. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Beauty - SalonManagement Software
If you are already familiar with Salon Management Software systems, you may be aware that most can do much more than simply book in appointments.
In fact many of them can help you to ‘manage’ your business effectively and efficiently from organising staff rotas to controlling your stock levels, but it would be interesting to see just how many of you actually put these tools into action.
The foundation of any good business plan is to ask the question; ‘where are we now?’ Here, we’re not necessarily talking about physical location but more a case of assessing how successful your business has been so far and to look for areas that might be improved in the future to ensure continued success and growth.
Measuring success
For those of you who formed a business plan for 2012, it should be fairly easy to measure the level of your success against the aspirations you wrote down at the start of last year – were you looking to improve your retail sales, for example, or perhaps you wanted to demonstrate a commitment to further improving your staff’s education through advanced training.
Although you may have a rough idea of whether you achieved these goals by the end of the year, wouldn’t it be great if you could pull up this information in a report with just a click of the mouse, or these days a simple swipe of the screen.
To me, this is the real beauty of Salon Management Software; after all if you’ve gone to the effort of purchasing a Salon Management System for your business, you need to make sure it works hard for your money.
What to look for
Knowing what you want to get out of a Salon Management System is vital to finding the right fit – you wouldn’t just hand over the running of your business to a complete stranger, so it’s important to outline
exactly what features you couldn’t live without now, and also consider what kind of things you might be interested in doing in the future.
Obviously, I’m guessing the main priority for most of you would be the appointment booking system, but have you thought about other features such as client management, staff rostering / performance levels, marketing / promotional functions and stock control / analysis.
“Even though only 10% of the average salon's turnover comes from retail, salon owners spend a lot more than 10% of their time managing all the stock and inventory in their business,” says Ronan Perceval, CEO of Phorest.
“The reason is because they only have maybe 100 services or treatments but often more than 2,000 products which need to be tracked. For this reason salon software needs to minimise the time spent managing stock so they can concentrate on the aspects of their business that really are their priority.”
Don’t forget to apply ‘Spring cleaning’ to your employees as well. Goal tracking should allow you to set reasonable goals for your employees that will not just tell you who is producing and who isn’t (anybody running a business should be able to see that), but also whether or not your employee expectations are realistic. Maybe too low? Maybe too high?
Future-proof your
business It is impossible to predict exactly what might happen in the future, but when it comes to your business it is possible to make educated guesses, or to use the formal terminology, ‘forecast’ potential trends or ideas that you might want to develop further down the line.
For this reason it’s essential that you future-proof your business, and your choice of Salon Management Software can help you do this – from ensuring that your website or online booking facilities can be accessed via smartphones through to moving your entire salon management system into a ‘cloud’.
“In 2013 for the first time, more people will have smartphones and tablets than desktop computers. Salons need to be where their clients are if they want to grow their business,” explains Ronan.
The premise behind cloud-based software systems is that instead of the Salon Management Software being installed on a PC or laptop, all the information is stored in an internet ‘cloud’. This makes it ideal for mobile therapists looking to access all their information from their phone or tablet whilst on the move, or smaller salons who may not have the capital, or space, to install a pc-based system.
But cloud-based systems aren’t just designed for smaller operations; in fact the functionality behind cloud- based systems means they are suitable for larger salons or Spas also.
For those of you who may be concerned about storing all your clients’ data in a cloud-based system, there’s no need to be, as Ronan explains: “All the client records are stored securely in the cloud - using Amazon's server infrastructure. This means there is a constant triple back-up of each client record.
The great thing about this from a salon's point of view is that they don't need to back-up their database each night anymore The number of times salons forget to do this even when the software asks them is scary! We have seen lots of salons lose all their data over the years to this - so the cloud system means this will never happen again to them.”
Turn the page to see a round-up of some of the latest Salon Management Software solutions available...
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