From Optios to HairConnect

Updated on 2026-10-01

The switch happens in three phases: export, import, check. Your guide does the first two; you do the third, because only you know what belongs in your file.

Rather do it yourself, without a guide? That is now fully possible: see Migrating from Optios yourself.

What comes across

A client's address

Optios keeps a client's street, house number and town in one field, and not always in the same way. At the first salon, 914 of the 3,066 filled-in addresses carried the house number behind a comma of its own — Wijngaardstraat, 3, Gent next to Krijgslaan 57, Gent.

HairConnect keeps street and house number together and drops only the town; that one is already in the town field. If HairConnect does not recognise the town inside the address, nothing is dropped: better one town too many in the street field than one house number too few. A house number that disappears is never noticed again — and without a house number the address register can confirm almost nothing.

What you have to fill in yourself

Optios does not hand over your salon's address. It therefore comes in empty, and that is on purpose: better empty than invented. Fill it in under Instellingen → Het salon (Settings → The salon).

The same goes for your VAT number, your phone number and your email address.

The price on a migrated appointment

Optios does not hand over a price per appointment block — measured across a complete file: 62,698 blocks in 34,390 appointments, not a single price field. So there is nothing there to migrate.

For such an appointment the detail panel in the diary shows the price from your current service list, with an asterisk next to it, and says so underneath. The till works with exactly the same amount. What Optios shows today for an appointment from three years ago is something we cannot know — and we do not invent it.

Appointments you book in HairConnect do fix their price at the moment of booking. A rate change next month no longer touches them.

What the import never does

The import never corrects silently. Anything suspicious — a client record that is really a supplier, a phone number that makes no sense, a postcode with free text in it — ends up on the Opkuisvoorstellen (cleanup proposals) list and waits for your judgement.

That way you do not migrate eight years of clutter, and you also lose nothing without someone having seen it.

See Cleanup proposals.

The import may run again

Everything is recognised by the number it had at Optios. A second round therefore overwrites instead of duplicating, and the list of cleanup proposals does not blow up.

Switchover day

Preferably do it on a Monday.

1. Fetch the data one last time.
2. Lay the gift card balances next to the Optios overview. That is the one figure a client will pull you up on straight away.
3. Redirect your booking link to your own address. Nearly half of all appointments came in through the Optios booking link — that link has to point to you from day one. See Sharing the booking link.
4. Let Optios run alongside for one more month, read-only.
5. Only then cancel the subscription.

After the import

Go through these screens in this order:

1. Instellingen → Opkuisvoorstellen (Settings → Cleanup proposals) — work the list empty.
2. Diensten & prijzen → Diensten (Diensten & prijzen → Services) — check the Wachttijd (processing time) above all. That field did not exist in the same way at Optios, and it is what fills up your diary.
3. Team → Medewerkers (Team → Staff) — drag the list into the order you want in the diary, and switch on Moet prikken (must clock in) for those who clock.
4. Team → Afwezigheden (Team → Absences) — check long leave periods. At Optios a single absence is repeated under every day it covers, each time with the same key; a week of leave can therefore appear as a single day.
5. Team → Prikklok-overzicht (Team → Time clock overview) — compare a few weeks with what you paid out. For an imported punch, the schedule and the clocked/approved difference are in the note.
6. Instellingen → Het salon (Settings → The salon), Openingsuren (opening hours), Online boeken (online booking), Huisstijl (branding) and E-mail — those did not come across.
7. Voorraad → Producten (Stock → Products) — check the stock levels and the photos.

A warning about the export file

After a successful import, the export folder holds the complete client file: name, address, phone, email, colour history. Encrypt that folder or delete it.

Frequently asked questions

Why are there staff members in my list that I do not know, with a name like "Oud-medewerker #1234"? Optios removes former staff from its staff list, but their name is still attached to old appointments. Without those records, thousands of diary blocks and empty appointments would disappear. They sit invisible in the diary and marked as having left. The import asks Optios for their name one staff member at a time, and a record still called "Oud-medewerker" gets its real name in the next round. If one is left, Optios no longer knows that number either: fill in the real name, or leave it as it is. A name you filled in is never overwritten by the import.

My stock levels are right, but the old deliveries do not count. That is on purpose. The current level came across with the product export; if eight years of deliveries were added on top of that, your stock would double. The history here is accounting, not a stock source.