Sawyer

Avantages

1. I love that HiSawyer is specific to use for children activities and classes. I tried other booking plugins or websites that were a "one size fits all" (appointments for nail salon or doctor's office) and well... they didn't quite fit for my business.
For instance, HiSawyer allows the possibility to see the age and birthdate of the kids, having an "older sibling discount", adding semesters or multiple locations, specially because our class doesn't have only one location... Bookings are specific for a kid's class, and it's awesome.

2. Very easy to use! All what can be done in point #1, is very easy to set up!

3. Professional look. Some other plugins I had tried before look very outdated and amateurish. I love HiSawyer fresh and professional design.

It's exactly what I was looking for for months until I bumped into HiSawyer.

Inconvénients

I really love everything about it. If I had to really look for perfection: it would be awesome if there was an app. It might be just me, but checking it from mobile can be a little bit frustrating sometimes. Nothing out of this world, not bugs or errors, just think about checking social media from a web browser in your phone.

But other than that, I love this!

Avantages

The ability to set up events for automatic online registering and not having AR at the end of the summer, or at the end of a semester.

Inconvénients

Inability to speak with someone, without buying some annual package. Why not offer technical "spot help" for a flat fee per instance? My IT guy can be reached almost 24/7 and he does alot of things over the phone or via remote connect to my laptop for $20 to $100 per whack.

Avantages

Sawyer is easy to implement and their customer service is helpful at first.They might be good if your customers all use the same main stream web browser (whichever one happens to work that day) and they are registering kids for classes without parent involvement or too many details.

Inconvénients

There is no option to add a second adult/parent to a family account.The program doesn't work with Duck Duck Go or many web browsers consistently.

Avantages

I love that I can add and change my classes and transfer students easily. I also like that I can get paid within 24 hours of my clients purchasing my classes.

Inconvénients

I wish I could also add adult classes to my options as well. I also would like to have an invoice option.

Avantages

My customers can learn about all of our programs in one place and register for them easily. I can track registration at a glance and make changes as needed.

Inconvénients

Rosters are difficult to read when printed and it's an important part of our camps.

Avantages

Hello, super cute design grabs everyone's attention. It is one of the best websites which draws customers in their market place. I think the customers love it but not much the administrators. Free trial and discount option helps to attract new customers but some customers keep taking advantage of it by changing emails and creating multiple accounts. Also this website doesn't have duplicate merging feature, phone number look up, teachers payroll report. Also editing schedule is not flexible, if clients sign up in the middle of semester, they shows up for the entire semester which they weren't even registered. I care about this company, that's why I am spending my time to write about this.
Appointments, semester, membership reconciling is not recognizing each other. Appointment and membership should have options to charge registration fees like semester. I can't wait for the apps. One day. I know it costs a fortune but it will be the next unavoidable step for sawyer. My school has an app and I know app will put Sawyer to the top!

Inconvénients

Super cute design. The market place brings customers from all over the state.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Sawyer

Avantages

Sawyer is the best tool in the game - I’ve tried them all from Square to Activity Hero, and this tool is the most streamlined and easy to use. Customers appreciate it and I can build kid-centered client accounts, robust scheduling and semesters, and easy checkouts.

Inconvénients

By far the most expensive tool in the market and there was no free trial or setup window so the expense began before I had enrollees.

Avantages

Easy to navigate. Clear and concise. Accuracy is a must for me. Your reports are always accurate and timely.

Inconvénients

I am very pleased with Sawyer's services. No complains.

Avantages

For our company, Sawyer is critical for student enrollment, being private lessons, group classes or productions.

Inconvénients

One thing that is not included is the ability to uncheck a student once it has been checked in.

Avantages

Its ease of use. Many concepts make sense. To be able to assign teachers and increase parent communication. *** Please add ability to attach files *** and please *** update your form software for custom forms - it is terrible right now ***

Inconvénients

This summer Chefsville had over 30 camps. The normal training schedule for Sawyer didn't allow for us being out working those camps so getting trained was twice as hard for Mollie.

We actually had to test, play and figure it out until she advised us and we could follow.

I still have no idea of what an acknowledgement/registration confirmation e-mail looks like and have customers calling me asking when there next payment is due and what dates our programs are.

I have a great email that I use, but I can't use that when I am trusting your software to do it along with payment receipt.

We still are not trained and know that your software does more than what we know. Mollie has been out and schools started for us this week. So we are having to scramble to find information.

We still need help with our form, our form asks several questions that your profile automatically does. I need to find where and how to get this information, change our form so it asks only one time.

Website Widget - we have no control of it! I had to figure out the coding to modify the short code to show Semesters and not camps. I did ask for help, but by the time customer service got to me, many people passed our programs over because they couldn't see how to register by changing "Camps" to "Semesters". I think your clients need to have more controls on their WordPress.

Avantages

Sawyer makes what we do to keep the business moving forward much easier. They have amazing support and desire to grow their product offering.

Inconvénients

The ability to connect to my google calendar is very important but not yet possible.

Avantages

It got me up and running fast. It is a really solid product.

Inconvénients

I like the entire product; I do, however, wish they added a way to keep track of the acutallly content of class ( cirriculum ), and profile pics of students.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Sawyer 

Pourquoi passer à Sawyer

Avantages

I like how easy it is to manage and use. Our clients seem to enjoy it as well since it allows them a lot of accessibility and privacy especially when registering. I also appreciate all of the options that we can do for creating camps and classes. Overall, there are a lot of options that we can do for our programs now that we have Sawyer.

Inconvénients

Because of how easy the program is to use, there are some options that we would appreciate having but do not have yet. For one, it would be nice to have the ability to send out receipts to clients on the financials page if we were to increase their balance or charge them through there. It would also be nice to have a notes section on the financials page so that our accountant and I don't have to look through all of our emails to find information regarding a client but instead have it readily available. Another thing, we would appreciate is if the financials alone had the ability to sort the clients by payment method and etc. And if we move to another page and press the back button, it would be nice to not have to restart but instead just have it still remaining on the clients that we searched for.

Avantages

I like the clean look of this software, and that it is easy to add, change and adjust information on my end. The dashboard helps me see all my upcoming programming and stay in communication with registered participants. It makes billing very easy, offering flexibility for participants and automatic payments so I don't need to spend time tracking this each month or sending reminders. I like the waitlist option.

Inconvénients

The cons are small things - I wish you could edit the coupon codes because I can never get them right the first time. I wish there was a printable check in/check out list as a roster setting that could fit onto one page. I would probably use a mobile app to check class registration, or be able to have different teachers use a mobile sign-in process for classes. But these are small compared to all the benefits.

Avantages

So easy for the parents to use as well as teachers. We can easily contact a parent if needed by simply pulling up the roster. The kids names are alphabetized by first name which is very helpful for kids coming to class.

Inconvénients

I like it all, however I would add a check in app that instructors can easily have on their phones. I would also reformat the printable roster so that they can fit on one or two pages instead of 7 to 8 pages.

Avantages

Easy to set up and get started. Ease of use, most things are pretty instinctual. The automatic charging is fantastic! Class management is SO MUCH easier with this system!

Inconvénients

No way to cancel all future payments, so have to go in one by one.

Avantages

Sawyer has been a blessing! It’s allowed the company to have all the registrations, tickets, forms and payment online. It’s great being able to see the finances all in one spot and create coupons, refund or cancel/transfer bookings. The classes and camps are easy to set up and modify. Clients do not have issues registering for events. There is an option to create financial reports and you can download email addresses for communications.

Inconvénients

Only one very small con. I wish we had the option change some of the wording. For example: instead of classes/sessions it’s events

Avantages

I like the process to integrate the parents to the classes. Easier and quickly!

Inconvénients

They need to put also the Spanish option because we have many latin families.

Avantages

It is so easy to use and I appreciate all the helpi hot yo set it up

Inconvénients

Nothing at all. I have been in business 39 years and wish I had done this years ago

Avantages

Easy to use for daily tasks and simple setip

Inconvénients

Nothing, it works as it should, all the buttons and screens display what should be there and no added or unnecessary information.

Avantages

The ability to move through dates on banking reports is useful.

Inconvénients

I dislike that the fees, totals and Gross numbers are not totaled at the bottom per transaction/payout. I have to manually do this with a calculator to adjust accounting for fees which seems pretty silly.

Avantages

calendar review for daily activities. This is very helpful for ONLY daily operation - like the front desk staff to do quick look up.. But, by far not for the administrator, me.

Inconvénients

Report becomes unusable when students sign up for multiple classes!
It puts ALL dates into a single cell in the report, in various order. Asked support to look at it.. Nothing can be done about that. So, I had to go through EVERY student who has signed up for more than one week to figure out.

Reports with mismatched headers.
e.g. DOB as the header, but it is actually something else like email address.
Half of them are mismatched! To say unacceptable is an understatement. I was told it was some customization issue??? No form of customization should render such a fundamental error. This clearly indicates very sub-par software.

No proper auditing.
.. cannot explain why a balance showed discrepancy.. the only reason I got was " someone must have changed it." The administrator again simply insisted that made assumption it was us, or the client making the changes. No auditing info for accountability! An unacceptable excuse! This tells me this is ot an adequately built software. I would be ok with it if the administrator did recorgnize the error and committed future improvement! But they seemed to be content placing the blame on us, or the mysterious someone!!!

Missing one of the most fundamental reporting features:
Cannot generate a report of scheduled classes unless at least one student is already registered? But, I have to manually check one by one! It would be ok if you have 10-20 classes, not 40+ like us.

Avantages

if you are in the summer camp, kid business, class business this software makes your life so much easier. Easy to understand set ups and anything you need help with a tech is available to help guide you.

Inconvénients

we have no complaints on software - honestly we love it and continue to find more ways to utilize it.

Avantages

I initially chose this software because it's specifically made for the industry I am in; play space and child groups. I like the look of the design as well.

Inconvénients

I am extraordinarily frustrated with this company. First of all, they rely on customer support people who can't solve problems, only kick them to the engineering team. I don't hear back on bugs that need fixing, or hear from anyone other than this poor guy who's getting all my issues. Second the bugs we're experiencing are completely dumb; minor things that should not be an issue by this stage of their business. Here's the issues I've encountered since starting with Sawyer in September!
1. Can't edit description of memberships because people have bought them
2. My members can't enroll themselves in what they paid for
3. There's a glitch on my website where you have to scroll down twice to get to the widget
4. There's an error in the typing of the party descriptions with characters too close together
5. Refunds cost you money because they charge you the credit card fee
6. We get random drops of income into our bank account
7. Setting up multiple groups was a MESS and needed emailing with admin many, many times (not because I'm bad at tech, but because of the system)

I could go on; honestly in the span of 4 months, I've had so many encounters with their customer service email guy, it's not good. And no one else will talk to me about it, so I'm canceling.

Avantages

Setting this up was easy. After using it for a year there are some set up features I'll change in year two to make some of the flow better. The team that helped with set-up with quick to schedule and helpful with the details and overall flow.

Inconvénients

We have to manually count how many campers are checked in vs there being a way for use see a live number of how many campers are checked in at any given time. This is a really big deal for our prograrm.
It's a poor use of our time not to mention full of errors because every camp director knows you neeed an updated count of how many campers are on site at any given time. Manually scrolling through pages is not a good use of our time and is erroneous. We did submit a request (2x) so the product team does know that it is a feature that would really make a difference if added. We need a current count as a camp for safety so we know how many kids are on site (and of course in case of a fire or other emergency as well as every day safety you want that count to be known with ease) but we also have constant check in/out so its a moving number for us and to constantly be manually counting does not work.

Alternatives envisagées