EMV Chip Card Update

As I mentioned in a blog post last fall we had gotten our program ready to support the EMV chip credit card readers. We've been steering our customers away from them since the beginning since it was clear to us the industry wasn't ready when they tried to roll these out - it seems now that the industry has come to the same realization. The rest of this blog post is an update we just received from our partner that provides our credit card integration, OpenEdge.

New Post from OpenEdge

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EMV Update

We value our partnership with you and strive to keep you informed related to significant updates across the payments landscape. You may have seen recent stories in the news regarding EMV chargeback policy changes. We’re contacting you to provide an update on how these changes affect you and your merchant customers, and what merchants can expect if they have not already upgraded their systems for chip card acceptance.

What’s the Latest on EMV?
The U.S. continues to see a slow rollout and implementation of EMV. We are now well beyond the start date of October 2015, and most merchants at this point realize there was no need to panic. In fact, only 17% of small to medium businesses using an integrated POS have upgraded to EMV.
The card brands have also taken a step back to evaluate the EMV rollout with both Visa and American Express recently modifying their chargeback policies for merchants who are not yet ready to accept chip cards. Those changes include a decision to block all US counterfeit fraud chargebacks under $25, effective July 22, 2016. According to their own research in the U.S., American Express discovered that 40% of counterfeit fraud chargebacks occur on transactions that are below the $25 threshold.

In addition, beginning October 2016, VISA and American Express issuers will be limited to charging back 10 fraudulent counterfeit transactions per merchant account, and will assume liability for all fraudulent transactions after the limit has been reached on an account. Both of these changes will remain in effect until April 2018. These changes to the EMV chargeback policies are designed to give merchants more time to upgrade their systems for chip cards while limiting merchant fraud losses.
Specific to the verticals that OpenEdge serves, we see low to moderate chargeback risk, with extremely low numbers of chargebacks reported. In fact, over the entire OpenEdge portfolio, only 0.005% of sales volume has been reported as EMV chargebacks.

What Does This Mean to Merchants?

This is good news for your customers. These changes give merchants more time to update their systems for EMV while reducing excessive chargebacks. Please note that there is no action required by your customers related to the updated EMV chargeback policies from Visa and American Express. The changes will be implemented automatically – no intervention is required.

Beyond the new chargeback policies, several of the card brands are also working on resolving another merchant EMV concern – the time it takes to approve a chip transaction. Visa and American Express are both working on technology to speed up transaction times. Visa has introduced Quick Chip for EMV which allows consumers to remove their card from payment terminals before the transaction amount is finalized or before the authorization response has been received.  American Express recently announced the launch of Quick Chip, a service designed to provide a quicker route to process chip card transactions.

Additionally, OpenEdge will continue to leverage our card network partnerships to provide technology that improves the performance and overall customer experience of EMV processing.
We look forward to continuing to serve you and your customers with secure integrated payment solutions.

Please contact us if you have any questions regarding the recent EMV chargeback policies or other topics impacting payment processing.

For more information: https://openedgepayments.com/emv/update.html

Credit Card Updates and EMV

I'm sure the calls have started coming for many of you...salespeople claiming that your credit cards will stop processing soon or that you'll be facing liability on all transactions if you don't switch to their company's card processing. Unfortunately, the upcoming changes to credit card regulations have left the door open to people trying to exploit the uncertainty to make money. Hopefully this post will both set your mind at ease and give you a look at some of the new features that we've made available in our OpenEdge/Accelerated Payments (X-Charge) integration to get businesses ready for EMV and streamline your credit card processing.

To start, as OpenEdge explains in their EMV FAQ, " EMV is a chip technology used globally in place of magnetic stripe. EMV chip technology helps to reduce card fraud in a face-to-face card-present environment, provides global interoperability and enables safer and smarter transactions across contact and contactless channels." Basically, EMV allows more secure credit card transactions that require a card present that's nearly impossible to fake and therefore greatly reduces fraud.

To process EMV transactions you need to have a new EMV-capable credit card swiper. As OpenEdge mentions in the FAQ the liability shift for merchants begins in October 2015. However, this simply means that if a customer presents a credit card that has an EMV chip in it and you choose to swipe it instead of using the new EMV method of processing that any chargebacks would automatically be the business's responsibility instead of the credit card processor. That said, it's exceedingly difficult for a salon or spa to win a chargeback on a regular credit card transaction so the added costs of this liability may be very little compared to the current system. In addition, OpenEdge points out, "Currently, the card networks will be charging the same interchange rates for EMV and non-EMV transactions. OpenEdge has no control over network interchange rates or knowledge of changes in the future."

As it stands now you have a chance of additional liability on chargebacks in a situation where you would have won a dispute if you'd had an EMV reader and no extra charge per transaction whether you process with EMV or not. We leave the decision up to our customer's as to whether they want to use EMV terminals or not but each business should definitely discuss the costs of upgrading to EMV devices with OpenEdge and balance that cost again their comfort level with the added liability. You can read more about OpenEdge's handling of EMV at their EMV web site - don't hesitate to call us with any questions at 937-832-3969 with any questions.

In order to prepare our software for these changes we've made many changes under the hood with our credit card processing and a few changes that you'll notice with the flow of credit card transactions. Our first change - and one of the more important - occurred in our Maintenance area under Computer Info. We've removed the 'Path to Credit Card Software' box and replaced it with a much easier to use 'Credit Card Setup' button. This button will guide you through the setup of your credit card processing on that computer. Very important to note - especially for future versions of X-Charge that will mandate that you change passwords in X-Charge every 90 days - is the ability to set the UserName and Password for X-Charge within this section. This will be required once you've updated to make the X-Charge integration work correctly so everyone will need to set this up even if they're already processing with X-Charge through the program. In addition, the system will ask for your Processing Account (or MID). This is the name that you'll see in X-Charge when you go to Transaction and choose Processing Account. For most businesses already using X-Charge the system will automatically fill this in for you but for new customers or customers with multiple processing accounts for their independent contractors you'll need to get this information from X-Charge. We've tailored the questions in this section to your setup so as long as you have the MID, UserName, and Password for X-Charge the setup in this section should be quick and easy but as always, please contact support with any questions.

The next most noticeable change will be with the flow of processing a sale. In the past, when Spa/Salon Manager processed a credit card sale there was no interaction with X-Charge until you'd swiped the customer's card, printed their authorization receipt, had them sign it and write in their tip amount, entered the tip amount in our program, and clicked Continue. Due to the new PCI and EMV requirements we've moved away from this process. Now, as soon as you've clicked continue on the Check Out screen and the Credit Card form pops up you'll notice X-Charge process the transaction. If you have an EMV device, Pin Pad device, Signature Capture device, or any of the other devices X-Charge offers that interact with customers these devices will then take over the sale and collect their information. If it's just a standard credit card swipe sale X-Charge will prompt you on the screen to swipe the card. This represents a change to the current system but ensures that whatever device you're using X-Charge will be able to take care of the card for you. Once you pass this step you can print your authorization receipt. That receipt will now have added information from the original sale including authorization codes, EMV information, and all other pertinent information to the transaction. Finally, you can add your tip before hitting Continue, when the program will adjust the sale to include the tip.

We're very excited about these changes - they're cleaner and they insure that even if the final processing hits a snag you still get paid for the sale itself as opposed to before where if you handed the card back to the customer before the transaction was complete you ran the chance of having them walk out without paying, and they ensure that whatever changes come in the future with the devices X-Charge offers we'll be able to support them. The last change directly relates to EMV transactions. We'd hoped to offer EMV transactions without changing any functionality in the program but unfortunately the regulations on EMV with OpenEdge's processors does require a couple changes. Specifically, those processors do not allow EMV transactions to be adjusted which has a couple effects on our software. First, for any customers that choose to use EMV devices their sales will no longer run as a Purchase and then Adjustment. Instead they would run as what's called a Pre-Auth and then a Force. This means that one benefit we got from the new updates - the fact that if there's a problem with the final processing of the card you're still guaranteed to receive payment for the non-tip portion of the sales - goes away for customers using EMV. The second and larger issue is that since we're prevented from adjusting EMV transactions you would no longer be able to change the amount on a credit card payment through Correction. The only method for changing a payment on a credit card transaction for businesses using EMV terminals would be to Void the transaction, contact the customer for the card information, and then re-run the sale. Please keep these limitations in mind when weighing the pro's and con's of utilizing an EMV device.

Some of our Cloud customers are already running the new version of the credit card processing and we should have all Cloud customers on the new version by October. For our customers using the installed version that would like to prepare their software for EMV, please contact technical support to plan your upgrade.

Fixing App Access on a new iPhone

With many of our customers upgrading to the new iPhone 6 I felt it was important to provide some information on how to upgrade our App on your phone in case it doesn’t automatically work. I’ve included a guide below to help fix the Notification settings for our app on the iPhone and get back into your App. As always, don’t hesitate to contact support with any questions.

New Feature - Membership

In the past, businesses that wanted to charge an ongoing membership fee within Spa/Salon Manager needed to track those payments separately. With our release of the new Membership feature that’s all changed! Not only that, but we've rolled together several existing features in the software to make a very powerful Membership program allowing each business to create a customized Membership program that includes automated billing, discounts, and reports to track your valuable membership customers.

In order to use our new Membership feature you’ll first need to make sure you’re using our Integrated Credit Card Processing. By using X-Charge to process your credit cards within the system you can ‘vault’ your customer’s credit card information. This safely stores the information necessary to charge your customer’s card in the future without actually storing their card information on your computer. That way you get the best of both worlds – the flexibility to charge your customer’s recurring payments without the hassle and liability of storing their actual card information.

Once you have the Integrated Credit Card Processing in place you can move on to the simple setup of the Membership program. Before actually going to the Membership Settings though you’ll want to make a quick stop under Maintenance -> Loyalty -> Categorize Customers if you plan to have a special Customer Type in the program for your Membership customers. Setting a specific Customer Type for your Membership customers has many advantages – setting a service or retail discount for all sales right there on the Categorize Customers screen, marketing directly to those customers with our Mailing Reports and Email features, to even creating customized Discount Codes that can only be used by your Membership customers, creating a new Customer Type for your members makes your Membership program work for you.

Once you’re ready, go to Maintenance -> Loyalty -> Membership Settings and fill out the following information there…

• Use Membership Settings: Checking this box turns on the Membership program and makes the rest of the options visible.
• Default Payment Frequency: While each customer gives you the option to select how often their payment is due for many companies you’ll only have a single Membership program in place. In those cases this setting and the rest of the default settings saves time for each new membership customer.
• Default Payment Amount: The amount (without tax) that you’ll charge for your primary membership program.
• Default Customer Type: The membership program does far more than just charge the customer’s card each month! By selecting a customer type you can use the existing Discount Code and Customer Type features to create discounts targeted to just your membership customers.
• Default Transaction Type: This ensures that you have a valid payment type to accept credit card payments in the system. Simply select the desired payment type from the list of valid types. If you have not yet set up a valid credit card payment you can do so under Maintenance -> Transaction.
• Default Days for Expiration: Leave this set to 0 days for Membership programs that stay in place until the customer cancels them. If you’d like to have a Membership program with a set ending date you can fill in the number of days in this box to set the expiration. For example, if you fill in 365 in this box and then create a new Membership on 6/16/2014 the expiration date would come up as 6/16/2015.
• Requires Service Tax/Retail Tax: Depending on your state laws Membership fees may be taxed as either services, retail, or both. Check the proper boxes for any taxes you’re required to collect.

There’s one more important piece of information to fill in before you start selling memberships to your customers. Since all of the bills after the initial payment will be charged automatically at night, you’ll want to have someone authorized to receive email feedback letting them know when the system declines a customer’s credit card, when their membership expires, and any other important information that happens while those cards automatically process. You can set this up under Maintenance -> Management Alerts. There are three types of alerts in the Membership Program section:

• Membership Billing Declined Transactions: All of the employees you select under this option will get an email any time a customer’s card can’t be processed or their membership has expired.
• Membership Billing Errors: This is a catch-all for anything that might go wrong during billing. For example, if the computer running the billing does not have credit card processing set up the employees selected in this option would receive a notification email.
• Membership Billing Feedback: This sends a single email to each authorized employee once the billing finishes each night and lets them know how many customers the system attempted to process.

With those settings in place you’re ready to start using the Membership feature. Accessing the Membership feature is simple. We've added a new button to the Customer Display screen called Membership. Most of the boxes on that screen are the same ones we set the defaults for earlier in Membership Settings. That’s great news for your front desk staff since they won’t have to ever change any of those settings if you only have a single membership program! The screen will show a Start Date which will show today’s date for new customers or the date the customer entered the program for existing Membership customers. It will show a Next Billing Date which shows the next date after today’s initial payment a new customer would be billed or shows the next date that the system plans on billing existing customers. Existing Membership customers will also have a Last Date Billed which will show the last time the system successfully charged their card. Finally, the expiration date will show if you entered a default other than 0 days and the Service or Retail Tax will show along with a Total Payment for businesses that have to pay those taxes on Memberships. Also on this screen is the last 4 digits of the credit card on file as well as its expiration date. Don’t panic if you haven’t put one in yet – you’ll get the opportunity to do so when you click Continue to save all your settings. Simply fill in all of the information on the screen with the correct information for the Membership program the customer would like and you’re ready to move on to the next step. You can also Cancel a membership right from this screen with the click of one button and print out Membership Summaries for your customers that will let them see their Membership settings and billing history, either with a printed copy or an email sent directly from the program.

After hitting Continue the system will ask you to vault a credit card if the customer did not already have a card vaulted. Simply swipe the card or key in the information and click Ok to keep going. Next the program will ask you whether to use the stored credit card for this transaction. Click Yes and you’ll come to your familiar Credit Card Processing screen. The Card Number and Expiration Date will already be filled in – no need to swipe the card again. You can click Authorization Receipt to print a copy of the receipt that includes a Membership Agreement for the customer to sign. Finally, when you click Continue on the Credit Card Processing screen you’ll get a receipt for the customer that also includes their Membership Agreement.

Once a customer has signed up for a Membership their card will automatically get charged as each new payment date comes up. The Management Alerts you set up earlier will let your managers know if someone’s card couldn't be charged or if their membership has expired so that you can quickly handle any problems with billing. Changing a credit card on file is as simple as clicking on the credit card information on that customer’s Membership Screen, so even when a credit card expires it’s a quick fix to get the customer set back up for recurring billing.

To pull all the new information together we've added two new reports to Reports -> Owner Reports -> Date Range Reports. The Membership Transaction Log gives a listing of all billing activity during the dates that you enter. The Membership Billing List gives you a list of customers, broken down by whether they’re Active (still getting billed regularly) or Inactive (not getting billed anymore due to a failed payment or expiring membership) and sorted by their Next Billing Date. This report gives you a glimpse of how much money you’ll likely bring in from your Memberships over any time frame as well as how much money you stand to lose if you don’t convert your Inactive memberships back to Active status. The Membership Transaction Log will be especially important in reconciling your Spa/Salon sales to the X-Charge information because Membership transactions are a special type of sale that will not show on the Detailed Daily Sheet. The Transaction Log for the current day can also be viewed directly in the program through Correction -> Membership Transactions to allow quick access to customers who had cards processed that day. The Membership Billing List can also be viewed through the Memberships button at the top of the screen and will allow you to see all memberships that have their next billing dates between certain dates, that are part of certain customer types, or that are Active/Inactive.

One last thought on the Membership program – while we've created a powerful system that uses the various tools in the Spa/Salon Manager to create compelling Membership programs for your customers, at its heart the Membership program is a recurring billing system. This system has applications beyond our Membership system. For example, booth rental salons that charge their employees a rental fee could use the Membership program to set up those booth rental charges. Schools could set up the system to charge tuition. Fitness clubs could use the system to charge a monthly fee just to be a customer. Basically, the Membership program is powerful but it’s also flexible enough to meet any recurring billing needs.

As we’ve alluded to throughout this article, the power of the Membership program comes from using the existing features of the program like Customer Types, Discount Codes, Mailing Reports, and Email to extend what Membership means to your customers. As always, please contact Technical Support with any questions. We’d be happy to help you find ways to use The Spa/Salon Manager to meet your Membership Program needs!

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.