Kitomba Salon & Spa Software Reviews 2

We have Kitomba for about five years and found it to be simple, easy to use and effective.

Yes, it is expensive as a monthly cost. However, for us, it is a cost effective tool that has helped us to grow our business.

The software in intuitive, easy to use and does nearly everything we could ask of it. The most important thing however, is the back up service and tech support.

As an example, we had a problem this morning with the software, one of the tech staff jumped on line and had it fixed within ten minutes. We were back up in action and able to focus on our clients.

We are Studio146 in Wynnum Australia and recommend Kitomba.

I have been a customer of Kitomba for over 5 years and from my perspective they can only rank as average.
Acquired by Jonas Software, a large software acquisitions company, who tend to try and own verticals in different industries. So for the salon and spa industry they own the two major competitors but also three others.
The software is built by technical people who have not necessarily has an understanding of high performing businesses who don't need or want to discount their work by offering loyalty points and packages.
Pros:
Customer service is actually VERY GOOD - whether it be by phone or online chat or email - it's friendly, helpful, tries to be efficient and effective and best of all, they all have an excellent command of English.
The system manages appointments and reminders well enough
Target and KPI tracking is good - really important.

Cons:
Overall this system is clunky.
There are aspects of functionality like refunds or credits that aren't handled in what I would say an appropriate manner from an accounting perspective.
It is not fully cloud based and what's worse, most important management functions are only available from the desktop that has the primary database installed which is absolutely crazy.
Some functionality only available using the cloud based version???
User interface of inventory in the cloud is the worst!
Questionable tracking when it comes to accurately recording KPI's like retention.
No open API to be able to integrate to other systems with AND
Marketing capability is sub standard for a clever operator.
So this all keeps you "locked in" doing average and sub standard type of marketing.
You "can't" access your own data either to try and break out of the average-ness unless it's within the application... or unless you hacked your own database...
The extracts aren't entirely accurate either. You can't query your database to improve the accuracy either!
This is probably the worst aspect of it: they stonewall you if you want more.
There is no transparency to their software improvements
Their "suggest a feature" forum is like a graveyard where they ghost you and bury requests.
Multiple locations: if you're a salon with multiple locations it doesn't have a single unified view of the customer. So if your customer visits Location A then Location B it will be counted as a new customer of Location B which is technically not correct. This is a simple example of how their approach to the systems development has been a bit piecemeal and clunky and then when you have to build more functionality on a clunky foundation, stuff like this will skew your data.

There are other companies out there like Phorest who are fully cloud based and have an open API that offer significant advantages and similarly some drawbacks.