The digital partner of spa businesses

HMS Spa did not come out of a software company’s market research but out of hotel and spa businesses themselves. A team that had worked for years in hospitality and personal care kept seeing the same three problems in every business: the appointment book and the till record not agreeing, the package balance sitting somewhere nobody knew about, and staff commission turning into an argument at the end of the month.

It was not that the programs on the market failed to solve these problems; most of them did more than that. The trouble was that the person running the business got lost in the excess. The screen reception opens a hundred times a day had been designed with the same weight as a screen used once a month. We started from the other end: the three most used screens would be the fastest, and the rest would not get in their way.

That is why the product’s feature list is kept short and every feature answers a question from the floor. “How many sessions does this client have left?”, “why didn’t the till balance yesterday?”, “who earned what this month?” If a feature did not answer that kind of question, it did not make the list.

We keep to the same approach today. A new feature gets written when several businesses ask for the same thing; a screen is not made more complicated to satisfy a single request. What we sell is not a module count but a record that balances at the end of the day.

The company has two arms: hotel management software on the hospitality side, and HMS Spa on the personal-care side. In both products we believe the same thing — the success of business software is not measured by a feature count but by whether the person at reception keeps using it.

The team is small and talks to customers directly. The people who write the software read the support exchanges; with no layer in between, the time it takes for a question from the floor to become part of the product is short. That is the most concrete benefit left to us by not being a large company.

We apply the same rule when describing our own company on this page: we do not write a figure we cannot verify. Numbers such as how many businesses use the product or how many sessions have been completed are printed only when we can also write what they count and which day they belong to. If you do not see a figure on this page, that is why.

The images we use on the site follow the same discipline. Screenshots are taken from the current version of the product; a screen that never left the design stage does not enter the marketing, because that is not how it really looks. The client names and amounts in the images are sample data, not a real business’s records.

The information on this page describes the current version of the product. We do not present a feature that does not exist, and we do not print a figure whose basis we cannot state; if something here is out of date, write to us and we will correct it. The free trial is fourteen days and no credit card is required. We reply to written requests within the same working day. Plan scope and current fees are on the pricing page, and the binding form of our commitments on personal data is in the data protection notice.