Sawyer

Avantages

- Very user friendly on the customer facing side.
- The interface on both the customer and admin side is clear and pretty easy to navigate.
- I love the ability to copy classes and semesters to more easily duplicate past schedules.
- Class widget is convenient, especially with recent updates.

Inconvénients

- Appointments can only be made with minors, not adults, and they do not support small group appointments.
- Reporting features could be clearer/more accurate, we've had issues with bugs causing inaccurate financial reports.
- I wish there was a way to download registration reports for select classes all at once; the semester-wide registration report includes students who already withdrew, and going class by class is tedious and time consuming.
- Class attendance can only be viewed for one student at a time instead of seeing full class attendance across multiple instances. Also no option for attendance records for adults?
- I dislike that store credit/gift card balance is locked behind a higher subscription tier. This seems like a basic feature that should not be paywalled.
- No way to mass edit activity information currently.

Avantages

The interface has strengths, easy to use but plenty of idiotic limitations

Inconvénients

After a month, they “informed” me yhey would be adding a $2 fee for every transaction for their R&D efforts. Which is absurd, prices already are so high and they charge a fortune for their service. Also, they marketed other similar businesses via email to MY customers for birthday and special events. Places customers had been to once, they got emails once they were back on Sawyers radar. Onboarding customers is terrible. Work for your customers. Plenty of glitches too. Sawyer is out for 1 business, and that is themselves. Not you.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Sawyer 

Pourquoi passer à Sawyer

Avantages

We currently use Sawyer but are reconsidering our options given a massive issue.

Inconvénients

We are a membership-based studio, and Sawyer allowed multiple members to continue renewing their memberships for MONTHS without flagging that their card on file could not be charged. It doesn't appear that Sawyer notified the members either. We only discovered this issue when we did an audit to see why we were missing funds. Now we have to have difficult calls with multiple members and attempt to collect back-owed membership fees going back months. Sawyer should notify a business and member IMMEDIATELY if a charge on a card doesn't go through. This is ridiculous.

Avantages

Everyone at Sawyer was super helpful when I was first getting set up. Very easy to talk to, clear & concise communication. I couldn’t have opened up my studio classes without all of their help.
The reports helped me tremendously when I was doing my taxes.

Inconvénients

It is expensive for a business as small as mine. Some months it’s difficult for me to be able to cover the cost of the website plus my rent.
I wish I could afford to pay for the Parties option. I think a lot more people would have been booking parties this whole time if they could have done it online.

Just recently, after I create an activity, unless it’s brand new, I am unable to add more images to the activity when I try to edit it. It just uploads a solid black image

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Sawyer

Avantages

It is flexible in the option of weekly registrations and can be integrated with the teachers' roster.

Inconvénients

It does not have CRM integrations or more complete profiles for tracking students or families. Additionally, orders processed by families must allow for late start in prorating and start date selection.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Sawyer 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Sawyer

Avantages

Customer Support and help. They are always available to help and address our concerns and special requests in a manner I have not experienced elsewhere.

Inconvénients

Although their software is extremely versatile and they continue to improve it, it does not offer me (a one-man operation) the precise, simple, user friendly, efficient flexibility. However, they have offered me several alternatives to customize they services to my individual needs.

Avantages

I love the flexibility in the scheduling.

Inconvénients

I would like a more efficient way to see when we have waiting lists, would love if that were listed on student schedules and on class rosters. I also would love if when you click "upcoming", the first day of classes would pop up if we were not yet at that time block (example, when checking in May for September classes).

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

It’s pretty easy to use. I like that I can easily view my upcoming events in the calendar and quickly add new events and publish updates.

Inconvénients

There is a slight learning curve with learning how to post classes and use certain features.

Avantages

Great people to work with to get set up. Clean, easy to use interface on the client end. Fast responses when minor issues popped up. Reasonable price for the ease of mind of having a well-organized booking system.

Inconvénients

Widget is very glitchy on phones and freezes while scrolling. It would be nice to be able to change Sawyer terms like "semester" to "quarter" or other terms that fit what I'm doing more appropriately. It would be nice to be able to separate and group classes for different customer groups more easily.

Avantages

Customer service is great. Most aspects of the portal are easy to use.
I also love the fact that they know their clients.

Inconvénients

It would be nice to have a way for parents to pay through their bank account so they and we are not charged a service fee. For a small business like ours and for our families, every little bit makes a difference.

Avantages

Sawyer makes my business possible. I need a registration software that is easy for me and is easy for busy parents, and that's exactly what Sawyer provides.

Inconvénients

Sawyer would be even more usable if I could sell tickets through it for events. Also, I'd love to be able to integrate Sawyer with Flodesk.

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

easy to use for providers. Helps with finding new customers

Inconvénients

I would improve the calendar function, is not easy for parents who always ask providers the dates of classes.

Avantages

It is user friendly and the customer support is great.

Inconvénients

I haven't experienced any cons so far. We do not use all the features.

Avantages

Sawyer has been SO incredibly user friendly and has allowed me to confidently market my classes and confirm registrations so much easier than using my old method of Google forms.

Inconvénients

I would love to see more email integrations!

Avantages

It does almost everything I need for camp registration, payments, coupons, payment plans, class descriptions, etc.

Inconvénients

Very expensive. We are a small non-profit and need the functionality, but the price tag is difficult. In addition, our clients pay $1.99 for transactions. I wasn't aware of this at first. I had some upset customers.

Avantages

The ease of use and the customer support. I also appreciate the webinars.

Inconvénients

The dashboard can be a little difficult to navigate. I do fine now but when I first started using sawyer it wasn't always clear where everything "lived", if that make sense. The website looks great though.

Avantages

The calendar widget interface is the best. I LOVE everything about Sawyer and I also am SOOOO appreciative that they continue to strive to improve and add more needed features.

Inconvénients

I want to be able to edit parent info. MANY parent accidentally type in .con on thier email and I want to be able to go edit it quickly.

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

The reporting tools we have access to and how we are able to break down different information we look at monthly.

Inconvénients

When creating a new class it is difficult to go back in and edit required information and make changes in general.

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

Sawyer is very easy to use and has a great support team. We use sawyer for our non-profit for registration and class management and it is very useful

Inconvénients

I think there are some things that can be easier to do however i can always find a workaround.

Avantages

Online payment system. Classes can be duplicated. In system communication with clients.

Inconvénients

Plug in within square space sometimes does strange things.

Avantages

It handles the administrative and financial aspects of my business.

Inconvénients

It can sometimes be a little counterintuitive to use.

Avantages

Easy to access attendance for all of my classes

Inconvénients

I have nothing bad to say about this product

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

Very easy to enroll parents and process payments.

Inconvénients

Color on the widgets should be optional.

Avantages

Everything is so easy to navigate and set up my classes. It’s user friendly for my customers.

Inconvénients

I don’t really have anything that I speak of…Sawyer has been great!

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

"School is the factory of humanity" said Comenius. So Sawyer is a powerful brick for humanity and progress, evolution because it helps studenta, teachers and educational system.

Inconvénients

Nothing like least about Sawyer because is very organized, useful for all categories.

Avantages

I like that it makes my business look professional. I have a lot more students in my classes since using Sawyer and I feel the look of the registration page is a big part of that. My parents have the confidence to register because I look organized.

The payment processing is another feature that has helped me save time and awkward asking for payment from my parents. It is set up online an I don't have to worry about non-payment. Its amazing!

Inconvénients

I wish it didn't cost quite as much. I am a very small art studio with only 60 students for the whole semester. I find the cost is worth it since I have more students than I did without it.

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

What I like most is the teachers can access all of the students enrolled in their classes, their information in emergency contacts. I like that parents can most of the time figure out how to register online pretty easily.

Inconvénients

We had several students want to add or delete days, or change their days attending the preschool. When we made changes, it really messed up the child’s attendance days. It registered them for days they were not coming and vice versa. We have a ticket in to Sawyer for this. It is a bug that has been popping up for the last six months while we’ve been integrating this into our program.

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

We love using Sawyer! It is easy to set up our programs and registration for our programs. Parents love the UI and it is optimized for mobile, making it very user friendly and easy to register their children for our programs from their phones. We love that our coaches can easily check rosters from their mobile phones and are able to track attendance. Great product. Excellent support. Highly recommend!

Inconvénients

I wish that Waitlisted participants would automatically get notified when a space opens up for a program, so that they could easily transfer from Waitlist to Enrolled and become Registered.

I wish that we could automate a welcome email to participants after they register for one of our programs.

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

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

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

It can be imbedded on your website. Visually it is appealing to the purchaser.

Inconvénients

Instead of paying out event registration income once, after the event, or one time at the end of each month, they pay out micro payments every 3 days. This renders keeping your checks and balances almost impossible, and we are currently paying extra payroll hours for our accountant to tally up each payment (We are talking about payouts as small as $1.25, when we are receiving as much as 10K a month with their platform). Can you imagine your accountant adding up all of those micropayments to hit 10K? It equates to hours of work. The whole process does not at all match industry standards and is very unrealistic for companies to handle. It's a hidden expense that makes the platform not worth the use.

Avantages

I like being able to create a calendar of all our upcoming events. Sawyer makes it easy to handle registration, create rosters, assign instructors and processes payments quickly

Inconvénients

I would like it if Sawyer did more to promote events and activities in market areas. Unlike Eventbrite, Sawyer is not a name recognized by parents searching for classes for their children. In fact, it is difficult to even find Sawyer in a Google search since a clean water company with the same name comes up first.

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

I like the simplicty of the software and the easy navigability. I also appreciate the ease of making payments. The quick pay feature can be a lifesend for unique billing situations. In addition, Sawyer has an active directory listing. We've gotten a number of new clients this way who have become committed customers.

The group development meetings have been helpful, along with the additional office hours with both the front-end and back-end teams. I've gotten much better results from Sawyer when I've been able to communicate with people directly about my issues.

Inconvénients

The main issue I have is the frequency of bugs in the system. I've had many bugs appear on Sawyer such as difficulties logging in, glitches in payment processing (thankfully no double payments have been made though), glitches in changing pre-existing schedules, glitches in viewing reviews, and more.

I also wish the Sawyer software could be more automated and more easily integrated into other services. We have to recreate a lot of inforamtion from Sawyer events such as Google Calendar events, payment reminders, and automated emails because these features are not fully included. It creates extra effort on our part that I would prefer to avoid.

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

The software is SO easy to use! When you’re setting it up and training other employees it’s easy to see that it’s hard to mess anything up!

Inconvénients

No Point of sale feature available. We still pay for another 3rd party software for this part

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 

Avantages

I love how easy it is to use for both the admin side and the parent side. I also love that the item will be held in your cart for a certain amount of time while you finish registration questions and payment- this was a huge game changer for our camp which sells out in minutes.

Inconvénients

The only feature I do not like is that if I have a parent register multiple kids for multiple camps, and down the road needs to cancel just ONE of the camps for one of the kids. In both the parent portal, my staff admin side as well as the receipt for tax purposes it will still show that camp that was canceled. I’ve talked with Saywer staff about this and I am hoping that this can be changed in the future.

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 is so easy to use compared to the software that we left. Viewing of the software is clean and straight forward. We do wish that there was app for both us and the consumer to use to sign up and cancel classes out.

Inconvénients

We wish that there was app for both us and the consumer to use to sign up and cancel classes out. We also hope that clients will be able to cancel out class themselves