Effectively booking, scheduling and following up on your appointments is at the core of a spa or salon business. At a basic level, your spa or salon software should support the following capabilities:

• Pre-book appointments and handle walk-ins
• Determine available times, and staff when a customer calls in to book an appointmen
• Quickly identify qualified staff for a particular service

When evaluating the billing or point of sales capabilities in the software, ensure that the features support:

• Multiple payment methods including cash, credit card, debit cards, and optionally checks
• Process split payments – e.g., deduct party of the payment from a membership and pay the remaining
• using a credit card
• Redeem a service from a gift card

The right marketing programs can be instrumental to bringing customers into your spa regularly. The software you choose should have adequate tools and features that help you design and execute marketing programs, as well as track effectiveness of your efforts

To have the right set of marketing programs targeted to customers, your spa or salon software should allow you to store important information about your customers.

Inventory management is often a challenge for most spas and salons; and it’s just as challenging to apply inventory expenses to wastage and pilferage.

Employees are the face of your business to your customers. Their performance is often tied directly to the success of your business.

• Effectiveness of marketing programs by revenue and customers.
• Average revenue per customer trends.
• Conversion of new walk-in customers into regular customers.
• Reports on trends by gender.
• Evaluate which service categories are improving or decreasing in revenue trends.
• Reports to track employee performance.