The Ultimate Boulevard Salon Software Review 2025

Our Video Review of Boulevard

Boulevard Software Features

The remainder of this article will walk you through a detailed look at the features and tools offered by Boulevard. The intent of this review is to allow you to experience what it’s actually like for your business as a Boulevard customer and to better understand if the platform offers the tools and support you need to grow and succeed.

You can use the links below to navigate directly to the topics that are most relevant to you.

• Integrations
• Online Booking
• Appointment Calendar / Scheduling
• Client Data Management
• Appointment Notifications & Alerts
• Two-Way Texting: Contact Center
• Email and SMS Marketing Tools
• Staff Management
• Business Reports
• Inventory Management
• Memberships, Packages, & Gift Cards
• Point of Sale (POS) Options
• Mobile Booking App

Boulevard Apple Calendar & Google Calendar Integration:

We’ve all run into that scenario: You’ve scheduled an errand on a workday, but you’ve forgotten to block it out on your salon scheduling software. Next thing you know, a client has booked that spot and you’re stuck with a hard decision.

This integration helps solve that problem.

Boulevard offers 2-way calendar sync with your personal Apple Calendar or Google Calendar.

Whenever an event is created in your synced personal calendar, that time block will automatically be marked out as a personal block on the synced Boulevard calendar, preventing clients from booking during that time.

Boulevard Facebook/Instagram Book Now Integration:

This is a genuinely cool integration.

Social media has never been more important for beauty businesses. Ensuring potential new clients have easy access to book with you can be a game-changer when it comes to growing your client list, revenue, and reputation.

With Boulevard’s Facebook Book Now integration, you can add a “Book Now” button to your Facebook business page (as well as your Instagram business page) that will launch your self-booking overlay where clients can get their appointment on the books.

Boulevard Quickbooks Online Integration

If you’re a Quickbooks user, this is a pretty handy addition.

Boulevard’s QuickBooks Online integration automatically syncs your sales and payment settlement data each night so that your books are accounted for automatically each morning.

This integration even gives you the option to map individual sales categories to separate accounts in Quickbooks, and it’s completely free of charge.

Tools like this are genuinely useful and cut down on unnecessary work (and your accountant’s billable hours).

Boulevard Reserve with Google Integration:

We’ve all seen the blue “BOOK ONLINE” button on a Google business listing.

That’s exactly what this integration is for – it syncs up Boulevard’s self-booking overlay to your Google Business Profile, allowing clients to book with you directly from Google Search and Google Maps.

There are some important caveats that apply to this integration that may prevent businesses from taking full advantage of its features, however.

1. Reserve with Google is unavailable to Essentials plan customers. You must upgrade your plan to Premium (+$150/month) to be eligible to use this feature)
2. You must have a Google Business Profile to use this integration
3. Per Boulevard’s Support Center article, this integration is currently not supported for customers with custom booking, as the integration will link the Book Online button to a standard Boulevard self-booking overlay
4. Businesses that are classified as a covered entity under HIPAA are currently not eligible for the integration per Google’s Merchant and Service Eligibility guidelines.

But Wait, There’s More…

These are just a few of the integrations available to salon owners and stylists within Boulevard. Check out their integrations directory to see the rest of the options available to you and your team.

Boulevard’s online booking feature page boasts advanced features such as “on-brand online self-booking” through an overlay that can be integrated into your website, as well as online gift card purchases and selective visibility for services to ensure that only the services you allow to be booked online can be.

You have the option of whether or not to require a card on file for online booking, but it is highly recommended you do so in order to protect your books and your staff’s time.

Clients can also reschedule themselves online without having to call in and take time away from your front desk.

Boulevard has trademarked its Precision Scheduling™ feature, a piece of tech that only shows clients the “best” time slots first. If the client doesn’t find any of these initial slots acceptable, they can choose to view all available slots from the menu by selecting that option.

While there is undoubtedly some algorithmic secret sauce going on behind the scenes, the simple explanation is that Precision Scheduling™ works by reviewing your current scheduled appointments and attempting to find ideally timed gaps that can be booked—either back-to-back with existing appointments or far enough apart that a future booking could fit in-between.

You can set and manage the ideal timing for this feature (i.e. 30, 60, 90 mins) in the Service Setup menu.

Boulevard customers also have the option to enable waitlist functionality for their clients.

If none of the available time slots work for the client, they can waitlist themselves directly from the online booking interface so the business can review and notify them if one of their preferred days and times opens up on the schedule. A credit card is required to join the waitlist, which helps ensure that spam is kept to a minimum.

Each time a client adds themselves, a notification is displayed on the dashboard, alerting staff members to review the waitlist where they can check appointment requests, filter by client name, date added, and requested staff or service, and attempt to fit them in.

Note that the waitlist is not automated, meaning that you will not receive future notifications if a potential matching spot opens up on the calendar — you will need to check back periodically and manually schedule appointments from waitlist entries.

The Boulevard calendar has some tricks up its sleeve. Well, on its sleeve.

Boulevard has opted for a more maximal approach to its calendar interface, with a variety of options available right at first glance.

In the menu bar at the top of the screen, the calendar features several day view options, including Day, Today, 4 Day, and Week views, as well as filters to select the individual staff member (or members) whose schedule you would like to view.

Likewise, you’re free to customize colors for your staff members from a pre-selected palette, making their schedule visually distinct from the ones sandwiched on either side. Each service provider’s scheduled hours will be highlighted in the shade you choose and all appointments will be color-matched.

To book appointments or block out time, simply click on the calendar and a booking pane will pop up from the bottom of the screen where you can search for clients, services, and more.

You can even pop up multiple booking panes at once, although attempting to book more than one appointment at a time resulted in mis-bookings in my testing.

Both appointments ended up booked on the same stylist’s schedule with the same client name, despite selecting two separate stylists and clients. As with any salon and spa booking software, it’s recommended to stick with one booking at a time.

Boulevard has some very robust client management options.

The software does this through the use of client profiles, which include details on past visits and previous purchases, and can even include social media profiles of your guests.

The client profile tool lets you enter notes and add attachments so you can keep track of before-and-after and inspo-photos, as well as important at-a-glance information like client tags so you can easily spot your loyal, no-charge, VIP, and—God forbid—banned clients.

These tags can be added at any time and are easily visible in the client profile and as icons on calendar appointments. You can even use tags in Boulevard’s marketing suite to segment your clients into audiences to market to them more effectively.

When clients book for the first time either online or through your front desk, a new client profile is instantly created and saved in the software. This feature allows you to track your client’s entire history for easy access and improved marketing opportunities down the line.

You can even set client-specific pricing for services that will be stored and automatically applied each time they book and check out.

The built-in search function allows you to search by criteria such as referral source, service provider, location, first or last appointment, and more. This level of data insight is definitely beneficial and allows you to run your business a bit more strategically.

Whether that means you keep an eye on last-appointment dates to schedule courtesy booking reminder calls for those clients who absolutely refuse to pre-book, or compile a list of suggested products based on their recurring services, purchase history, or hair-type for upsell opportunities, you’ve got several options to help you boost sales and service numbers in Boulevard.

You can also view less common client metrics at a glance, such as client lifetime client value, laid out in simple terms.

Boulevard offers a clean interface that lays out statistics like number of appointments, show rate, average time between appointments, and average visit value so you can see who your star clients are.

Boulevard supports appointment-related notifications using both email and SMS.

When a new appointment is booked, the client receives a booking email that shares the details of the appointment and Client Instructions.

If you are using the Forms and Charts add-on feature, you can include a link to any forms that need to be filled out prior to the appointment.

Client Instructions can be customized in the Manage Location menu to include information about parking, arrival time, and any other relevant information you would like your clients to know before their appointment.

By default, a reminder email will be sent two days before the actual appointment.

If the client has not responded to the reminder email, a reminder text will be sent later the same day. SMS reminders are not currently customizable, according to Boulevard’s Support Center.

Reminder timings can also be customized in the Manage Location settings to specify how many days before the appointment they are sent.

Contact Center is Boulevard’s client communications suite. As a premium add-on, it offers two-way texting as well as a custom booking line with Caller ID.

To use Contact Center, you first need to set up your booking line — a dedicated phone number that is unique to your location and where all calls and texts are sent and received.

Once that’s set up, you’re good to go with all the features Contact Center has to offer.

From the Messages screen, you can see the entire SMS conversation history between the business and the client, along with their contact info, tags, client notes, and recent appointment history.

You can also access their Client Profile by clicking on the Open Profile icon in the upper right corner of the pane. That button gives you access to the entire Client Profile, which is an incredibly helpful view to have at a glance.

From the Client Profile view, you can check past and upcoming appointments, see which products your client picked up on previous visits and which ones are suggested for their future ones, and even access any forms and charts they have on file. There are also quick access options to send an email, create a new sale, or schedule a new appointment from this screen.

From my testing, there doesn’t appear to be a way to view automated email communications from either the Messages pane or the Client Profile.

Don’t get me wrong, the client messaging features and information on offer are detailed and provide a ton of utility for business owners and front desk staff to get in touch with clients and access most of the information they need at a glance.

However, in recent years we have seen some other competitors take major steps forward in offering comprehensive client messaging suites, complete with not just automated and custom texting, but also the inclusion of reminder emails and client forms, timestamped and visible right in the messaging screen.

These added inclusions can make an already impressive client communication feature a true all-in-one communication suite.

With Boulevard, you can always dig a little deeper to find forms and most client details, but you don’t get a comprehensive conversation view that spans beyond text messages in the Contact Center just yet.

Marketing is a major focus for Boulevard, and might just be its best feature set.

In fact, one of the primary reasons I would recommend Boulevard over some of its competitors is if your business needs integrated marketing tools.

With automated campaigns, premade email and text templates, and direct access to your client data, you can quickly create marketing emails that look great and appeal to the right clients.

Boulevard’s Marketing Suite makes filling slow days and last-minute openings, reminding clients to rebook, and sending birthday messages super easy. The new text marketing feature further enhances these capabilities, allowing businesses to reach clients through their preferred communication channel.

Use client tags, appointment dates, and referral sources to create audiences that you want to get the message.

That means you don’t have to keep a mental list of birthdays or booking dates – Boulevard handles the bookkeeping for you, so all you have to do is select who you want to reach, and you’re good to go.

Depending on your subscription tier, the number of free emails included with your plan can range from 500 – 10,000, and more can be sent for an additional fee per email. The new text marketing feature complements this, allowing businesses to reach clients through SMS campaigns.

For text marketing, Boulevard provides a dedicated phone number unique to each business location, ensuring client recognition and improving response rates. All text communications, including client notifications and marketing messages, are sent from this same number.

If clients do book with you within 7 days of receiving one of your marketing emails, Boulevard takes a $2 fee for that booking.

Unfortunately, there is not a clear-cut way to determine attribution from Boulevard’s email marketing suite.

If you send an email to your client and they happen to book within 7 days, Boulevard will charge you the fee, regardless of whether the client booked because of that email.

According to the Boulevard Support Center: “All bookings made within 7 days of receiving a marketing email are attributed [to the email], regardless of how they’re made (from the email button, self-booking overlay, or call to book).”

Not the most elegant approach to billing, and one that’s likely to inflate the monthly cost of bookings whether or not they’re a direct result of your marketing efforts. However, the addition of text marketing does provide businesses with more options to engage clients and potentially increase bookings.

Boulevard allows you to manage staff information at a pretty detailed level.

Staff members have individual accounts that can be customized to have the exact permissions and privileges you choose to give them access to.

You can distinguish between Privilege Groups in Boulevard to allow or disallow access and administrative privileges within the app. You can take advantage of a few preset categories or create your own custom privilege groups and assign privileges accordingly.

The list of privilege options available is pretty extensive, ranging from basic access to the web app and mobile app to admin tasks like viewing and editing sales, and even more complex permissions such as viewing and editing client information and notes, creating and modifying form templates, and responding to client text messages in the Messages tab.

Adding Staff members to the system and getting their permissions set up is relatively simple, but enabling services as “assignable” to those employees is where things got a bit more challenging in my testing.

Rather than adding a bulk service category (“Extensions” or “Color”, for example), an admin is required to go through and enable each service they wish to be bookable for a particular staff member, one by one.

There is no dropdown menu or checkbox option — you must select the Customize button for each service and then select the Assignable option for each one as well.

Some customer reviews have mentioned this as a sticking point for them as well, so it appears that this experience is not isolated to my testing.

Overall, the staff management options on offer in Boulevard are extensive and full-featured, just like the majority of its other systems, but some quality of life improvements to assigning services would be a major benefit to usability, especially for larger businesses with several services providers.

Reporting is another strong-suit for Boulevard.

The software offers dozens of reports, covering standards like sales summaries, staff performance, and inventory on-hand, as well as more complex business insights reports for things like booking forecasts, account liability, and more.

Boulevard also offers beta reports, which are highly customizable experimental reports that can analyze various metrics.

Beta reports can be customized to drill down on specific data that is relevant to your business objectives.

These reports can be both very useful and occasionally buggy (they are beta reports, after all), but their benefit as even an experimental free feature is clear.

Products and inventory can be managed within the app from the Boulevard dashboard.

You can add products, set prices, adjust item counts, and receive purchase orders (on Premier, Prestige, and Enterprise plans only) right from the Products tab on Manage Location screen.

Newly added products will not show up in checkout by default. Each new product added will need to be enabled (toggled on) for each location they are stocked in to be rung up and checked out.

For Premier and Enterprise customers, usage-based pricing is available. This allows the business to track product usage whether or not a product is sold as retail.

This is a highly useful feature for med spas that perform injectable services or that otherwise use products that they wish to charge by-the-unit for, as well as beauty and wellness businesses that sell retail products that can also be used in-service.

Boulevard offers support for packages, gift cards, and memberships to help encourage repeat visits and build recurring revenue.

Packages can be sold online and in-store, assigned a custom tax rate and price, and tracked in inventory to help with reporting as well.

Each service in the package becomes a redeemable voucher, and can be assigned an expiration date if you choose.

Memberships are set up as subscriptions, can be assigned custom term lengths, and will automatically renew on the term date, charging the credit card on file to help ensure that transactions are smooth and painless for both the business and clients alike.

Boulevard also offers both digital and on-demand physical gift cards with custom artwork and printing options through their partner, eCard systems.

You can access checkout right from the calendar screen by clicking on the appointment and selecting the Checkout option.

The checkout pane will pop out and allow you to type in or scan any products the client wants to purchase, as well as add gratuity to the service.

There is also a convenient prebooking interface on the left side of the checkout pane with buttons for 4-, 6-, and 8-weeks so you can jump straight to the week you want on the calendar, get your client on the books, and finish checkout as efficiently as possible.

Considering how crucial prebooking is to generating recurring revenue and boosting client retention, and how long it traditionally takes to prebook clients, I’m surprised more salon and spa software companies don’t offer a similar option at checkout.

The POS hardware offered by Boulevard is the Boulevard Duo, and EMV-certified Bluetooth card reader that accepts dip, tap, and swipe transactions and supports Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The Duo reader requires syncing to the Boulevard Duo iPad App, so an iPad must be connected to the reader to take physical payments in-store.

Important Note: If you choose to skip the Duo reader, you can still use the Duo app to collect gratuity, check in clients, and collect digital forms.

Boulevard’s main app runs in any web browser and is recommended for use in Chrome.

The Boulevard Professional mobile app can be used to view and edit appointments and client information from your mobile device, as well as view basic performance metrics, and is available on the Apple Store and the Google Play store.

Boulevard states that the Professional app is intended to supplement, not replace the desktop version, as it does not offer the full functionality that users can expect from the desktop web app.

The Professional app has a user rating of 3.5/5 stars on the Apple App Store (with 36 reviews) and a rating of 2.1/5 stars on the Google Play Store (with 31 reviews) as of the writing of this review.

Based on user multiple user reviews, the overall sentiment of both the iOS and Android apps is that they currently offer a buggy experience, lack some polish in the user interface (UI), and that the backlog of feature requests is moving slowly.

This feedback is even more pronounced on the Android side of things, where the majority of complaints revolve around functionality-breaking bugs and a lack of support overall.

Obviously, the Professional app is a must-have if you are a Boulevard customer, although I do hope to see major bugfixes come to both Android and iOS versions.

I would also really like to see more features from the desktop version of Boulevard make their way to mobile in the near future.