Feature requests for Square Appointments for salons

NBHD_Owner · ‎08-03-2017

We are moving from dedicated salon solfware to Square and I wanted to recommend some changes that would greatly improve the software from our perspective. I beleive the service will really improve the way we manager the business and I look forward to not having to decipher tiny notes on a calender to do payroll but there are some things we will be losing as well

Multi Appointment Checkout - If we have a family of 3 come in our current options are to group all 3 in a ticket and cash them out, which impacts our sales reporting or have them charge their card 3 times. We should be able to combine into a single ticket but it should show up as 3 seperate sales.
Shading of cashed out tickets - Currently when you cashout an appointment the appointment remains visable with no indication of if it was already cashed out. If the appointment could fade out a little after it is cashed out it would make it easier to track the status of the appointments
Modifying closed tickets - After a transaction is final there is no way to modify the customer, employee, or services. In a busy salon its common to enter your own pin when rinning out someone elses ticket and that impacts our sales reporting. Also being able to update the customer or the services after the ticket is closed is useful to ensure accurate reporting.
Customize Staff Availability - This needs to be available in the IPAD app so the staff can manager their own time without either the owner needing to take requests and enter them in the website ot giving the staff access to the website.
Android App - I have see this on the community as being on the roadmap, the staff LOVES the ability to book their appointments on the go but the ones with Android have a slightly less rewarding experience. They can use the website on their phone but the native app would be better.
Additional Views for Appointment Screen - We currently have 7 employees and it gets crowded on the screen and the combined view is no better. There also does not appear to be a way to define the order of the staff and it changes ramdomly as you change views or add and remove people from view.
Categories for Service - We do very little retail sales so being able to categorize our services would lead to far better sales reporting.
Reminders - We currently do not use the txt reminders and it would be nice to be able to set a default for this instead of having to select no notification everytime we create a new appointment or change an appointment.

Chad · ‎08-06-2017

Hello @NBHD_Owner, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to provide thoughtful and constructive feedback for Square Appointments. I've moved your post to the feature section of the Seller Community. I've also flagged it to our product team to take a look at.

Please let me know if you have any other feedback. I would love to hear it. 😀

Devon · ‎08-07-2017

Hey there @NBHD_Owner! This is a GREAT list of suggestions. I'm a product manager on the team, and feedback like this is what keeps us moving in the right direction, so thank you for writing it up. I can't speak to any timelines for any projects, but here's a blow-by-blow of what you mentioned :

Shading / differentiating checked out appointments on the calendar -- this is something we're actively working on.

For Group booking / checkout multiple clients, customize staff availability in the app, an android app, and service categories- I've heard these from a lot of sellers, and they're definitely on our radar.

Modifying closed appointments, better calendar views for multiple staff members, and the ability to turn off text message notifications completely-- these are requests I haven't heard much, and I'd love to learn more about your usecase. Here are some specific questions; any amount of information is helpful!

Modifying closed appointments -- What do you typically need to modify? Could you provide some examples? In the example you mentioned: if we forget about passcodes for a bit, is it just that that the staff who receives 'credit' for the sale in your reporting should always be whoever was assigned to the appointment? I know that's not how it works today, but would that work for your business?

Calendar views for multiple staff members -- What device are you looking at your calendar from? Is it a big screen monitor or an iPad screen or something else? Are you typically looking at a day or a week at a time? What information is most important to see from the calendar without having to tap / click into the appointment?

Turning off text messages -- I've got a pretty simple question: why don't you like text message notifications? Do you have text message reminders turned on ( the ones that get sent automatically some time before the appointment )?

Thank you again for your feedback, and in advance for your answers 🙂

NBHD_Owner · ‎08-09-2017

Hello,

Thank you so much for your responce. Great to hear some of these items are being activly developed. Below are more details on the items you have not heard as much about.

Modifying closed appointments -- Bringing over the team member that was assigned the appointment would solve most of the issue here. Also assuming we could customize the sales reporting to utilize that field vs having to hack something together by downloading transactions.

The other main usecase is around tips. When a staff member is either stiffed or given a 2 dollar tip after working with a client for 2 hours we allow them to discount the services to incease their tip. So if the bill was $150, they may go in after ringing out the customer and drop the price of a foil from 110 to 90. So there is no differnce in the total for the customers but you are helping out the staff member. However you dont want to do it before the customer signs out because it would likely offend them.

Calendar views for multiple staff members -- We have been using the iPad version of the app. And the biggest issue is when you are double+ booked. Most of the color services need time to sit, and often we schedule appointments on top of each other, so while one customer is sitting reading with color applied the team member is cutting another clients hair. We can have up to 3 overlapping appointments at a time and in the app you really just end up with small colored squares. Our old software had a list view of the scheduled tickets (appointments) and you could sort it by start time, customer, team member, service, etc. So if a customer Jill had a color (40 Minutes), a haircut (20 Mintutes), and a foil (60 Minutes), we would see 3 records in the list with the starting times of 12:00 PM, 12:40 PM, and 1:00 PM with Team Member Jane, the second client Joe may have a haircut (20 Minutes) scheuled with Jane at 12:15 PM. So now the list shows Jill at 12:00 PM Color, Joe at 12:15 PM Haircut, Jill at 12:40 PM Haircut, and Jill at 1:00 PM Foil. This in conjunction with the fading/hidden cashed out tickets/appointments is a much more efficient way to manager our time.

Turning off text messages -- I seem to be getting overruled on this from the staff and I did see that you can turn them off within a single customers profile so that would be sufficient for any customers that do not want them. Mostly its when I was setting up our appointments the first time, I didnt want to send out hundreds of text messages. Its less of an issue day to day, though I do think having a global option is a good idea, It would be nice to be able to have our number show up instead of a number of CA

Overall though, its a great tool and I look forward to any and all additional features!

Thank you,
Mike

Helen · ‎12-08-2018

Feature requests for Square Appointments for salons

Feature requests for Square Appointments for salons

Re: Salon - Change Requests