We’ve known it for years, but it’s nice to see it in print. Turn to page 23 and you’ll see we’re number one for salon software and on the next page, we’re number one for spa software too.

Obviously, we’re pretty chuffed, and it’s nice to see all the hard work we’ve put in to web booking and our new 7.6 update being appreciated.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

Premier Software have always had lofty ambitions of creating stellar software, but now they’re really reaching for the stars – by being the official software of the first Lunar based Spa.

Due to the early stages of negotiations, and as we are under strict non-disclosure agreements to ensure that details of the space age enterprise are not leaked, we can say that the the business will be run by a large-scale company who’s owners surname sounds similar to a well known pickle manufacturer.

The new spa will be offering a number of authentic moon-based treatments, including Zero Gravity Anti-wrinkle treatments and Weightless Massages, where clients will gently float in open space as part of the holistic experience.

Situated in the Sea of Tranquility, the new spa facilities include relaxation pods, allowing clients to extend their stay while enjoying all the benefits of a the pure, filtered oxygen environment.

Picture courtesy of NASA

Premier Software are currently testing their software with the space-age broadband, which is supplied via a new, experimental Laser Communications Relay system.  Once testing is complete, our intrepid Installations and Training staff will be undergoing full astronautical training with NASA before making their journey (unfortunately, they have been informed that they will not be able to claim travel expenses for this particular mission).

In celebration of the news, Premier Software will be rebranding their Premier Spa salon management software as ‘Premier Spa-ce’, to reflect the exciting new opportunity.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking a lot about how we’re listening to our clients, and why this is important to us.  As part of this ongoing plan, we sent out a questionnaire to our clients asking what they wanted to see in the next version of Premier Spa and Premier Style.

We’re pleased to announce that Premier Spa and Premier Style 7.6 has now been released, including a new look and some new features, all of which have come from your ideas.  Take a look below at the main features, or view the PDFs below to see the new features we’ve added!

UpdateDocumentSpaV7 6 4

UpdateDocumentStyleV7 6 4

Make sure you click ‘read more’!

As always, updates are part of your ongoing support contract – see the end of this post to see how you can get hold of the latest update to your software.

We’ve updated the look of Premier Spa and Premier Style to give a more modern, more fluid design over the original screen layout.

New look screen - click for full size

Custom Logo

For any business, consistant branding is an important part of the overall impression of a company.  To ensure that you can modify your system how you want it, we’ve created a custom logo feature.

Theme Support

Want to be able to change your software to suit your salon – or maybe even just your mood?  The latest update to Premier Spa and Premier Style enables themed support, so now you can change the look of your system simply by switching options.

Category Highlight

Categories can now be used as an additional way of seeing what’s happening in your business at a glance, simply by checking the diary view.

You can customise the category highlight colours within the software to your liking, changing them at any time via the software configuration

If we get a closer look at the appointments, you can see that there’s now an indicator strip on the left to show the status (arrived, departed or completed), and the appointment colour reflects the appointments category.

Diary Quick Jump

Repeat business is important, and we understand that in a lot of cases you need to quickly be able to book a clients next appointment in 4, 6, 8 weeks (or whatever they need) without having to work it out.

That’s why we’ve introduced the ‘quick jump’ feature.  Click the number of weeks ahead you want to move in the future, and the diary view will automatically work out the date.

Other Items we’ve ran out of room for…

The list of features in the update is exhaustive, so rather than overload you with them all, here’s a quick overview (you can read more about them in the PDF – Style|Spa):

• Diary Closure, allowing you to automatically mark all staff / rooms as being unavailable for specific dates, like Bank Holidays.
• Moving arrived appointments, enabling you greater flexibility within your diary.
• Viewing extra detail on past / departed appointments, so you can now see the original appointment notes from ‘old’ appointments.
• New diary view symbols, so you can see more appointment information without clicking on anything.
• Staff Appointment Schedule printed to your receipt printer.
• Do Not SMS flag to help you manage your clients privacy options.

How Do I Get It?

Software updates are provided as part of your ongoing support contract, so if you have a contract in place you can download the update now from the support area (you’ll need your serial number, which you can find by clicking ‘help’ and ‘about’ in your software, and your company postcode).

If you don’t have a contract with us and you’d like to get your software up to date, give our sales team a call to discuss renewing your contract on 01543 466580.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

If you’ve logged a call with our helpdesk in the last few weeks, you may have found an email arriving from us shortly afterwards, asking for your feedback on our performance.  Because we know you’re already busy, we’ve kept the process simple, with a handful of options that just require a single click:

Of course, we’re always aiming to get that gold star – but we really want you to be honest.  If we’re not doing something right, or you’re not happy with the service you got, then let us know and we’ll try our best to rectify whatever the problem is.

Of course, there’s no real point in doing this unless we’re open and honest with the results, so we will be sharing the results sporadically via our blog, here.

Our last survey was sent to 152 clients and, of the responses we received, we’re happy to say that every client marked the option for ‘superb’ or ‘good’.

Is there anything else you’d like to see our support team to do improve service? Please let us know in the comments below.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

Premier Software, leading supplier of software to the salon and spa industry, have officially launched their free, cloud-based scheduling system for salons and spa this weekend.

Salonlite has been developed with smaller businesses in mind, who might not need the full functionality of the established desktop-based products such as Premier Spa and Premier Style, and need a fast solution to help establish and grow their business.

Taking the current trend for mobile and tablet portability as it’s lead, Salonlite creates a truly revolutionary scheduling experience by allowing access almost anywhere an internet connection is available.

Premier Software have been creating software for spas and salons of all sizes since 1994, and have drawn on that wealth of experience to create Salonlite, an online scheduling system, which is accessible almost anywhere you have an internet connection.

You can see a full list of the many features of Salonlite on the features page here.

Want to be one of the first to use Salonlite?  You can sign up via the registration page at www.salonlite.com.

Have you signed up for Salonlite? Have you used it yet? We’d love to hear your comments.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

Mail..chimp?

No, we don’t know why they’re quite so infatuated by our simian friends, but what they are good at is providing a mail service, which lets you track what’s happening with your email marketing.

At this point we should state that we have absolutely no affiliation with Mailchimp – we just wanted to show you another way of getting your message out there.

Step 1 – Getting your Data out of Premier Spa / Premier Style / Premier Spa+

The first thing we need to do is get hold of the list of clients we want to send out our email to.

Fortunately, this is an easy task to accomplish in your Premier software – just go into the Manager, select ‘Marketing’ and add your criteria.

For our example, we’re going to market to men in the closest two postcode areas – the people most likely to have entirely forgotten about Valentines day, who’ll be desperately clamouring for the perfect gift.. which they’re going to find in their email box shortly, thanks to our client records.

Clicking onto ‘Generate Data’ will set the process in motion, and tell you how many clients match your criteria.  At this stage, we just need to get our list in a format Mailchimp will be able to understand – luckily, we have an option for an industry-standard format sitting there on the right, so let’s click ‘CSV Output’.

You’ll get a big long list of fields to include in the CSV file at this stage; we don’t really need all of those, so at this point we can uncheck everything other than first name, surname, title and email (the easiest way of doing this is to click ‘unselect all’, then just mark the fields we want to keep).

Finally, you’ll get a prompt to tell you that your CSV file has been successfully created.

Step 2 – Preparing our Data

The data we’ve created is now sitting in a CSV file, ready to be imported – but due to the rules of Mailchimp, we need to make a slight adjustment to the layout, moving ‘email’ to be the first column.

Assuming that you have access to Microsoft Excel on your computer, you can easily edit the file by going to:

c:\chase\temp

…and double clicking onto the ‘mailmerge.csv’ file there.

You’ll see something like this:

Which we need to turn into something like this:

To move the column, just click onto the heading (in our example, the column named ‘d’) to highlight the entire column, right click over the column name, and select ‘cut’.  This will leave a broken line highlighting the column.

Right click over the first column, and select ‘insert’ (don’t use paste, or you’ll overwrite the clients names).

That’s all we need to do with our data, so select ‘file’ or the office circle, then select ‘save’.

Step 3 – Creating your Mailchimp List

At this point, we need to create a list in MailChimp ready to hold our list of clients.  Head over to mailchimp.com and login (if you don’ t have an account, you can create one for free at this point).

Once you’ve logged in, select the ‘lists’ option from the top of the page, and then click ‘Create List’ (assuming you don’t have a placeholder ‘list’ already created).  This is essentially what we’ll be using to hold the data exported from your Premier software system.  You’ll need to fill in a few basic details and default settings before continuing.

Once the details are on, select the option to ‘import contacts’, select ‘import from Excel / CSV’, and then locate the mailmerge.csv (unless you’ve saved the file somewhere else, it should still be in c:\chase\temp\mailmerge.csv).

Clicking on the ‘import’ button will upload your data – all we need to do now is tell Mailchimp which fields are which by matching them up.

Once you’re done, click onto the ‘All Done’ button.  After a brief delay, MailChimp will email you to let you know that your list has successfully been imported.

Worth Checking…

Make sure your list is okay to send. Generally, clients from your system should be fine, but it’s worth checking against Mailchimps rules here.

What do I do with my list / I need further help

Mailchimp provide varying tools to let you contact your clients.  Most of it is fairly self explanatory, and they do offer online support on their website, and their ‘Getting Started‘ guide will most likely answer any questions.

Please don’t contact Premier Support for Mailchimp assistance, as the support team are unable to provide support for third party products.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

After getting some requests for new features, we’ve set our web team hard to work and got them to include some brilliant new features – check them out below!

Pay By Paypal

Paypal is a well-know, secure way of making payments over the Internet, without the trouble of having to store credit card information yourself.

To enable your clients to easily pay for their appointment in advance, we’ve added an option to pay via Paypal as the appointment is booked.

Maximum Outstanding Amount

For added security, we’ve included a ‘ceiling limit’ for the value of appointments booked by an individual client.  Once the client has reached their limit of unpaid bookings, web booking will no longer allow them to add any further appointments.

First bookable day

Allow people to book appointments for today.. or can they only book appointments from tomorrow, or the day after.. up to 2 weeks

Available staff

In some instances, you may wish to only make specific staff available for booking via the website.  You can now configure this directly in the software, giving you complete control over which members of staff appear to your client.

Search +/-

You can now set the number of minutes that web booking will search for if the exact time your customer wanted isn’t available.

If you haven’t got your web booking set up yet, and you hold a current support contract with us, please feel free to get in touch – our webteam will be happy to help you get up and running!

If you’d like to test web booking for yourself, just click the link and use the credentials supplied.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

The hotel owner proudly boasted that the hotel bookings were all made manually in a well-worn book, using “lots of coloured pens and lots of tippex”.  Why was he so proud of his archaic system? Because, in his own words “we never have to say ‘sorry, we can’t book your room because the system is down’ or ‘please wait while we update our system’”.

The reason why he was defending the practice of a scribbled on paper pad?

Because he’d just overbooked one of the guest rooms for a wedding party, much to the anguish of the bride-to-be, and had no clue how to rectify the situation.

If the hotel had a computerised booking system, they wouldn’t have needed to worry about situations such as overbooked appointments, as their system would have alerted them to their mistake.

We’ve heard a lot of common concerns when computerising your business, and in most instances they’re generally unfounded.

The Main Myths – Busted!

The computer will crash and we’ll lose all of our information!

How easy would it be to take a copy of a thick, heavy paper appointment book? Or worse still, the reams and reams of client files that you have stored away?

There’s a number of simple, quick ways of making a copy of your data these days, whether that be backing up over the internet or onto one of the inexpensive portable USB drives available almost everywhere these days.  It’s a great relief for most people to know that, should the worst happen and the  computer be stolen or damaged, all the information can be brought back almost instantly – unlike a hefty, manually written appointment book.

We’ll make mistakes on a computerised system

I’ve seen manual systems before, where receipts are stapled to client cards to prove purchases, and numbers of courses are scribbled on in pencil or changed under layer after layer of tippex.

No matter how good your staff are at keeping records, it’s easy to be sidetracked from updating information correctly by a ringing phone or a client who needs attention, and this inevitably leads to mistakes which are then hard to find.

Most computerised systems verify information as you enter it (Can I book appointment a with staff member b in room c?  Is the equipment needed available at that time? Does the client have a course of this treatment?), and even in the instance of a mistake being made it’s much easier to spot within a dedicated software package.

Our manual system is quicker / easier to use

Computers are everywhere these days, from the usual desktop machines to laptops, netbooks, tablets (like the iPad) and even mobile phones, and because of this nearly everybody is at least comfortable using a mouse and a keyboard.

Now, when making a booking, you don’t have to worry about availability of staff, rooms or equipment. You don’t have to manually count up receipts at the end of the day to see what’s gone through the till, or pore over sheets and sheets of a book to try and add up how many hours your staff have worked.  Stock is automatically deducted, ordered and tracked in the system.

In short,  rather than trying to consolidate shreds of paper and ten different styles of handwriting,  you can get on with running your business.

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

While we’re obviously (and deservedly!) biased, here’s some tips on what to look for when selecting the software for your salon.

Cost is always a fundamental when selecting a system, especially in times like these where money needs to be stretched a long way.

Checklist:

• Is the software yours at purchase, or are you tied into a hire purchase or other scheme?
• Do you need to purchase any ‘bolt-on’ items to allow you to have the full power of the software?
• How established is the company you’re purchasing from?  Experience is usually worth the price.

What features does the software have?  Every system should be able to store client record cards and allow you to book appointments, but does your software contain the features you really need?

Checklist:

•  Are you able to easily produce text messages and emails to your clients?
• Can your clients book appointments over the internet?

The whole idea of purchasing software to run your salon or spa is to take away the stress of admin, and to let you get on with providing the best possible service to your clients.  Computers, and software, can occasionally go wrong, or you may just need some help, so you’ll want comprehensive help without having to spend too much time dealing with support.

Checklist:

• What’s the cost of support, and what does it include? As an example, our software support includes free updates to your system, so any new features or software patches are automatically made available to you.
• Is there any cost to contacting support (e.g. a premium rate number)?  Our support line is free to call from a landline, so there’s no extra hidden charges to get in touch.
• Can the support team connect into your system to aid in assisting you?
• What availability does the support team have?  If you’ve purchased a system that isn’t UK based, can you contact them during your working hours?

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier

The question is, how can we share something that’s interesting enough for others to be interested in what we can provide?

In Sao Paolo, a vintage fashion store made themselves stand out by taking live photos of their collections using an iPhone and the Instagram app, displaying then in real time  to show off an instant, virtual catalogue (click for the full article).

It’s an interesting concept – normally these kind of high-fashion events are the realms of high-spec, SLR cameras, taking glossy images of models that can then be sent out on paper catalogues or printed flyers.  Which is fine – but this way creates something unusual, which can then be shared instantly, and distributed without any real cost.

Why not try grabbing your iPhone, download instragram and try it?  We’d love to see whatever images you make to help promote your business.

Here are a few that we found:

image by thatgirl71

image by my_p_p

image by my_p_p

Premier Software - Spa & Salon Software from Premier