DaySmart Salon (formerly Salon Iris) Review

DaySmart Salon’s Appointment Book is a color-coded digital scheduling tool that can add booking information in a few clicks. Clients who book online can show up instantly (or manually approved) with details already populated, so you can avoid the risk of double bookings. Appointment tiles can be dragged and dropped in case of adjustments, while recurring bookings can be set up in one go.

As a cloud-based system, DaySmart Salon’s calendar is accessible on any device with the software installed. This means you can quickly access the appointment calendar to adjust, cancel, or confirm bookings—and you can even check in your clients from a mobile device and seamlessly update all this information in real time. You can also customize the view on your device by using filtering tools.

In addition to online booking capabilities, DaySmart Salon offers the following appointment scheduling tools:

• DaySmart Salon Kiosks: Use a dedicated tablet as a walk-in kiosk to capture new clients and so your services become walk-in selections with available service times. It is available for Deluxe and Premium subscribers.
• Advance Waiting List: Create a list of clients without prior scheduled appointments for each of your employees and service.

An example of what clients see at walk-in kiosks. DaySmart Salon can capture and give available schedules to walk-in clients.

DaySmart Salon includes tools for collecting, maintaining, and promoting client relationships. You can create detailed client profiles, which give you information on their appointment history and preferences, apart from their contact details. You can also store images, which can be handy if a client would like to revisit their old hairstyles.

Include images on your client profile.

The Basic plan allows you to set up automated appointment reminders for different situations. Send an email, SMS message, or both to remind clients of their appointments—or when they reschedule, cancel, or confirm their bookings. This feature is highly customizable, so you can specify when clients receive your messages and disable messaging for those clients who prefer not to receive notifications.

If you subscribe to the Platinum plan, you gain access to a two-way texting feature, which allows you to link a mobile number to your account and receive in-app notifications for messages that you receive. You can also respond to individual queries or send out your announcements to all or a selected group of clients.

View, send, and respond to SMS messages from the booking platform on the desktop and mobile app.

The online booking tools in DaySmart Salon allow you to accept bookings 24/7 by creating a booking website.

When you set up your booking website for the first time, it prompts you to enter a subdomain and choose from the list of domain names available for free.

The system integrates with Facebook and Instagram, so you can add a booking button that takes your readers directly to your booking portal. You can also customize your booking website with your domain name, themes, and images to let visitors know about your services.

Your online booking website integrates with your DaySmart Salon platform. This ensures that you can seamlessly manage all bookings in real time. Aside from a booking plugin and automatic notifications, your clients can create and update their own accounts in a customer-facing portal.

An example of a booking website made with DaySmart Salon’s website builder

Clients can request a new appointment, choose a stylist, and specify the service they want to get.

The client login functionality allows you to:

• Complete and update customer profiles and contact details
• Secure credit cards on file
• View upcoming appointments
• Receive new appointment requests based on your availability
• Check loyalty point balances

This is the client’s view when they create an account on your booking website. They can update their contact information, request a new appointment, and see their upcoming appointments.

DaySmart Salon offers robust POS features that allow you to track sales, appointments, payments, and taxes, among other metrics. Its dashboard lets you see your business’ health, showing key information like booking percentages, total appointments, and product sales. You can accept payments in the form of cash, card, and gift cards.

The platform’s checkout features include:

• Split tender or multiple payment types
• Multiticket sales
• Tip prompts
• Retail product sales, returns, and exchange processing
• Membership billing
• Signature capturing

You can also issue fully customizable online gift cards for your customers. Clients can redeem the gift cards on their next appointment by adding the gift card ID, card value, and expiration date.

DaySmart Salon offers reporting and analytics tools from its Basic plan. It comes with a dashboard that can be customized, so you can set it up to reflect your business benchmarks and show a preview of the reports you need the most. You can also choose the type of graphs and filter the reports with your preferred date range or by employee with just a few clicks.

Some available reports are

• Sales totals and taxes
• Retail sales
• Client retention
• Referrals
• Payroll

In addition, users who subscribe to the Premier tier get access to expense reporting tools. This allows you to record and track utilities, booth renter fees, supplies expenditures, equipment depreciation, inventory, and more. If you combine reporting with resource management features, you can assign reference numbers and organize your assets by category and edit or void expenses. You can even generate these expense reports with your preferred custom filters.

Users subscribed to the Deluxe plan get access to more service management features. These tools allow you to create service packages that can be prepurchased on your booking portal, and they let you assign the required resources for each service for every booked appointment. Having these functionalities ensures your salon operations don’t get stalled due to insufficient equipment and supplies.

• Resource management: Automatically assigns specific resources such as booths, seats, and coloring supplies every time a service is booked.
• Package and prepaid management: Create customized service packages and make them available for prepaid bookings online.

Set up customizable prepaid packages that clients can redeem at a later date.

Employee management tools are available for DaySmart Salon plans with multi-user access. An employee time clock allows you to keep track of your staff’s working hours as they log in and out of the system. You can set customized email and/or text notifications for your employees for new appointments, schedule changes, and cancellations.

In addition, Premier plan subscribers get access to payroll management and report generation tools. It lets you specify employee service levels and customize your payroll settings with granular overtime, bonuses, and commission rules.

DaySmart Salon includes a customer loyalty system from its Deluxe plan. It makes use of client information and history to create an effective reward system for individual customers. You can customize how your clients earn loyalty points with their purchases and the type of redeemable rewards. During checkout, the option to redeem their credits will be displayed, along with a note indicating the available number of points and corresponding redeemable value.

You can create one-time and recurring marketing campaigns with DaySmart Salon. The system lets you choose between email and text formats, then customize them based on your campaign type and client criteria. Templates for different campaigns are available for each format and can be updated with the help of step-by-step marketing campaign customizing tools. You also have the option to build your own from scratch.

The step-by-step guide will show you how to design campaigns, select recipients, and send test messages to yourself so that you can review your campaign. The text marketing feature is included under the Platinum plan but available as an add-on to Deluxe and Premier subscribers for an additional $49 per month (2,500 text marketing messages).

DaySmart Salon recently launched a teleconsultation feature, which is available to all its users with the current cloud or desktop version and an internet connection. This allows you to send out marketing campaigns for your teleconsulting service and receive consultation requests. Desktop users will need a remote access license (normally $9/month).

For teleconsultations, clients will need to have their accounts on your booking site. During the scheduled appointment, you will see a green circle under the Upcoming Calls section. This indicates that the customer is logged into the site and can receive the video call.

An example view of a teleconsultation from the DaySmart Salon dashboard

During the teleconsultation, you’ll see the client details section to the right. It contains the following sections:

• Notes: Create notes during the call and see any notes submitted by the client.
• Image: If the client uploaded a photo, it will appear in this tab.
• Chat: You can chat with the client during the call.
• Client Forms: If there are forms submitted, you can also view them here.
• Email: Send the client a direct email.

With inventory and order management features, you can add items and name suppliers and their information. You can even set up a low-stock alert and an automatic reorder for a particular stock amount.

While DaySmart Salon has a list of handy add-on tools, available integrations for the software are very limited. In fact, it only supports third-party integration with online booking and accounting platforms.

• QuickBooks
• Facebook
• Instagram