Any time you adopt new technology, it should only make your life easier. That’s especially true when choosing a point of sale system for your beauty salon–it should improve the ease and efficiency of your business. You want to make running your salon more profitable, enjoyable, and less stressful, which is why ease-of-use should be your top tech priority.
Salon owners work in a consumer dominated, on-demand market containing a plethora of point of sale (POS) system options. So how can you know what to choose or what to look for? For starters, if it takes you or your customer more than a few taps to get a result from your business tech, then it is time to move on to something easier.
When considering the available beauty salon point of sale system options, there are a few key features you’ll want to make sure to look out for.
Necessary Features from Your Beauty Salon Point of Sale System
The right point of sale system can become the working hub of your salon. While your focus remains on your clients and the quality of your service, your POS solution should do all of the rest. That means handling:
- Sales transactions, refunds, discounts, and product modifications.
- Customer loyalty programs, gift cards, and personalized barcode printing.
- Inventory management, and automatically reordering when stock is low.
- Online bookings and purchases.
- Staff scheduling, training, communication, and payroll.
Like most modern systems, all of the information lives safely in the Cloud, allowing you to access it anywhere at any time, from the tablet and cash drawer standing proud in your salon to your mobile phone or laptop. To make things as clear as can be, we have broken down the five essential features you will want to be sure your POS system has.
1. Inventory Management
Few businesses have as complex a relationship with their inventory as a salon. The textures, cosmetics, creams, and colors that line your shelves are no doubt a mixture of personal favorites, promotional offerings, trendy experiments, and customer recommendations. A digital inventory management process can help you be sure you always have the products you need when you need them. Additionally, things can be automatically reordered when they reach a certain custom threshold.
By going digital, you can customize your inventory and run your business your way without losing track of the optimal financial path. You can bundle items together without losing profit, for example, or you can conduct your own sales events and retain a professional edge by printing your own barcodes.
2. Real-Time Data Reporting
Once you take your business digital, every aspect of your salon becomes accountable and traceable. The business analytics you hear the global brands using to streamline their services can be brought into your salon with the right POS setup.
As all those tasks we listed earlier are fed through the same software, you can analyze just about every aspect of your business. With a few simple clicks you can find out the most popular products and services your customers have purchased in the past week, month, or season, and then break them down further into specific styles, colors, and trends.
You can go further down the data science road and reveal the true value of discounts, the performance of staff members, or even which times of day yield the biggest profits. The beauty of it all is that this information is already flowing through your books, you just need a digital POS solution to bring it under your control and allow the data to work for you.
3. Appointments Booking
The best salon booking systems let your customers spell out exactly what they want and when they want it. If you upgrade to a digital POS system, you can build a custom web presence to take appointments directly online and give your in-store staff access to the same schedule to balance your in-person and over-the-phone customers.
As with your customer-facing display, you can make all this a one-touch experience that builds from the basics—a timetable with a service description, through to an in-depth collection of services, style advice, staff profiles, and product listings.
4. Customer Facing Display
The hardware section of your POS solution is the register. As with every cash register you’ve come across, the basic key here is to give your customer confidence in the transaction without detracting from the salon experience. As things have gone digital in the 2020s, however, your POS is now also a chance to improve that experience.
The solution is a tablet linked to a cash draw, printer, and payment device. With touch-screen simplicity, you should be able to ring up a customer’s service while giving them a view of the proceedings through a customer-facing display. This is just a smaller version of the salon tablet that comes with a customizable multimedia presentation you can use to reinforce your brand, suggest additional services, or show videos or images to help inspire a little impulse buying.
5. Staff Management
With a modern beauty salon point of sale system, you can hand over all but the most sensitive financial tasks of your staff management to the team themselves. You can assign responsibilities to each individual so they can create their own roster solutions, manage their own tips, and make themselves available to their favorite regulars.
There’s nothing that makes working life smoother than delegation. You can rest assured that, with a digital POS system, you can look in on and communicate with everybody from your personal devices, which should free you up to focus on the bigger picture.
At talech, we’ve developed a POS solution for salons that seamlessly blends the management of all areas of your business into one, concise solution. Contact us today to sign up for a demo and to learn more about how talech can be your valued POS partner.
