Important Information on Windows XP

As hard as it is to believe, Windows XP has been with us for 12 years now! Unfortunately, after supporting XP for all those years and releasing many new versions of Windows, Microsoft will be discontinuing support for XP. So what does that mean for our customers using Windows XP still?

First, if you're not sure which version of Windows you're using you can follow Microsoft's guide to finding your operating system. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us!

Even though the end of support for Windows XP is on April 8th, 2014 there isn't anything that will change immediately with your computer. Microsoft has a great article that explains the risks associated with remaining on XP - the primary points for our customers are the following:

Security:

Without critical Windows XP security updates, your PC may become vulnerable to harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software which can steal or damage your business data and information. Anti-virus software will also not be able to fully protect you once Windows XP itself is unsupported.

Compliance:

Businesses that are governed by regulatory obligations such as HIPAA may find that they are no longer able to satisfy compliance requirements. More information on HHS’s view on the security requirements for information systems that contain electronic protected health information (e-PHI) can be found here (HHS HIPAA FAQ - Security Rule).

This is an important issue that our customers should take very seriously - especially those that use credit card processing that runs through our program. That said, your computer will not shut down on April 8th. You'll be far more vulnerable to viruses and attacks but as long as you don't get attacked our program will continue to run. We will continue to support customers using XP on their systems for as long as we can keep the program running on them.

For customers that are not ready to switch their computers off of Windows XP by April 8th, the Cloud version of our software can decrease your risks. By switching to Cloud you no longer have to worry about your program's data sitting on your computer. Instead, we would have your information safely stored on our Cloud servers and as a worst-case scenario while your computer could be compromised, your Spa/Salon Manager software would not. In addition, changing to Cloud makes it far easier to switch computers in the future. You can read more about the Cloud version of our software in our Cloud-related blog posts and as always, please contact us with any questions.

New Feature - Check SpaSalon Email

As a service to all of our Cloud customers and all installed customers with current contracts we offer a free email address. We also offer many ways to check the replies to those emails - using the built-in email on your smartphones, Outlook, automatic forwarding to another address, and even our own web interface called WorldClient. We still needed one last part though - direct access to those emails within the SpaSalon Manager program. With the new Check SpaSalon Email button we've added that access by integrating the easy to use WorldClient web site into our software!

For any customers that don't have their SpaSalon email directly forwarded to another email address all you need to do is update your program. The update is already there for our Cloud customers. Once you're on the newest version of SpaSalon you can go to your Send Email button at the top of the screen and chose the Check SpaSalon Email option in the bottom-left of the screen. The program will launch a built-in web browser which will take you directly to WorldClient and immediately log you in. Once there you will have full access to WorldClient just as if you had logged in through the web.

There are some limitations on what you can do - for safety we've disabled any external links within the emails. Other than that though you'll have full access to read the replies from customers, send replies back to them, and handle anything that you used to do through WorldClient.

For customers that do have their email forwarded already but would like to use this feature just contact technical support and we'd be happy to help set you up with either WorldClient only or using both the forwarding of emails and WorldClient.

Preparing for Online Booking

If you're thinking about using online booking you should read my earlier blog post on the benefits of online booking and employee access. Once you've made up your mind to start booking online these simple steps listed below will prepare you for a smooth transition to our Online Booking.

There are a couple of pieces of information that are critical for the Online Booking to work - your working hours and the booking styles. If you think about what Online Booking does it makes sense - when someone calls the salon to book an appointment you've got a live person answering the phone. Even if you haven't set up your hours, service list, and timings correctly the receptionist may catch those mistakes and correct them. When you're booking online the computer makes the decisions though so you need to give it the right information about how and when to book appointments.

You'll want to set up Working Hours first. Go to the Appointment Book, then the Appointment Setup button at the bottom of the screen, and then click Working Hours. Go through each employee and make sure that all the employees have the correct working hours. In addition, you should set up any times where an employee is out during their regularly scheduled hours or working during hours they are not normally scheduled - either by booking the times out with appointments or through Appointment Setup then Schedule Maintenance.

Once you have set up your Working Hours you should make sure that our Booking Styles are correct. Booking Styles are accessible through the Appointment Book -> Appointment Setup -> Booking Styles.

To set up the timings for single services you can go to the Booking Styles button on that screen. Make sure that each employee has the correct timings for all the services that they do. In addition, if there are any services they don't do you'll need to go to those as well, click the box on the screen that says Employee Does Not Perform This Service until it turns red, and click Continue.

If you have any combinations of services that need special timings you can go to the Combination Styles button to enter those timings. Finally, if you have any customers that need special timings you can set that up through the Appointment Book -> Appointment Setup -> Special Customers.

Our last area of the program to set up for Online Booking is Service Maintenance. Go to Maintenance -> Service -> Modify Service and go through each service one at a time. There are two spots on the screen you'll want to check.

First, near the top of the screen there is an Allow Online check box. You may not want some of the services listed online, whether they're services for which you want to talk to the customer first or simply housekeeping services like 'Free Haircut/Redo' or 'No Show'. This step gives you the opportunity to present a clean, concise list of just the services you want your customers to see.

Right beside that box on the same screen there's an Online Description. This optional set allows you to enter a short description for the service. You can fill it in on just the services you'd like and use it to give more information about each service. It's very useful for providing special instructions or for marketing your services.

Once you have the program ready and we've turned on your Online Booking you'll want to contact your web developer to add a link to your website. If we developed and host your web site then you're all set - we'll handle everything for you! Otherwise we can work together with your web developer to not just give them a link but make the Online Booking a seamless part of your existing website.

By taking the time to go through these few simple steps as soon as you make up your mind to move forward with Online Booking you can have fully functional, accurate, and always available Online Booking functionality added to your web site very quickly, often within a day! As always, don't hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Family Checkout

We've just finished a wonderful upgrade to the Family Checkout process and I wanted to take some time to explain the changes and the feature in general.

Before anyone panics, there's nothing to relearn after the upgrade. We've kept the steps the same as they've always been but added some helpful messages to the checkout screen as well as made it possible to see the Previous Customer Total and the Balance Due at the same time. It's still the same easy process you've been using - we've just added more information to help new users know what to do at each step along the way.

The first step in using Family Checkout is checking in all the customers that will be a part of the sale. You can do that from the appointment book by clicking on the appointment and clicking Check In on the following screen or by using the Check In menu button  at the top of the screen. Make sure to check in all the customers that are paying together first.

Next, go to the Check Out menu button at the top of the screen. This comes up with a list of currently checked in customers which will include all the customers you just checked in. Click all the names that are checking out together - the program will highlight all the customers. Once you've selected at least two customers you'll notice that the bottom of the screen shows a new box - Customer Paying this Bill. Once you've selected all the customers for this ticket you can pick one of those customers from that list as the person that will pay for the bill. That customer will be the last one checked out and their total will show the total from all the other sales as well as their own. Once you've selected the customer paying the bill, click Continue to move on to the next step.



After this step, you'll have a typical checkout screen for the first customer. The only difference is a message that shows in yellow beneath the payment lines: "Click Continue for Family Checkout - Do not enter payment information". Fill in everything as you would normally - services, retail items, discount codes, etc. Once you have the correct information entered for that customer, hit Continue without entering a payment. The program will ask you if someone will be paying the bill later - answer Yes to this question. This will take you to the next customer - just repeat these steps for every customer until you get to the last customer - the one we selected earlier as paying the bill.



When you get to the last customer you'll see a new message in yellow beneath the payment lines: "Previous Customer Total: $XXX.XX". This message shows the amount that's carried forward from all the other customers. Fill in everything as you would normally again - services, retail items, discount codes, etc. You'll notice then that the Customer Total reflects the Service and Retail totals from this customer as well as the Previous Customer Total shown in yellow. At that point, enter the correct payment and click Continue. You're done with the Family Checkout!



On the bookkeeping end of things, all the customers that did not pay the bill will show up as paying with cash. The customer that paid the bill will show up as getting change in an amount that covers the rest of those sales. This reflects what actually happen - one customer paid over the amount for their bill, received change, and used that change to pay for other customers.

Family Checkout remains a powerful tool to speed up the checkout process for families, wedding parties, or any other type of group. Cloud customers already have the new features from Family Checkout and non-Cloud customers can do a Web Update to get the most recent version of the program. As always, please contact support with any questions.

Loyalty Program

We’ve had a loyalty program in The Spa/Salon Manager for a few years now but I took some time at the end of the year this year to improve it, make it easier to set up, and easier to use. Given these changes I wanted to take a moment to explain how the Loyalty program works.

We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity in mind. You’ll start by going to Maintenance -> Loyalty -> Loyalty Program Settings. On this screen you can choose some basic settings that will govern how your customers accumulate points. We provide separate lines for Service Dollars per Point, Retail Dollars per Point, and Gift Certificate Dollars per Point. If you set those boxes to $20, $10, and $50 respectively then customers would receive one point for every $20 of service sales, $10 of retail sales, and $50 of gift certificate purchases. The system assigns points down to the penny so in our example every $0.20 of service sales would give 0.01 points. In addition to these three settings you can assign bonus amounts to each day of the week for the three numbers. Extending our earlier example we could click the Thu box on the Service Dollars per Point line and put in 10 for the percent bonus. Then instead of getting 1 point for every $20 spent the customer would get 1.1 points on Thursdays – a 10% bonus.

Most salons can ignore the Location line (this only applies to stores that are running centralized gift certificates through us for multiple locations). The last part you need to set up is the method for assigning Loyalty ID’s. If you don’t use the Loyalty program yet we show No Loyalty Program here. Your other two options are to Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In or to Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In. If you have loyalty cards that you’ll be giving to the customers (like our plastic gift cards we offer) then you’ll want to choose the Assign Loyalty ID Manually at Check In option. If you’d like to have the program manage the ID numbers for you then you’ll choose the Automatically Assign Loyalty ID at Check In option.

Once you finish on the Loyalty Settings screen the program will automatically add the Transaction Type and Pay In/Out category of Loyalty for you. If you’re out of space and don’t have Loyalty in the system yet the program will warn you and tell you to contact support for help in adding the category. It’s critical that you get the Loyalty option added – customers will use Loyalty as their payment method when using their accumulated points to pay for part or all of a sale.

Our Loyalty program is an ‘opt-in’ program. This means that until you assign an ID# on the Customer Display/Check In screen the customer does not accumulate points. Once you’ve assigned an ID# customers will start accumulating points and you’ll be able to see their current point balance at the bottom of the Check Out screen near the Continue button. It’s up to each salon to decide when you want to allow customers to use their accumulated points. The program will allow you to use them when you’re entering a payment on the Check Out screen but each salon could train their staff to put in policies such as requiring at least $10 worth of points used, only allowing Loyalty as a payment for retail purchases, or any other restrictions the salon wanted to place on these redemptions.

We’ve designed the Loyalty program with simplicity and flexibility in mind. We hope that these few simple options will allow a variety of discount programs for our salons. If you have any questions with how to make our Loyalty program work for you, don’t hesitate to contact our tech support department.

New Feature - Stored Reports

Did your printer run out of paper? Did you forget to print a report? Or did you just want another copy of a report later but not want to wait for the program to create the report again? Our new Stored Reports feature does all that and more!

Owners can access the Stored Reports button under the Reports section. It’s a new button on the left where we list the different types of reports (Receptionist Reports, Manager Reports, etc). Once you’ve updated your system to a version of the program with Stored Reports we will store any Mailing Reports you pull up from that point forward for quick access later. We automatically keep the last 90 days worth of these Mailing Reports. Better yet, you can select any of those reports and click the Save Report Permanently option to keep it even after the 90 days are up.

In the future, I’ll be adding even more reports to this section as well as looking for ways to have certain reports get stored automatically at night, but for now I hope everyone enjoys this new feature!

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.