I co-owned a skin care and waxing studio.
Like everyone else in the trade, we tried the booking platforms. The ones with a good feature set all wanted the same thing first: an online account, and our entire client list uploaded into it. We did it, because that is what everybody does.
Then we found out our booking software was advertising our competition to our own clients. Businesses down the road appeared next to ours inside the app our clients used to book with us. There was no way to turn it off. It was not a bug; it was the product.
There was more. Clients had to download the platform's app to book, which handed that platform their direct contact details and permission to market to them. Online booking, which had sounded so convenient, turned out to invite people who never showed up.
What's worse is we were PAYING for these companies to advertise to our competition!!
And we discovered that some competitors were making fake appointments on our booking page, filling our schedule so we looked booked solid, pushing real clients elsewhere, and starving us of business while we sat there waiting for people who did not exist.
So we stopped. We took appointments back into our own hands, only booking after actually speaking to somebody. We used the Apple Calendar. We kept notes on clients in Apple Contacts: who was good, who was trouble, who booked and never turned up, which phone numbers kept calling under different names. We tried to remember to text people the day before.
It worked. It was much more difficult and time consuming, but we had control. But, it was taped together. There were holes. Sometimes we would forget things.
Book Visit Now is a streamlined app designed to integrate Apple's Calendar, Contacts, Messages, Mail, and Maps into a cohesive system while enhancing your client management capabilities. It features comprehensive notes for each client and visit, a customizable private rating system, flags for clients you prefer not to book, tailored pricing for clients based on their value, and detailed reporting on your business's actual earnings.
Recognizing that some clients require more time, either due to the complexity of the work or the enjoyment of conversation, I've included reporting tools that highlight both high-cost and high-value clients.
For services that incur higher material costs, I leveraged my expertise in inventory management to create straightforward methods for integrating these expenses into your pricing. You can choose between a simple approach, where you input an average cost for a service, or a more detailed method that itemizes each expense.
For instance, when performing a service like a back wax, you might average your costs and enter a flat fee for the expected duration. Alternatively, you can breakdown all necessary items, like gloves, wax, strips, sticks, and a share of cleaning supplies and laundry expenses, for precise calculations.
Currently, the system does not maintain inventory, though this feature may be added in the future. However, you can at least list all necessary items to accurately calculate service costs. For example, if a box of XL gloves costs $8.98 for 100 gloves, that amounts to $0.18 per pair. Considering the occasional loss, such as breaking or dropping a glove, I used to estimate three gloves per client, raising the cost to $0.27 per service for the gloves.
The more information you input, the better your reports will be. Nevertheless, you don’t need to fill out every field to get started. You can be operational within five minutes by entering just four essentials: your company name, a service provider's name and phone number, a location, and at least one service. While the location's name is mandatory, providing an address enhances appointment notifications, ensuring clients receive accurate directions.
The core functionality remains intact. Your clients reside in your Contacts, and your appointments are managed through your Calendar, all syncing seamlessly through your iCloud. I do not retain any copies of your data, as there is no server involved.
Remembering to send out appointment notifications was sometimes a chore. I developed a Notification Center that lists all upcoming appointments. The Notification Center shows who has been notified, by what method and how many times. The page allows you to prepare texts or emails for a variety of notifications such as confirmation, reminders, canceled appointment, rescheduled appointment, and a special notification built to reach out to a client that you haven't seen in awhile to get them back in. This last one will become more valuable as I further build out a customer retention system. There is a report built that will show clients that have not been in for 30+, 60+, or 90+ days.
The appointment notifications must be sent manually to conform to Apple guidelines. This is not a mass marketing tool. I have simply made it as easy as possible to launch prepared notifications, which you can further edit before sending. The Notification Center instantly updates to let you know the notification has been sent.
There are features I could add that would make this app more competitive and I am not going to, because they would require your clients' information to pass through me. Online booking is the obvious one. It is the single most requested thing in this category and I have no intention of offering it.
New features will always be built on Apple's own frameworks and your own iCloud. Book Visit Now does not run back-end services and is not going to start.
I would rather have a smaller product that does not put me between you and your clients.
If Apple builds something into their own frameworks that would allows this, then I will jump on it. I'm curious to see if Apple will open up the Invites app to developers. The invites app currently lets you as an individual send an invite to people asking them to RSVP for an event, such as a party. This in itself would be nice if we could include it in appointment notifications. It's not workable right now.