What to ask before you move a studio onto booking software

There are two models. In the first, card payments land in a merchant account in your name and the software takes its cut on the way past. In the second, the software collects the money and pays you out later, on their schedule.

The difference matters most on the day something goes wrong. If the payouts are theirs to schedule, a dispute with the vendor is a dispute about your cash. Ask whose merchant account the money lands in and how long a payout takes, and get the answer in writing.

Ask about refunds too. A refund on a booking taken through a platform has to give back the platform's cut as well as the studio's. If it does not, the platform keeps a fee on money the customer got back.

This is the question that decides whether a migration is a weekend or a term. Weekly slots are the hardest thing to move, because they are the bookings that must not lapse for a single week and the ones customers notice immediately.

Ask specifically: can a recurring arrangement be created with the right start date and the right price, can it be edited without disturbing sessions already played, and will the vendor sit with you while you move them by hand? An import tool that gets 90% of them right is worse than doing it manually, because you will not know which 10%.

Ask whether both systems can run at once while you move. If the answer is no, the migration is a cutover with a date, and cutovers with dates go wrong on the date.

If your customers currently have cards on file, those cards belong to whichever processor holds them, and moving them to a different processor is a formal migration between the two — it is possible with most, but it has to be asked for and it takes time.

If you change processor without moving the cards, every regular has to enter their details again, and some of them will not. Ask this before you sign anything. It is the most commonly missed question on this list and the most expensive one.

Ask what an export contains and in what format, and ask before you need it. Bookings, customers, payments and future recurring arrangements are the four that matter; a customer list with no booking history is not the same thing as your data.

Ask what happens when you cancel: how long is the account readable, is there a final export, and does anyone delete anything on a schedule. A vendor who is comfortable with this question is telling you something useful.

Look at the page a customer actually books on, on a phone. Does it carry your studio's name and look like your studio, or does it look like software with your logo at the top? Can it live on a domain you own, and if so who issues the certificate and how long does it take?

This matters commercially and not just aesthetically. A booking page on somebody else's domain earns them the search ranking, not you, and a customer who books on a page that does not look like your studio has learned that your studio is a room somebody else schedules.

Be specific and be unsentimental. The features that pay for a booking system in a studio are: refusing double bookings outright, taking money at the point of booking, applying cancellation terms without a conversation, holding weekly slots properly, and letting customers do all of it without messaging anyone.

Anything beyond that is nice. If a demo spends its time on dashboards and not on those five, you are being sold a reporting tool.

• Can two people double-book the same room? Ask them to try it on the demo.
• What happens when a card is declined for a balance payment?
• Can a customer cancel themselves, under my terms, without emailing me?
• Can I take a booking at the desk and mark it paid in cash?
• What does a customer see when a room is full?

There are usually three components: a monthly fee, a share of card bookings taken by the platform, and the card processing itself. Get all three, and get whether the platform's share is on top of processing or includes it — the difference is a couple of percent, which on a studio's annual card volume is a real number.

Then ask what happens as you grow. A price that is per room, per staff account and per location will grow in ways a price that is per room will not.

Finally, price the migration. A vendor who will do it with you is cheaper than one who will not, whatever the monthly fee says.