Why we made homade: what annoys salons about CRMs

homade appeared for the same reason as most of our products: we solved the same problem several times in a row for different clients. Beauty salons came to us with the request "we need a proper system", and almost always behind that phrasing there was not emptiness but a previous CRM they had used for six months and abandoned. We got curious about why exactly they abandoned it.

Three reasons salons go back to a paper notebook

• The system is convenient for the owner but inconvenient for the manager at reception, where everything is decided in seconds.
• Stylist payroll is either absent or so inflexible that it gets duplicated in a spreadsheet anyway.
• Money is tracked loosely: one till for everything, card acquiring handled by hand, expenses nowhere — and in the end the owner does not understand how much was actually earned.

The appointment book — the screen a salon lives on

We started the design not with reports but with the appointment book, because that is what stays open all day. Different people in different situations find different views of the same schedule convenient, so in homade the book comes in four views. A stylist needs to see their own day, a manager needs all the stylists at once, an owner needs the overall workload. There is also a separate mode in which a stylist sees only their own appointments and does not get into anyone else's. What else the product includes is listed on homade.

A visit card instead of a row in the schedule

The second thing usually missing is the visit as a full object rather than a time slot. A visit card holds the client's history, the set of services and the payment. That sounds dull, but everything else grows out of it: the stylist's pay is calculated from the services actually delivered, analytics are built on real receipts, and a conversation with a regular client does not start with "what did we do for you last time".

Pay — the thing people argue about most

We listened to a lot about pay and realised the problem is not the formulas but trust. The stylist does not see the calculation, so they check it by hand and find discrepancies, often imaginary ones. So in homade the pay schemes — percentage, salary or mixed — are set explicitly, and a stylist sees their own calculation and only their own. At that point the dispute turns from "I was underpaid" into "this appointment was counted under the wrong service", and that is a solvable two-minute conversation.

Money: tills, card acquiring, expenses

The third block we considered mandatory was finances without self-deception. Separate tills, card acquiring with automatic fee deduction, expenses by category, stock records. The acquiring fee is especially telling: almost nobody accounts for it manually, and the revenue in the owner's head is consistently higher than the real figure. When the system deducts it automatically, the numbers stop diverging. You can look at the product at homade.ru.

Clients and loyalty — without the magic

A client base, bonuses and discounts by client group, a QR loyalty card with a scanner, mailings, 24/7 online booking. We deliberately do not promise that a loyalty programme will "bring clients back": it is a tool whose effect depends on how you configure it, and we write about its limits separately. What the system definitely does is keep an honest record of accruals and redemptions, so that nobody argues at reception about how many bonus points a client has.

Why the Solo plan is free

A stylist working alone is not a "small salon", it is a different mode of working, and there is nothing for them to pay an ERP for. So the Solo plan for one stylist is free. After that come Start at 1 490 ₽, Business at 3 990 ₽, Pro at 8 900 ₽ and Network at 9 900 ₽ per branch — the prices are gathered on our SaaS platforms. If the off-the-shelf product does not fit and you need a system built around your processes, that is our CRM and ERP development work, and you can write to us at contacts.