January 2023 - Product Updates

We're kicking off the new year in the only way we know how: by improving the product you use every day.

This month's product updates represent a major step in Swift's maturity as a product. Earlier, if you collected payments in person - you just hit "mark as paid" and moved on. The problem with this is that Swift's reporting capabilities can never be accurate, because we don't know how much you collected!

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Not anymore! With today's changes, you'll be able to do things like:

1. Charge or refund a customer's card directly from the app
2. Schedule an automatic charge on a customer's card the day before the booking
3. Charge or refund a customer's package/membership credits from the calendar
4. Charge or refund over a Swift Point-of-Sale (POS) system
5. Collect payments via cash, cheque, or "other" and indicate exactly how much was paid or refunded in Swift
6. Mark someone as "pay later"
7. Waive a charge or refund

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We've also improved the user experience on the calendar, in terms of how to add and remove people from bookings.

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Let's look at these improvements in reverse order (because the calendar booking improvements affect everyone on Swift):

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Calendar Booking Improvements

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In order to enable in-person payments and reporting, we had to re-think how adding participants to events should work. Ideally, we're able to note down how each participant is paying for an event without slowing you down.

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The calendar is one of our most loved pages, so anytime we modify it - we make sure to think really hard to ensure we've come up with the best possible user experience (UX) for you and your staff.

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We're obviously biased here, but what we've come up with is even better than what existed before. This is how it works:

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1) Creating Bookings

This works largely the same way as before, with a slight twist.

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Earlier, creating a booking in the calendar involved adding your booking details (date, time, location, etc) AND participants (staff and customers) all in one step.

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Now, this has been split up into two separate steps - allowing a faster creation process and the ability to note payment for each participant as you add them

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3) Adding or Removing Staff

For one-off bookings (non-repeating), you can just choose your staff member and they'll automatically be added to the booking. You can also just hit the "x" icon and easily remove them.

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For repeat bookings, when you try to add a staff member, just hit the "Manage bookings" icon and a new screen will show up. This will let you choose exactly which bookings in the group you want to add them to, or remove them from.

• Hit the "+" icon to add them to a new booking
• Hit the "x" icon to remove them from a booking

The summary at the bottom should confirm your changes, and you can just hit "Add staff" or "Save" to confirm.

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One-off Booking

Repeating Booking

4) Rescheduling Staff

Rescheduling or moving staff from one booking in a group to another is even easier! 

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You can go to the same "manage bookings" screen for a specific staff member, and use the "recycle" icon to reschedule them.

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Just click the booking you want to reschedule them to, and the summary below should reflect your changes.

5) Adding or Removing Customers

The same process holds true for customers, but instead of a "summary" we now have a receipt!

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This receipt intelligently estimates the price for each booking that you add the customer to - but you're able to modify these as you see fit.

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You can then collect payments (more on that later), and add/remove them to/from the bookings.

6) Rescheduling Customers

Just like with staff, you can use the "recycle" icon to move customers from one booking to another.

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Rescheduling customers produces no "sum" in the receipt, which means you can do it in one click without any additional charges or refunds!

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Swift will intelligently "move" the original charge to the new booking instead of the old one.

Payment Collection

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest requests we heard from our larger facility owners was that collecting in-person payments was tough with Swift. There was no place to indicate how much a customer paid - which meant any reporting done outside of Stripe would be inaccurate.

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This is no longer true! Now, when adding customers to bookings - you'll see an "estimated amount" that they should pay for this booking.

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You can then:

• Mark the amount as "pay later" by hitting the clock icon (ex: they're on the phone and they're asking you to make the booking, but they'll pay when they come in)
• Waive the payment completely by hitting the dollar icon (ex: they're a loyal customer and you want to give them a free booking)
• Collect the payment on the spot with a variety of options, as shown below.

And the most exciting news of all, Swift now has it's own point-of-sale (POS) system - courtesy of our payments provider Stripe!

Visit your Settings page to figure out which model to order, and how to purchase it.

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PS: If you already have a POS system you use and love, no worries! All the billing changes below will work just fine with other point-of-sale terminals - you just won't be able to directly "send" the charge from Swift but the reporting will be equally accurate.

With all these payment options, you can finally use Swift end-to-end to cover all the transactions that happen at your facility.

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And this is true for both charges AND refunds!  Let's see this in action:

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Charge/refund card on file

You can apply a charge or a refund directly to a card saved on file. Please note that you cannot refund to a card more than what was originally paid.

Schedule automatic payment

Another great option is scheduling a payment - this will schedule the amount specified to be automatically charged to the customer's card some time period before the booking. 

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This time period is based on your cancellation policy (aka if your policy is 24hrs - once they're within 24hrs of their booking, the card will be charged).

Charge/refund package & membership credit

If the customer has a membership or package with valid credits, you can also add them to the booking and directly redeem credits during the process. The same is true for refunding credits when removing a customer!

Charge/refund with point of sale (POS)

With the Swift POS terminal, you can charge a customer and send the charge directly to the device. Once they pay, that payment will "come back" into Swift and they'll successfully be added to the booking.

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When refunding, the card used to pay at the device is the one that will receive the refund (you don't need the device for this).

Charge/refund with another POS device OR cash/cheque/other

If you're using another POS terminal, or cash/cheque/Venmo/Bitcoin/some other payment method - you can indicate that as well.

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We've provided a "Notes" section for any optional info you may want to jot down for accounting purposes.

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And that's all folks!

The calendar improvements should speed up your day-to-day work, and our point-of-sale + in-person payments feature is a huge step in unlocking advanced sales & revenue reporting.

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If you have any feedback on the changes (good or bad) - let us know by replying to this email!

What's next?

Here's a taste of what's coming up in the next few months:

• Sales & revenue reports
• One-off payments
• Email marketing v2
• SMS notifications (finally)
• A branded mobile app?!
• and more....

To stay in the loop with the latest updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter @runswiftapp.

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