Gettimely Review

To tell it short and sweet 

Timely was founded by Ryan Baker and team. In 2021, they were acquired by Evercommerce, a US-baseed software company focused developing software for the service industry.

Gettimely has a friendly user interface which makes it extremely easy to use. What we like the most about GetTimely is how they have help notes everywhere on the UI.

Timely’s help documentation is detailed even for a small feature. They cover features with meaningful and contextual use cases from salons.

We also liked how they have interlinked various modules inside the product. If you want to add stock but have not added a supplier yet, there is a link to go to the supplier module.

Of course, it goes without saying that Gettimely has a comprehensive feature set, a great support team, and flexible pricing plans. They have the latest payment methods like Afterpay in addition to Timely Pay, their in-house payment gateway.

However, Gettimely does not have certain features in staff management like setting up a commission profile, staff wages, overtime rates, and tips.

Gettimely does not have a email marketing module on its own. You have to integrate with MailChimp. Also, they don’t have memberships or subscriptions which is common in the salon software space. Though you can work around this with packages, discounts, and vouchers, we believe it would have been better to do it without them

How does Gettimely fare on the essential features of a salon management software? 

  1. Online appointment scheduling:
    • You can turn ON/OFF appointment scheduling in Gettimely. They offer a free one-page website which you can use or embed on your website. Apart from the webpage, you can even create buttons, links, embed codes, and widgets for appointment booking, purchasing gift vouchers. You can further customize the page’s appearance by selecting one of the themes, adding a custom color, and by changing the default text. It is also possible to set up booking widgets for Facebook and Instagram.
    • The free one-page website can be customized by turning off or editing its elements. The elements include the cover image, logo, staff details, services and categories, gift vouchers, locations and hours, and a contact us page and form.
    • The online bookings module has other settings too. You can opt for new appointments to be approved automatically or manually, allow multiple appointments per transaction or multiple staff per appointment. There are options to set policies for bookings like booking and cancellation windows, display your privacy policy, and online payment terms.
    • You can turn on client login and make it mandatory if needed. Using the redirect URL, and Google Analytics or Google tag manager, you can even measure the effectiveness of your booking page and campaigns.
  1. Staff management
    • In Gettimely, managing your staff has three aspects, first of which is reporting. In the reports, you can see the staff timesheet, appointment summary, roster, and targets. On the staff dashboard you can check each staff’s bookings, retention and rebooking rates.
    • In the staff module, you can add staff and create a detailed profile for each. Staff can be marked as available for online booking and optionally displayed on the booking page. If you want, you can ask Gettimely to send staff members an email every day with their appointments for that day.
    • You can give either Pin access or Email access to staff members. Pin access makes it easy for staff members to switch between their log ins at the workplace without using email and password. Pin access can be considered a lesser form of access as those with only pin access (and no email access) need help from another staff/admin to log in with their email address.
    • You can control each staff member’s access levels to different modules like calendar, dashboard, sales, customers, stock, and others. In each module there are multiple adjustments which you can turn ON/OFF for each staff. For ex. You can give a staff access view/edit permissions to only their/all calendars. Other examples are how staff can be disallowed to see customer information or edit the value of a sale. In Gettimely, you get to adjust staff access levels in a fine-grained manner.
  1. Sales promotions
    • Gettimely has vouchers, packages, and discounts to boost your sales. You can create two types of vouchers – fixed amount and custom amount – for different needs. Fixed amount vouchers are good for year-round sale whereas custom amount vouchers are good for specific customers. YOu can customize the look and feel of vouchers, set terms and allow/disallow vouchers to be redeemed online. It is possible to set terms specific to each voucher or let all vouchers follow the default terms.
    • Packages are good to promote a lagging service or to boost customer loyalty or spend. You can create packages involving a combination of services and set the limits for how they are redeemed. You can also create packages involving a specific service and set limits for that alone. Both are good depending on the customers you have.
    • You can create discount types and apply them whenever necessary. The discounts can be a fixed amount or percentage.
  1. Point of Sale
    • Gettimely has a good POS interface, variety in hardware connectivity, and multiple payment methods. You can create invoices, sell products, manage cash and expenses, issue refunds, and collect payments online. Apart from selling products, you can also sell gift vouchers and packages.
    • You can connect printers, cash drawers, payment terminals, and barcode scanners. Using barcode scanners, you can add to/ sell your stock. Getimely works well with multiple payment terminals like Tyro and Smartpay. Since they are from ANZ region, they have a higher number of local integrations from there. Their integration with mPOP cash drawer and printer is the most prominent one. Mostly you connect to the hardware through the iOS app.
    • Gettimely has payment integrations with Paypal, Stripe, Windcave, Pinpayments, Authorize.net, and Timely Pay. You can collect payments by Afterpay or Laybuy also.
  1. Marketing
    • Gettimely gives email and SMS marketing options. SMS marketing is available only in some countries and the charges are not included in the regular subscription. You can filter customers with criteria and send targeted SMS campaigns. The filters are not exhaustive but can serve most needs.
    • Gettimely integrates with MailChimp for email marketing.
  1. Locations
    • You can manage multiple locations in Gettimely. The locations can be physical or mobile, when you go to client location. Each location will have separate calendars and your staff can be present in more than one location without getting double-booked. Since each location has their calendar, you can toggle the location calendars and see the appointments. It is possible to turn ON/OFF staff access to locations and also hide locations from the booking website to make them unavailable for online booking.
  1. Reporting
    • The reporting module is strong in Gettimely. There are detailed reports about sales, staff, stock, appointments, customers, and finances. If you want to get a quick glance at your business performance, there is a dashboard for that. The dashboard gives important metrics like future value, customer spend, and client retention.
    • In the report settings, you can choose which appointment statuses should be included in reporting. Also, if the staff breaks and days not worked are to be included in reporting, you can do so.
    • Some of the interesting reports that you can see in Gettimely are about cash management, refund details, client credits, petty cash, etc.
  1. Client management
    • In the customers section, you can search for, add, and import customers. Gettimely has a unique feature called customer sidebar which is a left pane where you can quickly search for the details of any customer. From here, you can even add a new customer. The details will include personal info, address, and appointment details. If you wish, you can sycn your customer contacts with Google contacts. You can turn ON/OFF appointment notifications and set intervals for appointment reminders and SMS marketing.
    • Rewards are one of the most effective ways to retain client loyalty. In Gettimey, you have options to set up spend targets for reward points, the formula for redeeming those points, and decide which products and services offer rewards. When closing a sale, you can choose to make use of these rewards for the client.
    • There are reports that give you a quick view of your rewards program.
    • One of the other great features for clients is providing them with a portal, they can create an account with you and see their appointments. They will also be able to see any consultation forms that they have to fill out. By giving clients a log in, they will be able to easily book, cancel or reschedule their appointments. Gettimely has options to make the client log in optional if you notice that your clients want to book without logging in.
  1. Inventory
    • In Gettimely, you get the stocks module where you can maintain details about products, suppliers, and orders. You can map products to suppliers, and make new orders whenever necessary. In stock orders, you can see the status of all orders whether they are ordered, cancelled, or received.  Using the receive stock option, you can update the stock when a new order arrives. A new product can be marked for retail sale or for professional use.
    • There is a report for stock movement in which you can track the changes to retail and professional stock. You will also get a report of stock levels.  
  1. Services
    • You can create different service types like a one-off booking or recurring bookings. Services can be categorized and grouped. When clients have to book multiple services, you can provide those services as a group. Services will have multiple parameters, you can optionally make them video calls. There are options to set procesing and padding times so that you can manage such services. Gettimey allows you to take new bookings during processing and padding times as well. Each service can have its color code, staff, and resources. Service availablity will depend on teh availability of staff and resource. You can use consult forms and map them to specific services to collect details related to that service.

How is the user experience?  

Gettimely offers great user experience, which is one of the best in the industry. It is not a simple software but they have made it simple to work with. It is a high contrast UI, well designed and has brand consistency all over. The navigation is smooth across the header and the left pane. There are quick access buttons to add a new appointment, find details about a customer, and to initiate a new sale.

Similarly, your clients will also have a great user experience either from the one-page website or when you embed it as a widget or a button. The customer facing page is highly customizable whereby you can control the appearance, navigation, and layout. Also, there are many settings related to the online booking page which will help you control the user experience further.

Value for money  

Gettimely has one of the most flexible pricing plans. They have multiple packages for salons of different sizes and the solo plan starts at just $15. If you’re very large with specific needs, they offer tailored pricing plans also. Gettimely offers great value for money for their UX, help documentation, features, support, and their community. In our research and survey we have found that their customers are extremely satisfied with them.

Help and support   

As we already mentioned, Gettimely’s help and support stands apart as one of their differentiators in the salon management space. Also, what differentiates them is the presence of the founders and the culture they have built. We have seen multiple customers switching from Mindbody commenting about how personal a feel they get from Timely as opposed to Mindbody.