Room Setup

Do I Need to Set Up Rooms?

Before setting up rooms within the SpaSalon Manager program you'll first want to determine if you need to use this feature.  Rooms are used to avoid double-booking a resource.  Whether it be a manicure or pedicure station, a vichy shower room or even a station to cut hair there are limited resources in every salon and spa.  If you have enough employees working at the same time that conflicts for these resources can happen then you need to use rooms.  For example, if you have 3 manicure stations but 5 employees that can do manicures working at the exact same time then you would need to set up rooms for your manicure stations.

Before You Start

Setting up rooms can be a very tricky process - especially when you have several different types of rooms that have overlap between them on the services they can handle.  If you're not 100% sure that you understand the concepts presented here or the process for entering the rooms remember that  help is just a phone call away.  In addition, each room you add counts as an employee within the system.  If you've purchased a version of the program that limits the number of employees that you can enter in to the program you should call us first to purchase additional employees before going through the set up for your rooms.

Room Types

To begin the process of setting up our rooms we want to go to Maintenance -> Spa Setup.  Click on the Room Type Setup button under Step 1- Set Up Room Types.  You'll be asked to enter the total number of room types that you have.  This is not necessarily the total number of rooms that you have.  A room type is all rooms that do exactly the same list of services.  For example, if you have three pedicure chairs and all three do exactly the same type of pedicures then those three chairs would all fall under one room type.  If two of those three pedicure chairs were in a separate room though and were the only ones used for a couples pedicure then we would now have two room types - one for the lone pedicure chair (which can't do couples pedicures) and one for the two pedicure chairs that are in the separate room.  This can get quite complicated but as long as you remember the rule that rooms fall under the same type only if they do the exact same list of services you'll be able to correctly determine the total number of room types.  Once you have that number enter it into the box on the screen and click OK.  A screen will come up asking for the name of each room type.  This is where you would enter descriptive names for the types of rooms.  In our previous example we would put Pedicure Chair for the description of the lone chair's room type and Couple's Pedicure for the description of the two chairs that are together.

Room Names

Once we finish step 1 we can move on to Step 2- Set Up Room Names.  You'll have a button for each type of room.  Click the button for your first room type (Pedicure Chair in our example above).  On the following screen you'll have a list of all of the rooms for that room type which will be blank if you've never added a room of this type.  Directly beneath the list will be a button that says Add New Room.  If this button is not on your screen then that either means your password is not high enough to add the rooms or you've already entered the maximum number of employees to the system as mentioned in the Before You Start section above.  Click on the Add New Room button and put in the name of your room.  It's best to use simple names...in our example we'll put Pedicure1 for the name of the Pedicure Chair room and click OK.  Continue clicking the Add New Room button until you've added all of the rooms for that type (in our example we only needed to add Pedicure1 in this step).  Click done and repeat these steps again for each room type listed.  Again, with our example we would go to Couples Pedicure under Step 2 now, click Add New Room and put in CouplesPed1 and click OK, click Add New Room again and put in CouplesPed2 and click OK and finally click Done to finish our addition of the new Room Names.

Room Services

The last step in the process of setting up rooms is to select the services that require each room type.  Only in a very simple situation will you actually use the buttons under Step 3 - Set Up Room Services though.  In  our very simple example that we introduced in the beginning -  3 Pedicure Chairs that all did the exact same services - we could use the buttons under Step 3.  We would click the button for Pedicure Rooms, pick the services that require the Pedicure Chair rooms and then click Continue.

In our example we've used most of the time here - 1 Pedicure Chair room and 2 Couple's Pedicure rooms -we could not use this method.  Instead we need to click Cancel to leave the Spa Setup section of Maintenance and go instead into Service -> Modify Service.  You'll need to go in to each service that requires a room and then select a 1st Room Choice and possibly a 2nd Room Choice and 3rd Room Choice as well.  The order that you want to use for the priority here is the most difficult part of the room setup process and if you have any questions don't hesitate to call for support.  Basically what we want to do is always go to the least important room first and then work our way down to the most important rooms.  In our example we've been working with we would first go into each of the couple's pedicure services and choose Couple's Pedicure for the first room choice and Not Required for the 2nd and 3rd (since Couple's Pedicure is the only type of room that can do the couple's pedicure services).  On the regular services though we would pick Pedicure Chair for the 1st Room Choice (since it's our 'least important' room type since it doesn't do as many services and it also doesn't do any specialized services that can't be done by other rooms), Couple's Pedicure as our 2nd Room Choice (since the Couple's Pedicure rooms can do pedicures...they're just not our first choice for them because that would take away our ability to do a couple's pedicure at the same time) and Not Required as our 3rd Room Choice.  There are of course much more complicated setups that full spas can run in to when setting up their rooms but as long as you follow the general principle that your least specialized rooms should come first and your most specialized rooms should come last you should be able to successfully set up your rooms.

How Rooms Work

Congratulations!  If you've gotten to this point you've successfully set up your rooms.  When you cancel out of Maintenance and go back into the program you'll probably notice that you have several new employees in your appointment book - one column for each of the rooms that you added.  You do not have to do anything with these columns and in fact can completely ignore them if you want.  The program will automatically book an appropriate room when you schedule an appointment with one of your service providers, will automatically cancel the room when you cancel the appointment with the service provider and will warn you when you try to book an appointment for which no appropriate room is available.  You can look at the rooms yourself to see if a room is available at the time that you would like to book an appointment but this is not required - the program takes care of everything for you.