June Newsletter – Steaming our Way into Exciting Summer Developments

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Whether you’re in the northern or southern hemispheres, there is no doubt that we have some exciting developments in this June Newsletter. Wedding season has started here in Cyprus, and you can’t go through a day without hearing all the horns blaring at a wedding car going by – a local tradition for good luck. And while the weather is just starting to get HOT, we are steaming ahead with many projects before everyone goes on holiday through the summer. That’s assuming they can go anywhere with all the flight cancellations.

As always, we are working on new developments to help you and your business work smarter, not harder.

Grab a coffee (or tea for preference), and take a peek at the new releases for June and upcoming developments from SimplyBook.me in July.

What is New in June?

Oh, we have some exciting news for you this month, if you haven’t already noticed…

SBPay.me New Dashboard display and Revolut Integration

SBPay.me allows you to choose from a broad of payment processors to handle payments from your clients. Via the SBPay.me platform, you can then manage your payments and clients, prolong or cancel subscriptions, refund and access extensive reporting.

SBPay.me is still in its infancy as a beta release right now, but that’s not stopping us from marching ahead with new integrations and developments.

This month, the monthly payment feature is ready for use.

And we have completed the Revolut integration. So many people asked us about integrating with Revolut. We just had to make it a part of the SBPay.me project. Now you can make it so that payments go directly into your Revolut account, and we are so excited about this feature. So many people use Revolut; it would be a scandal to leave it out. The ease of transferring payments just makes it the perfect option.

Quick! Look busy!

No, nothing like that. We aren’t inciting staff to try and look busy when the boss comes around.

However, there are times when it’s beneficial for you to look busy, even if you aren’t. New businesses never want to give the impression that no one makes an appointment with them. They want to look like they’re busy enough to need a booking system and clients are lucky to get such a sought-after appointment.

At the same time, a busy city-centre salon may have a steady and reliable stream of walk-in customers. While they want to keep both the planners and the spontaneous clients, you can’t have both without a little digital trickery. If you “look busy on your calendar”, you can save some of your desirable appointments for those who like to drop in – without someone trying to book you solid for the day.

It’s pretty simple, you can choose the number of open slots you want available throughout the day. I selected 15 because my particular services are only short, and I have a 5-minute interval.

When you check your booking website, you will see that even though you have no appointments, there is only the number of slots available that you designated. You can use this to make you look busy, save spots for walk-in clients, and ensure no one gets overworked with back-to-back clients all day.

You’ll find it in the Custom Features menu on your interface under “Make Me Look Busy”.

Admin App Development & Enhancement

With the recent introduction of SBPay.me, we realised more payment information should be available via the admin app.

As part of the Admin App development, we have released invoice management, allowed time filter during booking creation, and service duration display.

Also, we now support cloud fields support through the admin app.

Scheduled for July

So now we’re finished with June, what does July have in store for you and your business?

SBPay.me Charts

During June, our developers have been working on some new features for SBPay.me. One that we expect to come through testing and be released this month is pie charts. You will be able to see your revenues in an easy to analyse pie chart for tagged services.

Want to quickly check which services are bringing in the most revenue this week, day or month? Maybe you want to see what the most popular payment providers are. This should be available to you in July. It’s already in testing, so you should see it on your SBPay.me reports very soon.

Support chat improvements for Spanish/Portuguese users

The support Live Chat feature of SimplyBook.me is getting an overhaul, and right now, it’s in the testing phase for Spanish and Portuguese users.

Separate widgets will be available for Spanish and Portuguese speakers to better allocate them to the appropriate support person and improve our tracking and analysis.

In Case You Missed It…

Throughout June, we’ve been following a theme for our event industry users. While primarily targeted at events businesses, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some exciting information available for any business. So let’s catch up on the June blog content, in case you missed it the first time.

Guest Posts

We love getting outside insight from our guest posters. They can always be relied upon to offer different perspectives and new ideas. At the beginning of the month, we had some valuable information on managing waiting lists for clients. Some incredible and useful insight to using our waitlist feature from Nina Petrov.

Along the marketing route, we have some interesting data from Katie Tejada on building your brand awareness campaigns.

Regarding business management and development, Charlotte Lin gave us some fabulous considerations for starting an Escape Room business, which seems to be very profitable.

Photographers would benefit from Anisha Singh’s (from Pixpa) top six best portfolio builders in 2022. In addition, Jyoti Ray gave us 15 photography marketing ideas.

Sharing our SimplyBook.me Knowledge and Advice

On the subject of photography, our very own Daena has some personal insight into the picture-taking business. She’s put together a self-help guide to help manage wedding season stress for photographers.

When sourcing additional tools to make your business life run more smoothly, you can’t go wrong with project management tools. We listed our favourites for making business projects run more effectively and efficiently.

Events can cover so many different genres, so we couldn’t cover them all. However, we looked at a few that would benefit from the SimplyBook.me system to streamline and simplify their work.

Campsite bookings can really benefit from the additional features that SimplyBook.me has to offer. Using the service and product add-on features, they can really maximise revenues and keep things organised.