I have been laying low on the drama horizon lately — totally out of the loop on what the latest grumbles are in the biz. So I just have to rant about things that are bugging me I guess. And today's winner? Style Seat. Or rather, Styleseat.com, I guess.

I don't even remember how I came across this site. In fact, I'm not sure it's a "site," maybe it's a "service." At any rate, for those who haven't heard of Styleseat yet, it's a pretty cool online booking site/service/system thingy... at least, it promises to be really cool. But it's been up and running and gaining speed for quite some time and as far as I can find, they still haven't addressed some of the key issues that need fixing.

I love that this online booking system has this awesome interface that gives you some nifty statistics once you start using it consistently. Like many of the other online booking apps out there, you open your account, fill out your profile, and enter in all your services, what they cost and how long they take. Then, when you start using their calendar, they give you stats like what percentage of your schedule is filled — so it'll tell you that you're 80% booked or 23% booked ... very cool. Plus, it'll also tell you what your projected income is based on the services that have been booked in your calendar.

Now that is some seriously cool and useful information. The system also does confirmation e-mails and text messages, and sends follow-up emails after the appointment. Seriously, there’s so much great about this site.

Except ... there is no way to schedule recurring appointments. So all those standing appointments you've worked so hard to set up over the years? You get to hand-enter every one of them. And the calendar does not sync with other calendars. Sync, don't sync [shrug] whatever— but there should be a way to import from an external calendar.

Our calendars are our lives, and every time we have to transcribe from one to another it opens up wormholes in the universe that allow appointments to disappear into parallel dimensions, never to be seen again. Not to mention, I have appointments in my calendar that are booked out until 20 years after I'll be dead — the magic of setting recurring events to "never end." I have loved the recurring event function of a digital calendar since I spent all that money on my first beloved Palm Pilot in 2004. Oh! How I loved that Palm calendar! Why hasn't anyone ever figured out that that was the perfect calendar?!

But seriously. Someone introduced a scheduling program for the beauty industry without a recurring event feature? And I'm not the only one who's impatiently waiting for it, so I don't understand why it hasn't been addressed by now.

And yes, these are the two tiny things that are big enough to keep me from using this as my primary booking system.

I continue to wait until they get around to actually introducing these features. The response to my e-mail assured me that they were in the works ... *yawn* ... that was months ago.

But, I do realize that I can be a mite stubborn about things like this, so although I wanted to gripe a little about how frustrating it is to have something that's so almost great and could be great with such little effort, I also wanted to share the find for anyone who hasn't found it themselves yet. It's really worth a looking into. Especially if you don't already have a full book or don't book more than a month in advance.