Moving from a notebook to an app in one weekend

A conversation about changing systems in a salon almost always ends in the same place. Not on price, not on features. On one sentence:

"Fine, but I have one hundred clients in a notebook. Who is going to retype that?"

And that is a fair objection. Because if the answer is "well, you sit down and retype it", then the new system costs not a few dozen złoty a month but a few evenings spent tidying up the client base. Nobody has that kind of time in season.

What retyping really costs

Let us count, because that is rarely done.

One client is a name, a phone number, sometimes an e-mail, plus a note about what they like and what to watch out for. Retyping briskly from a notebook — a legible one, your own — that is about forty seconds per person. At a hundred people it comes to more than an hour of solid typing.

An hour is the optimistic figure. In practice you also get what nobody plans for: illegible handwriting from three years ago, two numbers for the same person, "Kasia from nails" with no surname, four pages from the period when you changed the way you took notes. Realistically it is two or three evenings.

And one more thing few people think about: retyping by hand introduces errors. One digit wrong in a phone number and the appointment reminder goes nowhere. At a hundred records and a typical rate of copying mistakes, we are talking about a handful of clients you will simply never reach again.

How people usually get around it — and why it does not work

Option one: I only retype the regulars. It sounds sensible, but those are exactly the people whose details you already know by heart. The value of a base sits in the long tail — in the people who came twice six months ago and whom you have forgotten. Those are the ones worth winning back.

Option two: I retype them as they come in. After a year you have half the base in the system, half in the notebook, and the question "where do I check?" at every appointment. Two sources of truth are worse than one bad one.

Option three: I stay with the notebook. The most common one. And it works — right up to the day the notebook gets soaked, goes missing, or leaves with an employee.

The common denominator is that each of these leaves you with an incomplete base: half the names, half the history, or a single notebook you cannot rely on. And the client base is the most valuable thing in the business.

How it works in Kepili

Kepili loads your client base from a file. You retype nothing by hand.

The whole move has three steps:

1. Prepare the file. If you already have anything in a spreadsheet — in Excel, in Google Sheets, in an export from an old system — you are home. All you need is a CSV file with columns: name, phone, e-mail, note. If all you have is the notebook, this is the one evening you cannot skip: you type it all into a spreadsheet. But you do it only once, and then you throw the notebook away for good. Importing your clients in bulk like this is many times faster than entering each client record by record.

2. Upload it and check the preview. Kepili shows you what it read before it saves anything. This is the moment you catch that the phone column landed in the wrong place, or that there is an empty row sitting in the file. You fix the file and upload it again. No consequences.

3. Save. The base is in. From that moment the search finds your client by surname or by phone number, and every later appointment adds itself to the history in their profile.

What you get from day one

Once the base is loaded, every person has a profile that starts working straight away:

• visit history — what, when, with whom and for how much,
• notes — that they prefer morning slots, that they ask about dates well in advance,
• contraindications and allergies — in their own field, not in the margin of a page,
• signed consents — signed on a phone screen, with a ready PDF in the profile.

And the thing you will appreciate only after a few months: the lost clients report. A ready list of people who have not been in for a long time, together with what they last had done. You will not pull that list out of a notebook, because you would have to leaf through a year and hold every name in your head at once.

A plan for the weekend

If you want to close this in one weekend:

Friday evening — the file. Open a spreadsheet and type the notebook out: one person, one row. Do not tidy up, do not correct, do not agonise over the notes. Just keying in — and it is the only effort in the whole operation.

Saturday morning — the import. Create an account, upload the file, check the preview, save. Fifteen minutes.

Saturday — the rest of the setup. Add services with prices and durations, create accounts for your employees, set the payment methods. The wizard you get when creating an account walks you through it in order, so you do not have to guess where to start or what comes next.

Monday — you start working in the new system. The notebook stays in the drawer as an archival copy of your data and a memento of the old days of doing everything by hand. From now on you will never open it again.

What not to be afraid of

"What if the file is badly made?" — You will see it in the preview before saving. You fix it and upload again.

"What if I change my mind?" — You can download your data from Kepili at any time, in a single file: the client base, visit history and documents. You can leave whenever you want.

"What if I do not even have a notebook, just contacts in my phone?" — To create a client profile in the base, a name and a phone number are enough. You can fill in the rest during their next appointment, the first one handled entirely in Kepili.

---

The biggest difference when you change the way you keep your client base is not the subscription. It is the way you build, refine and improve that electronic base — the one you do not want to lose.

Create an account and use the full Business plan for 30 days — no limits, no complicated contract and no card. Upload your base on day one and see what the work looks like when everything is in one place.