Currently used by thousands of stylists around the world, Salon Life is one of the most convenient salon booking software ever built. In this review, we will take a look at what it is, its features, pricing, platforms, security, and much more.
What is Salon Life?
Salon Life, as the name suggests, is a salon-focused scheduling & booking app. It comes with an in-built salon calendar which allows users to easily keep track of their salon businesses, no matter the size. Some of its functionalities include online booking salon management and setting employee schedules & preferences, as well as permissions & appointment lead times.
Special Features
Here is a complete discussion of Salon Life’s special features:
- Staff Management
The salon calendar allows you to create multiple profiles for all your employees based on their expertise or any other criteria. You can plan or preview a stylist’s entire week’s schedule with a single click on their profile.
- Copy and Paste for Bookings & schedules
The concept of copy and paste bookings is designed to make the process of booking repeat clients quicker and easier than it already is with this salon booking system. If you want to copy the details of a client booking, just right click on the previous booking event, hit copy, click on an applicable slot on your calendar, and select “paste booking”. As easy as that is, you instantly copy the client’s details, discounts, services, price list, and duration. It is also a fantastic option if, for instance, you need to book a given number of time slots in the case of online booking salon package-based sales.
There is also a copy and paste function for employee schedules. It works the same way.
- Reports
The reports feature gives you a real-time update of what is happening at the salon. This simplifies book-keeping meaning that you no longer have to use excel sheets.
- Full Customization to suit your salon needs
You can edit all the headlines, descriptions, and other texts on your online booking salon page. This means that you can amend the salon calendar to any imaginable language and use it anywhere around the globe.
- Import & Export via CSV
This feature makes transferring data from excel or from wherever much quicker compared to entering it manually.
- Multiple salon locations
If you wish, you can open several salon locations around the globe and operate them from one platform.
- Seamless Integration with other business tools
Salon Life integrates with Facebook, Instagram, & your website.
- Client Booking Notes
If you have too many clients to handle, you are likely to forget some specifications by certain customers such as the type of products used during the last session. With client booking notes, this should never happen. It enables you to write everything that you consider crucial to your clients and save them alongside their bookings.
The notes tab can be accessed by clicking on any reservation on your salon booking system.
- Notifications
You can send both Email and SMS booking confirmations, reminders, & thank you notes to your clients. For SMS, Salon Life uses Twilio which is one of the globe’s most trusted text message services. They use Mandrill for the emails, a service that brags sending out over 30 billion emails monthly and over 10 million active users.
- Mark booking statuses instantly
Salon Life comes with 4 different booking statuses which are Upcoming, Canceled, Completed, and No-show. Upcoming is the status after a future booking is made. If a reservation is fulfilled successfully, the upcoming booking automatically changes the status to “completed”. When a customer cancels a booking for any reason, the booking remains in the system with the label “canceled”. If a customer doesn’t show up, you can change the status to “no-show”. You can modify the status of any booking by right-clicking on it and selecting “mark as”.
All these status can also be viewed from a client’s history. This ensures that you do not make a double-booking for one client. The salon booking software marks a client with many “no-shows” with the color red.
- On Hold
If a customer wants to cancel a booking and schedule it for later, you can place it on hold.
- Easy Navigation with Calendar Hot Keys
To make navigation around the salon calendar easier, the developers of Salon Life have integrated a collection of handy keyboard hot-keys/shortcuts. Some of the easy hot-keys you can use include “C” for opening a specific date on the top-right menu, “H” for opening the “on hold” function, “T” for today, “U” for the user window and so much more.
- Booking filters
Booking filters enable you to view bookings by staff, services, category, or status.
Pricing
- Salon Life features three plans as illustrated below:
| Free plan | Smart Salon | Expert Salon |
| It includes: | It includes everything in the free plan, plus: | Includes everything in the previous plans, plus: |
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Platforms
Salon-life is laid out on a web platform which is fully optimized for seamless launch and performance across all desktop & mobile devices. The platform does not require any app downloads.
Security
Of course, you do not want to lose your salon information to hackers or competitors. For this purpose, Salon Life uses a combination of the latest SSL encryption technologies & authentication passwords. Salon owners can, therefore, rest assured that their saloon data is not accessible by any third parties.
Customer Support
There is a live-chat button accessible from any page on the platform. Reply typically takes a maximum of 5 minutes. You can also try to look for troubleshooting articles on the same button as you wait for a response.
Pros
- Easy Navigation, especially when you master the calendar hotkeys.
- Affordable plans
- Unlimited number of locations and users
- Reliable customer support
Cons
- Text message credit is sold separately. Each SMS costs €0.09
- The platform doesn’t come with mobile apps. The web platform is, however, fully optimized for mobile device browsers.
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