Corterra Book
Search for a spa POS system and the results are split between two things that are not the same product. Square, Clover, and SumUp are point-of-sale systems that added appointments. Vagaro and the salon-specific platforms are appointment systems that added a till. Which side of that line you buy from matters more than any feature comparison, because the two were designed around different assumptions about what a sale is.
We make Corterra Book, which sits on the appointment side of that line, so we are not neutral. What follows is the checklist we would hand somebody evaluating any of them, including us, and there is a section at the end on where we are the wrong answer.
The assumption that breaks
A retail POS is built around a straightforward transaction: an object has a price, the customer takes the object, money changes hands, inventory drops by one. Every part of that system assumes the thing being sold exists as a unit with a barcode.
Now run a normal Tuesday afternoon at a wellness facility through it. A member arrives for a service her membership already covers, so the line total is zero. She adds a sauna session that comes out of a ten-pack she bought in March. Her friend is with her and uses the guest pass that comes with the membership. She wants to tip the therapist on a visit where nothing was charged. She buys a bottle of oil on the way out, which is the only part of the whole transaction that resembles retail. She pays for the oil with a card, and puts the twenty dollar tip on Venmo because that is what she has.
Nothing in that sale is a barcode. Most of it is drawing down against something already paid for, and the money that does move is split across two tenders with a tip attached to a line that cost nothing. A retail POS handles this by making the front desk lie to it: ring the covered service as a zero-dollar item, keep the pack count on paper, and put the tip through as a miscellaneous sale.
The eight cases worth testing
Take these to any demo. They are the ones where systems built for objects start failing, and they are all ordinary rather than exotic.
| Case | What to ask | Why it breaks things |
|---|---|---|
| A covered visit | A member's service is included in her plan. What does the sale look like? | The total is zero, but a service was performed and somebody should be credited for it. Many systems either refuse a zero-dollar sale or record it as a discount, which destroys the revenue report. |
| Tipping a zero-dollar visit | Can she tip on that same visit, on the card reader? | A percentage tip needs a basis, and there is none. If the prompt is calculated from the total it never appears, which is how a therapist loses a tip on the visits most likely to produce one. |
| Drawing on a prepaid pack | She bought ten sessions in March. Does the front desk see the balance without looking it up? | If the balance is not on the checkout screen, staff charge full price for something already paid for. This is the single most common leak. |
| Split tender | Ninety on a card, forty in cash, twenty on Venmo. | Card processors do not split a payment for you. The system has to take several tenders against one sale and only close it when the balance reaches zero. |
| A comp with a reason | Manager comps a service. Who did it, and why? | A comp with no recorded reason is indistinguishable from theft at the end of the month. Ask whether the reason is required, and whether a comp can be undone. |
| Tip on part of a cart | A massage and a bottle of oil. Should the customer be prompted to tip on the oil? | No, and a system that prompts on the cart total is asking your customer to tip on retail. Per-service control is the fix. |
| Card on file, charged later | Service happens, then the card is charged from the back office. | This is normal in wellness and unusual in retail. It needs a stored card, an off-session charge, and a no-show fee path with consent captured at booking. |
| A group on one payment | Four people in a couples room or a contrast suite, one person paying. | If the system models one client per slot, four people is four appointments and four separate sales, and the group is invisible as a group. |
Processing rates are the real price, not the subscription
A subscription is a fixed number you notice once a month. Processing is a percentage of everything you take, and at wellness volumes it dwarfs the subscription. This is the number to compare, and it is the one most comparison articles skip.
Three platforms that publish their rates, as advertised at the time of writing:
| Card present | Card not present | Subscription | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mangomint | 2.45% plus 15 cents | 2.90% plus 30 cents | $120/mo plus $10 per user |
| Momence | 3.70% plus 5 cents | 3.90% plus 30 cents | Free to $199/mo by tier |
| Corterra Book | Your own Stripe rate, plus 15 cents | Your own Stripe rate, plus 15 cents | $40 or $80/mo |
Run it at your own volume before deciding anything. On $30,000 a month in card-present sales, the gap between 2.45% and 3.70% is about $375 a month, which is more than most of these subscriptions cost. A platform with a cheap subscription and a marked-up processing rate is usually the expensive option, and the arithmetic only becomes obvious after you have moved.
Two things to check specifically. First, whether the rate is the processor's or the platform's: a pass-through model means you keep whatever rate you negotiate as you grow, while a bundled rate means you do not. Second, whether a percentage rides on anything besides card payments. Momence's free tier, for example, carries a 5% transaction fee and a 4% service fee on top of processing, which makes it a revenue-share plan rather than a free one.
What about a salon rather than a spa?
Most of the above holds, with two differences that change the shortlist.
Retail is a much larger share of a salon's revenue, so inventory depth, product commission, and back-bar tracking matter in a way they rarely do at a wellness facility. A salon should weight those heavily, and the salon-specific platforms are genuinely better at them.
Commission structures are also more complex. Booth renters, tiered commission, and product commission on top of service commission are normal in a salon and almost absent from a sauna studio. If that describes your business, ask about payroll integration early, because it is the feature most likely to be missing or sold as an add-on.
What stays the same is the tipping and split-tender behaviour, which is where generic POS systems struggle regardless of which kind of business you run.
Where Corterra Book fits, and where it doesn't
Where it fits:
- Every case in the table above. Split tender across card, cash, and named other tenders such as Venmo or a check. Tips controlled per service, including a reader prompt on a zero-dollar covered visit. Comps that require a reason and can be reversed. Prepaid pack and credit balances shown on the checkout screen with the remaining count. Card on file charged after service, and no-show fees with consent captured at booking.
- Group sales. One booking holds several seats and one person checks the whole party out, because capacity is modelled as seats rather than as separate appointments.
- You keep your own processing rate. Payments run through your own Stripe account. We add 15 cents a transaction and take no percentage, so the rate you negotiate as you grow stays yours.
- Retention tooling is not a tier. Memberships, prepaid packs, credits, combos, gift cards, and promo codes are on both plans.
Where it doesn't:
- Below roughly $700 a month in card volume, a free percentage-fee plan beats our $40. If you are pre-revenue, take a free tier somewhere and come back later. We would rather say that than sell you a subscription you cannot yet justify.
- No payroll and no accounting sync. Commission-heavy salons should weigh this hard. We report revenue and tips per staff member, but exporting to a payroll system is manual.
- Retail is supported, not deep. Products, inventory counts, and retail lines in a sale all work. Purchase orders, supplier management, and back-bar tracking do not exist.
- No loyalty program, referrals, review requests, or lead capture. If the POS is meant to be your marketing stack too, look at Vagaro or Mangomint.
- No consumer marketplace. If the real problem is that not enough people know you exist, Mindbody's directory is a channel we simply do not have.
- Several separate service calendars is the $80 Pro plan, not the $40 one.
- No standalone bookable resource. The calendar is per service, so a room is represented by running its services on that room's calendar rather than as an object tracked across many services.
The thing worth deciding first
Before comparing any two products, work out what you are mostly selling, because it determines which side of that opening line you should be shopping on.
If the thing being consumed is a person's time and the room is incidental, which describes a facial, a haircut, or a massage, then an appointment platform with a good till is the right shape. If a meaningful share of revenue is a room or a machine rather than a person, which describes a sauna, a cold plunge, a contrast suite, a float tank, or a hyperbaric chamber, then capacity is the thing your checkout has to understand, and most of the category will ask you to invent a staff member called Sauna A to make the sale go through.
Both of those room cases are worth taking seriously, and neither is more important than the other. A single-occupancy room can be faked with a fake staff member, at the cost of paying per calendar for a space that draws no wage and polluting every revenue-by-staff report you run afterward. A shared room that seats eight cannot be faked at any price, and the failure mode is selling more seats than the room has. Most facilities have both in the same building.
If that is your situation, the POS question and the booking question are the same question, and answering them with two products is how the front desk ends up keeping a paper record of pack balances.
FAQ
What is the best POS system for a small salon? For a small salon where retail and commission matter, the salon-specific platforms fit better than a generic POS, because inventory, product commission, and payroll are built in rather than bolted on. For a small wellness facility selling memberships and prepaid packs, the deciding feature is whether pack balances and coverage appear on the checkout screen, since that is where money leaks.
Does a spa POS need an appointment booking system? In practice yes, because the sale and the appointment are the same event. A POS that does not know what was booked cannot tell whether a service was covered by a membership, drawn from a pack, or owed in full, so the front desk has to work it out manually every time.
How much does a spa POS system cost? Subscriptions in this category run from free to about $200 a month for a single location, but the subscription is usually the smaller number. Processing is 2.45% to 3.9% of everything you take, so on $30,000 a month the spread between the cheapest and most expensive rate is roughly $375 monthly, more than most subscriptions. Compare processing first.
Can a spa POS handle tips on a zero-dollar member visit? Some can and many cannot, and it is worth testing in the demo. A percentage tip needs a basis to calculate from, so a visit totalling zero often produces no tip prompt at all. The fix is a system that offers fixed tip amounts on the reader when there is no percentage basis, since covered member visits are among the most likely to be tipped.
Can a spa POS take two different payment methods for one sale? It has to be built for it. Card processors do not split a payment, so the system must record several tenders against one sale and close the sale only when the balance reaches zero. Ask specifically about cash plus card plus something like Venmo or a check, since the third tender is the one usually missing.
Do I need a card reader, or can I key in cards? Card-present rates are meaningfully cheaper than keyed or card-not-present rates, roughly a point in some of the pricing above, so a reader pays for itself quickly at volume. Keying should be the exception, and a stored card charged after service is the better answer for regulars.
Selling memberships, packs, and rooms rather than barcodes? Start a 15 day free trial at corterrabook.com and run your own Tuesday afternoon through the checkout.