An Optios alternative: what to check before you switch
Changing salon software is frightening — not because of the new package, but because of your history. What happens to your clients, your colour formulas, your booking link and your gift card balances.
When a salon owner starts thinking about different software, the new software is rarely the first thought. The first thought is eight years of client records, the colour formula for the client coming in at ten tomorrow, and the booking link that sits in a hundred e-mails and on a sticker by the door. That is the real barrier, and it is a fair one.
This article is about what to check before you decide anything. Not about why Optios would be bad — we are not claiming that, and there are salons running on it perfectly well for years. It is about the four things that actually go wrong during a switch, and about how you can try it today without breaking anything.
Four things to check
All four come from our own migration chapter, and all four have gone wrong at least once during a real switch.
- Your clients. Not just how many, but with which fields: e-mail address, mobile number, history. Count them beforehand and write that number down. Afterwards it is your only check.
- Your colour formulas. For a hair salon this is the most valuable column in the whole file, and it is the column that most often comes across only half. Ask explicitly for all the years, not for the last three.
- Your booking link. A good share of your appointments arrives through an old link — in confirmation e-mails, in your Google profile, on a QR code by the door. If it still points at your old package after the switch, clients will still be booking weeks later into a diary nobody looks at.
- Your gift card balances. That is money. Open balances are moved across by hand and laid next to the overview from your old package: two lists, one reconciliation, done by a person and not by a machine.
We wrote about that second point separately, because it is where a hair salon differs from a nail bar: colour formulas belong in a plain text box.
What comes across, and what does not
With us you can move your Optios file yourself. Below is what that self-service migration brings across. Whatever is missing from the list is not missing by accident — every exception is a choice, and the reason is stated each time.
| Data | In a self-service migration from Optios |
|---|---|
| Clients, with e-mail and mobile | Comes across |
| Colour formulas | Comes across, across all years |
| Appointments | Comes across, future ones included |
| Services with their processing time | Comes across |
| Staff | Comes across, including people who have left |
| Products, brands and stock | Comes across |
| Working hours and absences | Comes across |
| Suppliers and deliveries | Through an extra step, with saved pages |
| Receipts and turnover | Stays where it is — your cash journal only writes forward |
| Gift card balances | By hand, and counted twice: this is money |
| Clocked hours | Guided only; self-service offers no usable route here |
| Address, VAT number, phone | Arrives empty — empty beats invented |
That last row deserves a word. Your salon address and VAT number appear on your receipts, and a receipt is a tax document. A plausible but wrong address is worse there than an empty field, so the import does not fill them in and you enter them yourself, once.
Exporting your Optios data: there are two routes
The first is the legal one. Article 20 of the GDPR gives you the right to your own data in a machine-readable format, and your supplier has one month to deliver. So you ask for it today, not the week before you want to move. What such a request looks like and what comes back: getting your salon data out.
The second is shorter. HairConnect has a wizard under Migration that fetches your Optios file itself, using the owner's Optios login. Three things about that, because they are always the same three questions: your credentials are not stored, everything is read-only — nothing at Optios is changed, deleted or cancelled — and allow about an hour, most of which is waiting. You can keep cutting hair in the meantime.
The full steps, right down to the checklist afterwards, are in the manual.
The trial run is the whole point
A switch feels frightening because it feels like a jump: one day, one button, and after that it is what it is. That is not how this is built. You may run the migration as often as you like — a trial run today, another next week, and the real one on the day you switch.
Everything is recognised by the number it had at Optios. A second run therefore never duplicates anything; it only fetches the difference:
- New at Optios — one more client, one more appointment — is added.
- Changed at Optios is updated.
- Unchanged is left alone. Including — and especially — where you have improved it yourself in HairConnect in the meantime: your correction stays.
- Changed on both sides? Then the import does not choose. Your version stays, and the case lands on the clean-up suggestions list with both values side by side, where you decide.
That last rule is the most important one here: nothing is ever corrected silently. Eight years of records contain duplicate clients, swapped first and last names, and a record called "hood dryer delivery" that someone once created as a client. Only you know whether Van Eckere and Van Ekeren are the same person.
Which policy applies to which kind of data, and what ends up in an archive rather than in your live database, is on the switching page.
Switching day
- Pick a closing day. Not because it takes long, but so you can look at it calmly.
- Run one more fetch, so the last few days are in as well. That one does not duplicate anything either.
- Redirect your booking link to your own address. This is the step most often forgotten and the most expensive one.
- Let your old package run alongside for one more month, read-only. That keeps your old reports available.
- Only cancel after that, and check your notice period. With salon software, an annual contract is the rule rather than the exception.
What it costs
One amount: € 59 per salon per month, excluding VAT, everything included and unlimited staff. Working on your own, it is € 35, and that is all-in as well. The switch itself is free for the first fifty salons. You can try it for thirty days without payment details and without a sales call first.
And if you are still comparing
Then do not take our word for it. We keep a file per package with what we can substantiate, with the source and the date next to it — including the points where the other one is stronger. See HairConnect next to Optios and HairConnect next to Aimy.
And if you end up staying where you are: that is fine too. The four points above are still worth checking, because your client file, your colour history and your booking link are yours — wherever they happen to live.