Bellebook compared with the tools small businesses use today

What the stack looks like

It rarely arrives through a decision. It grows one question at a time: customers wanted to book themselves, the bank wanted a terminal, the staff needed a rota, someone wanted to send a newsletter. Each tool solved its own thing, and together they became this:

• A booking system for the calendar.
• A card terminal or checkout app for the payments.
• A rota in a spreadsheet, or on paper in the staff room.
• The customer register spread across the booking system, a phone and someone's head.
• An email tool for send-outs — and texts sent by hand.
• Supplier contracts and insurance papers in a ring binder.
• Spreadsheets for everything that didn't fit anywhere else.

The hand-work between the tools

It isn't the tools that cost the most. It's the stretches between them. The booking is in one system and the payment in another, so the day has to be reconciled by hand. The hours are added up from the rota at the end of the month. The customer who cancelled is still on the mailing list. And the notice period in the supplier contract is spotted only once it has already run out.

None of these jobs is hard. There are just a lot of them, they come back every week, and they're done by the person who should have been with customers. The mistakes rarely show up straight away — they surface at month end, in a reconciliation that won't add up.

What one platform changes

A platform removes the stretches. The detail is entered once and travels the whole way, instead of being copied between four systems:

• The booking becomes a payment at the checkout, the payment becomes a voucher and a day-end close, and the SIE file goes on to your accounting software.
• The employee clocks in from the calendar, and the hours are already there when payroll is reported.
• The customer who cancelled drops out of the send-out automatically, because it's the same customer record.
• The contract in Documents becomes tasks in your to-do list — notice period, warranty and response time turn up in time instead of afterwards.
• Belle reads the whole picture and prepares the next step. She writes the draft, you approve it. Nothing is sent without your confirmation.

What it doesn't change

The bookkeeping doesn't do itself. We build the records — vouchers, the day-end close, SIE export — but the bank connection, the VAT return and the annual accounts stay with your accounting software or your accountant. Anyone promising you the whole of your bookkeeping is promising too much.

We're not a marketplace either, so we send no new customers your way. And a change of system is still a change of system: it takes a while to learn, however simple it looks. The import brings customers, visit history, services, staff and products across from your previous system and reconciles it row by row before anything is saved — and you can run your current system alongside in the meantime.

Do the sums before you switch

Add up what you pay each month for booking, checkout, send-outs, the rota and that spreadsheet which is really a system. Then add the hours spent holding them together — those cost too, they just never appear on an invoice.

Compare that with our model: 1.99% per completed booking (1% extra with Klarna, Amex, foreign and corporate cards), where cancelled and rebooked appointments are never charged and the checkout, card payments and Swish are included. On anything else you sell, such as products over the counter, it's 0.99% per card transaction — never both on the same purchase. Minimum charge SEK 399 per month, no binding period, and you can export your data whenever you like.