Kitomba blog

When it rains it pours, and June showered Kitomba with some exciting new features. Online booking notifications, new Business Summary KPIs and a couple of other tweaks were added to make your day-to-day Kitomba life a little easier.

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

New Online Booking Notifications

We love Online Booking, and it seems you’re loving it too! In fact, we’ve recently looked at our numbers and on average, those that have Online Booking are seeing more than 130 people walking through their door each year and they’re making $3,500 per month.

What’s even better is that we’ve received some great feedback from you about how we can make Online Booking even better, so we’ve added a handy notification!

Now you’ll receive a notification via email if a client books an appointment that’s for the first hour of your next business day.

We’ve added this notification because we know you need time to prepare in the morning before you first client shows up for the day. So basically we’re eliminating that horrible moment when you arrive at the salon at 8.45am and see a client’s made a booking for 9am while you were closed for the night. It’s stress you don’t need, and now it can be avoided.

By the way, you won’t get these notifications too often. Any new appointments made while you’re open, you’ll see in your Kitomba as you’re working throughout the day. And appointments made for a few hours after your opening time still provide you with time to prepare. We’ll only notify you if the appointment is booked within the first hour of your next business day.

See cancellations and future visits at a glance

We’ve made two additions to the appointment quick view pop up:

1. A no show/cancellation notification bar
2. Future visits button

Here’s how it’ll look:

Why have we updated quick view?

Well unfortunately you’re always going to have clients who consistently cancel or no show for their appointments. It’s a time and money waster, and also disappointing when you have last minute gaps in your column. To help reduce these, if a client has a history of cancelling or no showing, thenKitomba’s new notification bar will display. Now as you’re preparing for your week, you’ll automatically see this important information and it’ll be early enough so you can take action, contact the client and increase the chances they’ll show up for their appointment.

Click on ‘view details’ to instantly see the client’s history:

We also want to help you save time and be more efficient, so we’ve made it super easy for you to access client’s future visit information. Instead of searching for it, now you just need to click on Kitomba’s new ‘Future visits’ button in quick view and you’ll instantly see what they’re booked in for:

Not sure where to find the appointment quick view? Click on a client’s appointment in your appointment book and a pop up will appear showing important client info at a glance. Quick view is customisable which makes it great for managing a busy calendar. For tips on this time saving feature, check out our guide.

See ya later duplicates

Kitomba 1’s got it, so Kitomba needs it too: Auto merge. Now, Kitomba takes care of your duplicates and will automatically merge them.

We’ve added this feature to clean up your database, which provides you with the ability to have more reliable client lists and reports. It’ll also remove the issues some of you found having client record duplicates.

In the background, Kitomba is already starting to work through your database and auto merge your client records. If you’ve only got a few duplicates, then your database will be tidy in a couple of days. If you’ve got several, then it’ll take a little longer to process them – so no need to be concerned if you come across some duplicates, it means Kitomba’s still working on it!

Measure what counts with new Kitomba 1 Business Summary KPIs

In response to feedback we received on our Feature Requests forum we’ve added two new KPIs to the Business Summary report in Kitomba 1. These are:

• Appointment total sales = The total value of services + retail sold with an appointment.
• Appointment average spend = The average amount spent per appointment (services + appointment retail).    

Don’t forget you can customise the Business Summary report to suit your needs. It’s easy, just drag and drop.