Couple Massage

[SanaSana707]

Our collective and clients love square because it’s so easy to book massages BUT booking couples massage is not available? I feel Like it would be a simple fix unless someone has a workaround ? 

Square appointments is almost perfect ! 
can we please get the ball rolling on adding this feature ! A couples massage booked with 2 therapists at the same time !!

[RachelEileen]

I could not agree more!  I have my whole business model through square and now that I have expanded I cannot use a feature that should absolutely be available!  It is beyond frustrating that my clients cannot book a couple's service online.

[TCSlaguna]

@SanaSana707 I totally agree that the service offerings (multiple bookings at the same time) is much needed. 

I think what may be difficult for Square to do on the backend is reporting when multiple services are booked with different service providers. I am working on creating a report to payout my service providers every week. One transaction for two clients, two service providers, different tip amounts for each service provider would make generating that report difficult. 

I'm glad  "Square Appointments is almost perfect" for you. There are quite a bit of feature requests we need before our opinion matches yours. 

[SanaSana707]

Appreciate you sharing that perspective. Totally hear you on the reporting side, that part can definitely get messy.

We’ve actually found a workaround that’s been working well for us. We created a duo service that’s basically double the price of a single session. When it books, we manually confirm the time and block both therapists.

At checkout, we split it into two services under each therapist’s name and set the duration to 0 so it doesn’t throw off the schedule. That way payouts are clean and tips can be split evenly between providers.

It’s not perfect, but it’s been a solid workaround for now.

[TCSlaguna]

@SanaSana707  Thanks for sharing the workaround. 

So my guess is you don't take pre-payment? 

[DragonMassage]

The solution we have been using for over a year now takes some time to set up and it might look horrible on our end, but for the customers it works and looks great.

We have set up "fake" staff combinations for Couples Massages. It looks more complicated on our end because we now have extra staff to view in the Appointments app but like I said, it works well for the customers. So let's assume you have three staff and they are all available to do couples massages; Tina, Susan, and Tiffany. Create "fake" staff called "Tina & Susan", "Tina & Tiffany", and "Susan & Tiffany". Create your Couples Massage service and assign only those fake staff to it, set their availabilities accordingly. Now when a customer books online and selects Couples Massage they see the list of staff as:

Tina & Susan

Tina & Tiffany

Susan & Tiffany

To make everything automatic is where things get a bit more tricky, but using the Square Google Calendar sync and a third party Google Calendar sync (OneCal) we get all of the calendars to sync up so when someone books a couples massage with Tina & Susan then both Tina and Susan's time in Square are blocked as well as any fake staff associated with them. The sync happens within seconds of the appointment being made.

It is not as simple as if Square had the ability natively and it might look messy on our end, but when you have four staff working on Valentine's Day and everyone booking couples massages the entire day it sure makes it easy once it is all set up. The customers do not see the "mess" and for them it just works.

[TCSlaguna]

Yeah... something that requires that much of a workaround is broken (to me). 

This needs to be integrated into Square Appointments. 

[DragonMassage]

I completely agree, I was just offering up a workaround that we have been using.

If you really need it to work and don't want to wait for Square to add the feature (doubt they ever will) this can be done with a custom appointment workflow using Square APIs but then you either still have the fake staff to be able to check it out as a single service (can still be split) or create two separate appointments, one for each staff member, and have to check them out individually.

Let's face it, Square built the basics and fully expects third party developers to utilize the APIs to fill in the gaps.