When it comes to managing a beauty salon or a spa there are three essential things that the customers seek; quality of service, efficiency of operations and the speed at which the process is run. In today’s world where everyone is hard pressed for time, it has become increasingly important to make each and every process streamlined and efficient. A quick conversation with any salon/spa owner often reveals that one of the biggest challenges they face is progressing their business is to efficiently manage all the administrative work which goes on in the background. So how has the industry worked on overcoming this challenge?

The simple answer to the question is by leveraging technology. Studies have shown that in last two decades increasing number of businesses operating in beauty and wellness industry have turned to adopt technology to run the entire gamut of operations. The cloud-based technology, colloquially known as a POS software has a multitude of features and is designed to intuitively help you streamline the business processes and in turn improve the bottom line and financial metrics. While there are many reasons why you must consider integrating your operation processes into a POS, listed below are the three prime reasons to do so. 

Improved Efficiency & Cost Savings

The single important reason for most businesses to adopt a POS software has been the streamlining of processes by removing the overlap areas and improving staff efficiency. Administrative tasks such as appointment booking, creating schedules, work allocation, generating invoices, keeping a track of inventory are both repetitive and time consuming in nature. A POS software is easily able to accomplish this task accurately, and in a short span of time. As a result, businesses are able to improve staff efficiency and therefore run lean operations. The POS software is designed to intuitively reduce the transaction time. It achieves this by deploying a complete track and trace model for every transaction. To cite an example; as soon as a customer checks-in for an appointment, the system intuitively generates the invoice for the selected services (as per the details mentioned at the time of booking of the appointment). As a result, the maximum work your front desk staff has to do is to check that the invoice is free from errors. Compare this to a traditional method where the front desk staff has to look up the appointment book, prepare an invoice and then collect payment into the cash register. It is a no brainer that the POS software expedites the process. 

Fraud Prevention & Business Insights

The POS system is designed to do a lot of hard work for the owners and the managers. From keeping a track of all sales activity and making relevant entries in the inventory to prevention of cyber attacks and credit card frauds. If your business currently maintains stock register manually then it is invariably prone to both fraud and human error. The impact of such events won’t be visible on a given day, but certainly make a dent over a considerable period of time. The POS software eliminates the possibility of human error by doing real time stock keeping. As soon as the invoice is generated for a product sale, relevant changes done in the stock record to show the real time stock status. 

Moreover, since the POS software is a cloud-based system, your customers personal and financial data is securely stored and accessed by authorized people only. The software no matter, at all times, keep your business data completely secure. 

Real Time Actionable Reports 

A POS software will open a treasure trove of data that your business generates such that you can take informed decisions to improve your business. By maintaining a centralized customer database, which also holds customer’s purchase history, the business can run analytics to ascertain a client’s preference and tweak their upselling game to suggest products and services which match the client’s taste.  Over a period of time when you have considerable data, you can analyse the fast-selling goods, slow selling goods, off-peak business hours and peak business hours and run marketing campaigns accordingly. As the system is capable of generating on-demand reports, it equips the management to ascertain daily revenue generation, capital deployed and the return on the investment. The software also enables the management to keep a check on employee performance and come up with suitable compensation and recognition plans. 

Over the decades the salon / spa POS software market has matured and has multiple such products competing with each other. Whether you’re setting up a new salon or looking at revamping the operations at your existing enterprise, integrating a POS is almost given. Some of the most renowned POS software are Zenoti, Phorest, SalonIris, Schedul and Vagaro. If you’re wondering what should be your evaluation criteria for selecting a POS software, we recommend reading our  post………………… ……………………………………………….