HoneyBook Review

Honeybook you say? Yes, dear. That’s what I said when Lindsay, my wifey, and office manager came to me with the approach of signing up. I did it blindly, without thinking of benefits and consequences. Oh don’t worry there’s a trial 14 days to be exact. It took me 4 days to send Daniel a message saying take my money! The only regret I have is doing it at this point and not earlier. However; it was not a bad thing to start now, we needed it. It’s actually perfect timing because it allowed openings for other things at the current moment that would have been hard to start previously.

Now if you would like to review all the way through I’d recommend it but, you can sign up here and save 20% off:  Honeybook Free trial plus 20% off

I did the all-inclusive, white glove, let me have it all Founding Membership package, I knew I’d be in it for the long run. Lets explore what I’ve learned in a month of use.

What is HoneyBook? I was asked to describe it at a recent convention for NACE. I proudly said it was a software platform that allows you to streamline your booking, contracts, and payment schedules. But learning further it’s a bit more; a lot more! Honeybook manages your communications in a nice feed that makes more sense than email. That feed is grouped within your pipeline in events.  The interface is super easy to use; a few icons to get used to but nothing complicated at all.

Trial Run:

You can sign up here for a trial run. It allows you 14 days to run through without any risk, and no credit card required. That’s awesome! Most trials force you into their services when you forget to cancel. Not here. So during the trial run you’ll have full functionality of all the features, including support, chat and getting paid.
There are so many features to it that I could go on for days about it but let me highlight some of the basics and interface that you’ll need right away.

Contact Form:

This is what I recommend you start with first. Manually entering events is able to be done but who wants to do that. Honeybook has an integrated contact form that when embedded it automatically goes to your inbox and your feed/pipeline areas. Get your contact form up and running and embedded in your website right away so all the new contacts will be landing on your lap and directly into your pipeline. Here’s a video tutorial I made for inserting links:

The contact form can be customized to have required or flexible inputs. You can even change the suggestion and sample blank form field to give your new inquiry some guidance. I set my price point blank field suggestion to near my pricing. See it here: HoneyBook Embedded Contact Page It really is easy and quick to set up.

Pipeline:

Being unfamiliar with the layout, it took me a about 2 minutes to grasp the layout and where everything is. Simple is better. The pipeline is where everything you need right now lives. It is your events and communication to the outside world. All of the events you have scheduled or that have inquired will populate here. Once you get a few inquiries you’ll see the organization it allows. Sorting through many different options to include new inquiries, follow up’s and proposals sent.

More importantly, retainers paid! Heck yes! Who doesn’t like to get paid for what they love to do. That’s what Honeybook did for me. Got me paid quicker, faster and no scheduling phone calls and makes it easier for our couples.  My first wedding who booked told me it was super easy, and very familiar feeling when she was checking out. She said the venue for an upcoming wedding at the Crystal Ballroom used something similar if not the same. I was sold. Being in the trial phase and taking payments was difficult for me to swallow because now I’m semi-committed.

Calendar:

You already have a calendar setup I am sure. I did, I was using iCloud calendar for years, I have an iPhone and could have gone google but with sync across platforms and ease of use for me I chose the cloud. With Honeybook you can link and sync your calendars pretty easy. There’s a few different options to get it to work but natively with google calendar. Now what’s super important to me is numbers, I like them, statistics and analytics. The calendar at a glance lets me know what funds down to the dollar are coming in at any given time by incorporating the payment schedule and that’s awesome! The calendar is even a bit more powerful than that, checking over new inquires that land in your inbox and confirming that you have the date open or not.

Reporting and Analytics:

As I mentioned I am big on numbers and stats. Honeybook lets you see all of your payments collected thus far and those in the future. It also gives you a little bit of insight on your success rate. This bases off of your inquiry vs booking rate. I did find a trick to boost the success rate as I mentioned above. Follow up! It was the biggest success since joining Honeybook and the stats show.

I am at a 90% booking rate according to the statistics on 2016, sweet! Now don’t get discouraged and down for stats. I used to be that way with analytics. It kills me to see lack of traffic. Use it as a motivator to better your ideas and strategies to get more successful bookings. If you have trouble and need some help with a few suggestions, reach out to me I may be able to help. If you need extensive help jump over to the mentoring page where I offer review and extensive help!

Jump over to the Payments tab and you can see at a glance all of your upcoming payments and due dates. The status are unpaid, overdue, paid and unpaid. These are all color coded accordingly. From this section if you have an overdue payment like I have of one of my samples you can send a reminder quick and easy.  When you click remind a sweet email that will remind your client to pay. It shows the due date, amount and a bold count of days it was past due. Thank’s Honeybook this really helps me keep everyone on track, even if I am the only one overdue:)

Doing the Math:

When just a few days into the trial I was looking to jump right in. Since I  was using Square, and still do, I calculated the math of what I was paying in fees. The fees for square are average across the realm of payment methods. Except for Honeybook. They offer a feature that none of the others do that I have seen. Bank Transfers. Yes. Yes!

3% Credit card processing fee
1.5% Bank transfer fee

So

With that being stated, currently I am paying 3.5 percent plus $0.15 per TX because all of my initial transactions take place online or over the phone. Over a year at 3.5 percent based on $100,000 you’ll pay 3500 in fees. plus the cents per transaction figure around $15.00 extra on top of it. At 3% you’re instantly saving $500.00 based off of the 100k. It’s simple math and it works. Wait, the cost to join Honeybook is $500.00 for the lifetime. So it’s paid for in your first year based off of that total.

If your numbers for accepting credit cards are not there don’t worry, let’s not stop with fees alone. I asked Lindsay, my wife who also runs her own wedding planning business, Lindsay Rachael Events, her thoughts after using it for a few weeks. She let me know that after the initial setup (approximately 4-5 hours of work setting up profile,  importing files, templates and contracts) it had reduced her workload by about 4-6 hours of work a week. Since I pay her like a million dollars an hour I’ve saved a ton of cash for that 458 Italia. I’m kidding I pay her in hugs and karate chops to the back.

Time is very important to me. Being a lover of all things physics. Time is limited and space directly correlates with it. So with “more time” we can have “more do”.

Summary

I haven’t said it enough. It’s enjoyable, easy to use, and it’s worth every penny without the savings, and in addition to a time saver it will score you more events if you do not do follow-up emails with people who may have lost track of time or who were bombarded with emails after inquiring with a few other vendors.  Take a peek at the free 14 day trial here: FREE TRIAL.

Community:

Lastly, I wanted to touch on something before I send you on your way. Honeybook has an awesome community of other professionals like you that can go on the FACEBOOK GROUP and see questions others may ask.

If you do have any questions please don’t hesitate to shoot me a line either here or on email and I can see if I can answer those questions for you!