when they come in the next day. Turning this option on turns on pager messages for same day appointment changes as well as notifications of any intercom messages received in addition to any other options selected below.
• Send Messages for Customer Check In - This option is the replacement for those expensive pagers or noisy in-salon intercom systems. Selecting this option sends the employee a text message to let them know each time their next customer has checked in at the front desk.
• Send Messages for All Appointments Booked - Some employees would like to know any time you book an appointment even if it's not on the current day. We had one spa for instance that had a massage therapist that came in on an as-needed basis. She wanted to know the moment the salon booked a new appointment so she could plan her schedule. Turning this option on would mean that every appointment booked in your column would trigger a text message notification.
• Send Messages Each Day with Start Time - If you're sending text messages to your customers to remind them of their appointment you can now send a text message to each member of your staff at the same time with their scheduled starting time in the appointment book as well as the time of their first appointment that day.

All of the options mentioned above are on an employee-by-employee basis. If I were implementing Paging in my salon I would take the time to educate my employees on the Paging area and then allow the employees to set their own options. That way they can keep their cell phone number/carrier up-to-date and can control what messages they receive. That puts your employees in the driver's seat and allows them to stay plugged in with Paging.

Gift Cards without the Fees

Almost every bank and credit card processor offers plastic gift cards for sale to salons and spas. Many do a good job at providing a quality service but for companies using our Spa/Salon Manager software that service isn't needed - you can do the same thing through our program with no fees!

The way these bank gift cards work is that they go through a separate box kept at the front desk and add/remove balances through there. Because of that, the banks have to charge you per swipe to offset their costs. When you use the bar-coded plastic gift cards offered by our company, there's no communication needed with another program. All balances are stored within the program and therefore we don't have to charge a per-transaction fee. Best of all you can even reuse the gift cards once a customer has used up their balance - as long as the card looks good you can use it forever!


All you need to get started with our bar-coded plastic gift cards is a bar code reader for each computer that will be running gift card sales. This reader is the same one that we use for inventory sales in our system so if you already have one you're ready to go. Then you can contact our sales department to order your customized cards. Judy will work with you on creating beautiful cards that you'll be excited to sell to your customers!

Web Site Design

As part of our dedication to bring more than just software to our customers we offer web site design and hosting services at very affordable rates. We're able to do this thanks to the immense talents of one of our employees - Judy. Before working for IBCS Judy worked as a graphic designer creating advertisements for customers and she's brought her great artistic and advertising talent to web design, both for our customers and on our own site.

You can contact Judy through our sales department to discuss your web site. She'll work together with you on gathering the information she'll need to provide a high-quality web site for your salon. To prepare for the process of having her create your web site it's very helpful to gather all of the information together you'll eventually have on your web site. Have your service menu with pricing and service offerings and any feature retail products (along with pictures if you'd like) ready to send to her. A bit of time writing a short bit about the history of your salon and what sets you apart can make sure that Judy presents your salon in the best light. Pictures and short bios of your staff help to add a personal touch to your site.  We'll also need salon details such as phone and email contact information, hours of operation, and the salon's address.  Finally, any logos, pictures, and information about your salon's color scheme can help to make your web site recognizable as a part of your salon.

We now have two great options for web site development. Our standard web sites are still the same amazing price they've always been - $200 for the site development. Some examples of Judy's work on standard web sites include HairExpressions.net, SydneysSalon.com, and Elon-Salon.com. In addition we now offer advanced web sites that include features such as Flash (which allows moving picture galleries) at a price of $495 for the site development. TheStrandSalonSpa.com and GrandmaToste.com are good examples of these type of sites. Whether you go with the standard or the advanced web site we still offer our low web hosting fee of $25 / month. Even better, if you're an online booking customer web hosting is free!

Call Judy at 800-682-2998 and get started today!

Custom Coding - Making our Software Work for You

No software program is perfect for every single person that uses it. As a developer I strive to write software that makes my customers' jobs easier, that does what they need without coming between them and their customers, and does all of this while maintaining an aesthetically appealing appearance. Obviously though every customer is going to have different needs and sometimes those needs don't fit into our base program. That's why we offer a great service to our customers - Custom Coding.

The first step in making the software work for you is contacting our support department. Bring your suggestions for the program to us and we'll discuss the best way to accomplish your goals. Often there's a feature in the existing program that will already handle what you need done. Even if there's not, we're always looking for great new ideas to add to our base program. There's a good chance that an idea that would benefit the majority of customers will find its way into the base program. There's no charge for any of this - it's just our hands-on way of providing a quality program.

There are times though where an idea is worth adding but would either add too much confusion for businesses that don't need the feature or it could be an idea that would make a huge difference for one particular company but isn't applicable in other businesses. In that case there's still an avenue available to getting those features into the software - Custom Coding. We charge $95 / hour and will tell you up front what the bill for a feature would be. We've customized the software for many different business and we know our program well so once we have a detailed description of the new feature we can let you know whether it's something we can do and if so what the price would be for the addition.

One major area I've seen our Custom Coding service help salons is in pulling customized reports. Adding a custom report - especially one for which all of the information is already available on other reports - is one of the easier projects for us to do and therefore it's often inexpensive. I've seen several businesses that struggled with the process of filling out forms for accountants, suppliers, or any number of other third parties. Once we took the time to provide them with a customized report they took a couple minutes to print the customized report, emailed it to the person, and saved hours a month on pulling up several reports every week and filling in paperwork by hand.

Whatever it is that you need in the software never forget that we're not just a software company - we're here to make the software work for you. Our Custom Coding service is just another way that we can help you run your business efficiently and keep your focus where it belongs - on your customers.

Switching to Cloud

For those of you not already familiar with our Cloud software, take a minute to read my previous blog post Why Cloud?.

It's been less than two years since we released the Cloud version of our program and it's taken off beyond even our expectations.  At this point almost 20% of our current customers are using Cloud! There are far more salons and spas out there that could benefit from our Cloud program but haven't made the decision to switch yet. Hopefully this post will help remove some of the roadblocks to making the switch.

Many salons feel that they don't have the time to switch over. We remove almost all the work though by setting up our server ahead of time for you. We'll transfer your backup after you close for the day, prepare your log-ins ahead of time, and in about 5-10 minutes per computer we can have you up and running on the Cloud. There's no wait - we can have you switched over in time for your next business day.

Most existing peripherals (printers, receipt printers, etc) work with the Cloud. Pretty much any Windows-based printer will still operate correctly. The Epson Receipt printers as well as the cash drawers that integrate with them will work. And you can even use your Pin Pad devices with X-Charge's credit card processing.

The ACH billing for the Cloud software is safe, secure, and much less of a hassle for our customers than credit card-based billing. You don't have to worry about letting us know when you get a new credit card or a card is expiring. The billing happens automatically every month without any extra work on your part.

The costs of our Cloud software are more for some of our customers - although I highly recommend taking the time to contact our sales department for a custom quote to see if the Cloud costs more for you or not. Even for the customers that would be paying more though the benefits to going Cloud have made it worth it for a large number of our current salons and spas - a number that's growing every day.

Online Booking and Employee Access

Ever since its release 12 years ago our online booking has been helping salons and spas reduce the workload at their front desk while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction. We have many satisfied salons and spas using the online booking now, both to put up that 'Open Sign' 24 hours a day 7 days a week as well as to increase their own employees access to their appointment books. I'd like to take a moment to explain the benefits and dispel some of the perceived pitfalls of online booking.

The number one concern I hear from salons and spas looking at the online booking relates to privacy. They want to make sure their customers won't know when they're in, when they're not, or how busy they are. Our online booking never shows that information to your customers. Instead, customers pick their services, dates, and if desired a requested employee and are given a selection of times that would meet their needs.

The only other barrier for most salons is the price. For customers using our installed program the price is $65 per month and for our cloud customers it's $30 per month. When you consider the amount of time savings involved - the reduced calls to the front desk, the reduction in number of computers needed to support a staff that can easily view and book their own appointments on their smart phones or home computers, and the possible reduction in necessary front desk staffing during slower times of day - you'll end up saving far more than you spend on the online booking fees.

So why use the online booking? The high level of customization offered ensures that you only give your customers and your staff the level of access you want them to have. You keep complete control of your book by opening up only the options you want people to have. At the same time, there's a huge amount available to both customers and staff.

You can enable your customers to book and cancel their own appointments. You can allow new customers to join your business's mailing and email lists. You can send interactive confirmation emails that mark customers as confirmed only if they click the confirmation link in the emails.

For your staff you can have them view their schedule, book and cancel appointments, adjust their books to mark off or open time up, and can even allow them to do those things for each other. The online booking is secure, flexible, and gives your customers and staff the ability to stay connected to your business whenever they need.

Lastly, we've made many improvements over the years to the look of the online booking. We can now make the online booking a seamless part of your existing web site and provide your customers with the same quality aesthetics you have in your current site. And for salons that don't already have a web site we can develop one at a very low cost and then host it for you at no additional charge.

Contact us to get started today!

Open/Close Day

Probably the most common support question we're asked is on how to open and close days. Surprisingly this isn't just a question we get from our new customers. Often it comes from customers that have been using the program for awhile but find that they're having trouble balancing the drawer at the end of the day. We've worked out an outstanding system to ensure that you balance each day. There are a few extra steps involved but those extra steps will save a lot of time spent searching for mistakes and avoid those late nights spent sifting through receipts looking for that one problem sale.

At the beginning of each day you should go to Verify Monies and go to the Cash section. You can then either use the Cash Helper to count your money or manually count the money and enter the total on the bottom line. This step is critical because we need to make sure what's physically in the drawer matches to the Computed Total shown on the screen. If for some reason the two numbers don't match - a possibility if extra money was brought from the bank and put into the drawer without recording that transaction in the program - we'll want to record those changes in the Pay In/Out section. After you've finished with the Cash we'd recommend double-checking all the other sections (Checks, Credit Cards, etc) to ensure that they're all empty. We want to make absolutely sure that we're starting fresh in the morning with a clean slate and that our actual and computed cash matches as the hardest problems to track down when balancing at the end of the day come from not starting with the right amount in the drawer.

Once that's done we can start our normal operation running sales through as they come in. Periodically throughout the day you'll want to go back to Verify Monies to handle the non-cash sales. You'll go into each non-cash section (Checks, Credit Cards, etc) and the program will show you a list of all transactions in that area.

For example, if you click Checks you'll get a list of all the checks you've brought in so far that day. Pull your checks out of your cash drawer and match them up to the ones on the screen. As you match each one up, click it on the list on the left and it will move it to the Verified list on the right. Then take that check and put it into a finished pile. When you finish or if you run out of time paper clip the checks in your finished pile so that you know you don't need to do those again and click Continue on the screen. When you come back in later it will pick up right where you left off with all the verified checks on the right and any new checks on the left.

At the end of the day you'll go back to Verify Monies one last time. Do the Checks, Credit Cards, etc one last time to take care of any last minute sales. Then you'll repeat your step on the cash section from the beginning of the day to make sure your cash still balances. If there are any mistakes you'll want to use the Detailed Daily Sheet under Reports -> List Daily Sheets to track those down. Once you're completely done with any corrections and Verify Monies you'll go to the Close Day screen to finish your day.

This process does three things for you. First, you catch any mistakes during the day rather than having to look for them at the end of the day. Second, you're actually spreading the close day process out over the entire day into your free time rather than trying to fit it all in at the end of the day when you'd rather be locking up and heading home. It's simply a better use of time because you're making use of down time to speed up your close day. Finally, using the Verify Monies cuts down on Close Day mistakes because the information from the Verify Monies screen automatically transfers over to the Close Day screen. That eliminates any errors adding up checks and credit cards or mis-keyed numbers.

As always, for any questions on making these steps work for you give our techs a call and we'd be happy to help you.

Why Cloud?

Ever since we released the Cloud version of our software we’ve been looking for ways to explain why and when Cloud Software makes sense. We’ve gone so far as to start working through our customer list calling every one of our customers to look at their business and see whether Cloud makes sense for them. Hopefully this post will help answer some of the general questions that determine whether Cloud is right for your business.

Cloud opens up a whole host of devices that our installed program won’t run on directly. You can still use a PC and in addition you can now use Macs, iPhones/iPads, and Android devices including the Kindle Fire. This device independence is one of the main reasons to consider Cloud. If you have a variety of devices you’d like to use with the program then Cloud might be the right choice for you.

Our Cloud option is also highly data secure. Rather than having your salon data installed on a PC that could be damaged or stolen your data is stored in a state-of-the-art data center, encrypted, backed up daily, protected from unauthorized access and any possible disasters. It’s safe. You don’t have to worry about backups, running updates, or any data theft issues.

If you have managers and owners that need access from home then Cloud is the perfect choice. They can access the full program from any supported device without interfering with the day-to-day operations of the salon. This is especially important for chain salons where the owner may need to oversee the operations of several different locations. You can even run a booking room that handles all your appointment bookings for the chain from one central location!

All you need to go Cloud is a reliable internet connection and any of the supported devices. Our technicians can quickly and painlessly convert an existing salon to Cloud or set up a new location. Check out our cloud prices or call us for a custom quote.

The Importance of Backups

We try to beat this into the ground as much as possible and this blog's a great spot for another reminder - if you're not doing backups in your Spa/Salon Manager program then you need to start today!

I talk to a lot of people doing technical support every day. I can tell you from experience that most people will eventually face a computer failure that will require some sort of data backup to fully recover. And I can also tell you from experience that pit I get the bottom of my stomach when I realize I'm going to have to tell a customer they've lost everything because there was no backup. If I feel that way giving the bad news I can't even imagine how it feels to receive it.

The good news is that backing up your information in Spa/Salon Manager couldn't be easier! If you're on the Cloud version of our software then we're already doing the backups for you. If you're using our installed software then you have a couple options.

We offer a service for $199 per year where we'll store your backups for you off site. We verify that the backups are running and make sure that you're secure no matter what happens in the salon.

If you'd like to handle the backups yourself all you'll need is a USB flash drive or two - having two gives you a bit of security in case something happens to one of them. Once you have the drives give us a call to set up your backups in the program. All you'll need to do is go to the Backup button at the end of the day every day and hit Daily / Weekly Backup.  It's that simple! I'd recommend taking the flash drive out after you're done with the backup and storing it somewhere safe. If you have a fireproof box on-site that would be ideal.

Introduction

This is an exciting time to be working at IBCS making The Spa/Salon Manager software and part of that excitement is the opportunity to reach out to our customers in ways that simply weren't available or widely used in the spa and salon industry in the past. With so many of our customers active on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and the many other social sites on the web I felt it was important to broaden the scope of what we do here and help to put a face behind the name on the phone.

My name is Bob Hoyng and I've been working with IBCS for over 16 years now. I love the work we do here - the combination of creating great new software products and services while at the same time getting to talk one-on-one with our customers every day. We've got a wonderful new web site now, our newsletter will be updated in the next few days, and not to ruin a great surprise but the next update will be coming very soon as well and will have some amazing features for customizing the look of the program.

I'll be posting here as we have more interesting news to report (or as I get randomly excited about a new feature I'm working on) but in the meantime, we always love hearing from our customers! We've got a variety of technical support or sales phone numbers and you can always contact me directly at bob@spasalon.com. My official SpaSalon twitter account is @bob_spasalon and if you'd like to see my random musings outside the office you can follow me on Google Plus, Twitter, or Facebook.