Comparing hair salon POS systems on feature lists is close to useless, because they all list the same things. Five questions separate them, and you can answer all five in a single demo.
The five questions
1. Does a two-stylist ticket attribute correctly? A colour with one person and a blow-dry with another, one payment. If the whole sale lands on whoever rang it, your commission numbers are wrong permanently. Ask to see it done, not described.
2. Is the pricing per terminal, per stylist, or flat? All three exist. Per-stylist pricing means every hire raises your software bill, which is a tax on growing. Per-terminal means a second station at the desk costs you. Find out which you are signing.
3. What is the effective card processing rate? Percentage plus per-transaction fee, by card type. Over a year this is usually the largest line and the one nobody compares. Half a point on twenty thousand a month is over a thousand dollars a year.
4. Can you export everything, free? Client list, service history, sales. If the answer is vague, assume no, and price in never being able to leave.
5. Does it know about the appointment book? A salon register that does not understand the appointment it is ringing up is doing half the job — and it means double entry for your front desk forever.
What the feature lists will not tell you
How long a normal sale takes. Have someone untrained ring a colour, a blow-dry, a retail product and a split tip. Time it. This is the thing your desk will do forty times a day and the difference between systems is real.
What happens when the price changes at the desk. A discount, a comp, a gift card. Watch who the system makes carry the reduction — the salon or the stylist. That is a policy decision the software will make for you if you do not make it first.
Whether the reports answer payroll. Ask to see the day-end and the period report. If you would still need a spreadsheet to pay people, that is your Sunday evening for the next several years.
What to weigh less than you think
Loyalty and marketing modules. Most go unused. Get the customer record right and worry about campaigns later.
Deep inventory. Counting back-bar product to the millilitre is a discipline few salons sustain. Counting retail stock is worth doing.
Hardware aesthetics. It sits on a desk.
Where the differences are real
Multi-person tickets, covered above.
Rebooking prompts. Whether the system asks the client to book their next appointment at the point of payment. Rebooking rate is the best leading indicator in a salon and prompting at the desk moves it measurably.
Offline behaviour. Ask exactly what happens when the internet drops. Card payments and order entry fail differently.
Commission flexibility. If your structure has tiers, or differs between services and retail, or between a senior and a junior stylist, make them configure yours in the demo. Not a simplified version — yours.
The one-year total
The only comparable number: twelve months of software at your real staff and terminal count, plus hardware, plus processing at your real card volume, plus setup.
Build it for three vendors. The ranking frequently differs from the monthly-fee ranking, and occasionally reverses.
The half nobody compares
Every system on your shortlist handles people standing at your desk. None of them answer the phone while your stylists are working, which is when a salon actually loses bookings.
Ours is both halves in one subscription, which is the reason we exist and also an obvious bias — weigh it accordingly. The point that stands regardless is that a POS shortlist which never mentions the phone has compared half the front desk.
Sonorch POS is ours; pricing is flat by team size, so neither a second station nor a fourth stylist changes the bill.