Salon Iris: Is It Right for Your Business?

Salon Iris’s pricing page shows monthly fees for its cloud system; they range from $29 to $199 per month. The main difference between the tiers is the number of users and access to premium features such as loyalty and marketing tools, and payroll processing. Transaction fees depend on the payment provider.

According to its website, Salon Iris partners with CardConnect and OpenEdge for integrated payment processing, offering custom, “meet or beat” rates.

*Works with PC and Mac

Basic

This plan is designed for one user and is recommended for booth renters, freelancers, and independent service providers. Its features include:

Deluxe

This tier covers three users and is made for small salons and spas. It includes everything in Basic, plus these tools:

Premier

Perfect for large salons, this option caters to an unlimited number of users. In addition to all the Deluxe plan features, it offers the following:

Platinum

Process 5,000 texts or 10,000 emails per month. As with the Premier plan, this option is for large salons with an unlimited number of users and even multiple locations. It enhances the premier plan with add-ons for enhanced client relations.

• QuickBooks integration
• Reputation management

Salon Iris offers both cloud-based and desktop solutions. As a cloud-based system, it is compatible with iOS and Android devices, so you can manage your business remotely. As an integrated desktop solution, Salon Iris can run on PC with Windows 7 or higher operating system. On Mac computers, it is compatible with Boot Camp or with Windows emulators such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

All-in-One Front Desk POS Solution

ELO is an all-in-one integrated hardware solution that’s available for users subscribed to the Deluxe or Premier plans. It is a full-service POS system that comes with a barcode scanner, built-in receipt printer, cash drawer, and a pivoting display. However, the website is unclear if the hardware is purchased outright or on installment. Those who are interested in this hardware will go through a credit qualification step in their account application process.

ELO is Salon Iris’ all-in-one hardware solution that comes with a cloud deluxe or premier subscription.

Card terminals for desktop checkout and mobile card readers for individual salon professionals, massage therapists, and wellness consultants are also available. Please contact Salon Iris for a quote.

Desktop and mobile card readers for integrated payment processing can be purchased from Salon Iris

At its core, Salon Iris offers enough features to grow a small salon business. Along with a scheduling tool, it provides online booking, card payments, and reputation management features. Users will have a number of plans to choose from, each designed for different types of salons.

Salon Iris’s Appointment Book is a color-coded digital scheduling tool that can add booking information in a few clicks. Clients who book online show up instantly 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, Salon Iris’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, or 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.

Salon Iris’ booking system can be viewed from a PC, laptop, or mobile device.

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

• Salon Iris Kiosks: Use a dedicated tablet as a walk-in kiosk so that your services become walk-in selections with available service times and also capture new clients. 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. Available with Professional plan.

Capture and give available schedules to walk-in clients.

Salon Iris 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 that 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 Premier plan, Salon Iris offers an added 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 Salon Iris allow you to accept bookings 24/7 by creating a booking website. The system integrates with Facebook and Instagram, so you can add a booking button on your social media profiles that take your readers directly to your booking portal. Customize the website with your own domain name, themes, images to let visitors know about your services.

As a customer-facing portal, your online booking website integrates with your Salon Iris 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.

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

Customize your booking plugin to fit the style of your website.

Salon Iris offers robust POS features that allow you to track sales, appointments, payments, and taxes among others. 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.

Salon Iris checkout features include:

• Accepting split tender or multiple payment types
• Multi-ticket sales
• Tip prompting
• Processing retail product sales, returns, and exchanges
• Membership billing
• Signature capturing tool

While it’s possible to connect with third-party payment processors, Salon Iris offers an integrated credit card processing option by applying for a CardConnect merchant account. You get a free mobile chip reader, access to lower transaction rates, and store credit cards on file for confirmation and cancellation fees. 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.

Salon Iris also 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 Salon Iris reports are:

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

Your reports dashboards also comes with a daily productivity meter and leaderboard.

Users subscribed to the Deluxe plan get access to more service management features. These tools allow you to create service packages that can be pre-purchased on your booking portal and assign the required salon resources for each service for every booked appointment. Having these functionalities ensure 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 Salon Iris 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.

Salon Iris Deluxe allows you to add and delete employees, set up employee access, permissions, and limitations.

Salon Iris includes a client loyalty system with its Deluxe plan. It makes use of client information and history to create an effective reward system for individual clients. 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.

Customize the type of redeemable rewards based on your client’s preference.

You can create one-time and recurring marketing campaigns with Salon Iris. The system lets you choose between email and text formats, then customize 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 out test messages to yourself so you can review your campaign. Please note that text marketing is a built-in feature for Platinum plan subscribers but is available as an add-on to Deluxe and Premier subscribers for an additional $49 per month. It offers the ability to receive responses and converse with clients via text messaging in real time.

Client names are automatically populated based on the client list in your filter.

Recently, Salon Iris launched a tele-consultation feature, which is available for all of its users with the current cloud or desktop version and internet connection. This allows you to send out marketing campaigns for your tele-consulting service and receive consultation requests. However, as this is a new feature intended as a quick response to the new normal, the feature is not fully integrated into the software.

Users who subscribe to a Professional plan, as well as Deluxe and Premier subscribers who upgrade to the all-in-one desktop solution, get access to additional features for free. It’s easy to notice that Salon Iris provided these sets of tools to ensure that salons can efficiently run their business with a stand-alone POS.

• General Ledger
• Check Printing
• Order Management
• Inventory Management
• Reputation Management

The inventory management feature allows you to add, update, sell, and process returns of retail products.

With inventory and order management features, you can add items, as well as name suppliers and their information. You can even set up a low-stock alert and an automatic reorder for a particular stock amount. However, users will likely end up paying more with Salon Iris to access these tools, so consider other scheduling software alternatives with built-in inventory management features that would not cost you as much every month.

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

• QuickBooks
• Facebook and Instagram