As the market share for the tanning dollar gets increasingly more competitive, the time demands on salon owners continues to be an upward trend. Having the ability to remotely access your data in order to stay in touch with every aspect of your business is of paramount importance these days and should be a non-negotiable issue when choosing a software provider or evaluating your existing product.

If you are like most salon owners, you’ve probably been at home or on vacation and needed to run a report for payroll purposes, wanted to see how sales of that holiday special have been, or on a more crucial note, needed to ensure that your staff was doing a daily backup of your salon data. Unfortunately, like most salon owners you had no way of getting that information without driving to the salon or interrupting your staff with a phone call.

Some tanning pros use PC Anywhere, VNC or other remote accessing programs to “dial into” their local PC at the salon. This is better than nothing, but does come with limitations and functionality issues that interfere with what should be a seamless and fully transparent integration with the operation of the salon computer. If your staff cannot process a sale because you’ve taken control of the salon computer to run a report, then you have the wrong software solution. Another disadvantage of these remote access programs is that when you want to print something, you will be printing to your local printer at the salon and not the one where you are working.

The most disturbing call our tech support department receives is from the salon owner who just had a hard drive crash and had not backed up their data, or their employee “forgot” to do it for the last few months. There are no words we can offer them that will fix their problem, but like a good friend of mine used to say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This critical function needs to be taken out of the salon and set up on an automated, remote routine.

Your software should offer you the ability to retrieve, modify and enter data in your computer without your having to physically be in the salon. Even more critical than these conveniences, a scheduled, automatic backup task that transmits your data to an off-site computer needs to be a standard feature in your software solution. I recommend that you call your provider today and ask whether you can do this, and if so, how.