Six signs you have outgrown paper
None of these is fatal on its own. Three of them together is a business leaking money it cannot see.
- You cannot answer “how many sessions does she have left” without looking for a card. And when the card is missing, you give her the benefit of the doubt, because arguing with a paying client is worse than losing one session.
- Commission takes days. Somebody adds up a book at month end, arrives at one number, and nobody can check it — including the therapist being paid.
- You do not know who has stopped coming. A client who came every three weeks and has not been in for four months is the cheapest sale available to you, and you will never notice she is gone.
- Two people were booked into the same slot. Once is an accident. Monthly is a system problem.
- Stock disappears and nobody is lying. Back-bar colour and treatment get used without being counted, so the margin goes somewhere you cannot point at.
- You cannot leave. If the shop only works when you are standing in it, you do not have a business, you have a job with overheads.
What the system actually changes
Not “efficiency” in the abstract. Four specific things:
- The balance is never in dispute. Sessions left, credit, amount owing — on the screen in front of whoever is serving, every time.
- The maths is done by the till. Commission comes out of the transactions, so the figure on the payslip and the figure in the system are the same figure.
- The lapsed list exists. You can ask who has not been in for ninety days, and get an answer, and do something about it.
- Somebody else can run the counter. That is the one that lets you open a second outlet, or take a holiday.
Software does not fix a business that is not working. If the problem is that nobody walks past your door, a POS will tell you that faster and more precisely, but it will not send you customers. Fix the demand problem first; the system is for when you have clients and are losing money handling them.
What it should cost
A salon POS in Singapore is commonly sold as a monthly subscription, per outlet and often per user. FingerBooth is bought once instead — $2,500 per branch, or $3,500 with a laptop, receipt printer and cash drawer. Maintenance is about $57 a month per branch from year two, $688 a year, with the first year included. The full breakdown, with a calculator.
If you are going to do it, do it in a quiet week
Not the week before a festive period. Export everything from whatever you use now while you still can, clean the duplicates out of the client list before it goes in, and train on your most awkward transaction rather than the simple one. The buying checklist has the questions worth asking whoever you talk to, including us.
Questions we get asked
Is a POS worth it for a single-chair salon?
Often not, at first. One person with forty regulars can hold the business in their head. It becomes worth it the moment somebody else has to serve your client, or the moment you cannot answer a question about your own business without counting.
What is the difference between a POS and a booking app?
A booking app fills the diary. A POS takes the money, tracks what was sold, holds the package balance, counts the stock and works out the commission. Some products do both. If you only ever needed the diary, you would not need a POS.
We already use a spreadsheet. Is that not enough?
A spreadsheet is a record of what you remembered to type in. It cannot stop a double booking, cannot tell the counter how many sessions are left while the client is standing there, and cannot be two places at once when you open a second outlet.
How long does it take to switch?
With FingerBooth, from install to running is about 30 minutes. Bringing an existing client list across from Excel runs alongside that and usually finishes within days.