Book by stylist, bill a cut-and-colour with the right commission, and finally see how much colour and developer each service really uses.
Hair salons have problems a nail bar or a spa does not. Colour and developer are expensive and used in grams, not units. Services overlap: a colour processes while the stylist does a blow-dry. Two stylists often share one client. And the relationship lives with the stylist, so knowing each client's formula and history matters.
Most general-purpose booking apps were built around a simple appointment: one person, one slot, one price. A hair salon breaks all three of those assumptions before lunchtime. That is why so many salons end up with a booking app for the diary, a notebook for colour formulas, a calculator for commission and no idea at all where the bleach went.
Ask a salon owner what their busiest colourist earned last month and most can answer. Ask what that colour service actually cost to deliver and the room goes quiet.
Back-bar is the hardest cost in a hair salon to see, because the client never walks out holding it. A tube of colour is opened, some of it is used, the rest goes back on the shelf, and nothing is written down. Multiply that by forty services a week and the gap between your revenue and your bank balance starts to make sense.
Salonipy handles it by attaching a recipe to the service rather than asking anyone to remember. Tell it once that a root touch-up normally uses 60 g of colour and 90 ml of developer. From then on, every time that service is billed, the Products used section fills in from the recipe. If the client needed more, you change the number on the bill; if you have changed it and want the default back, one tap resets it. The stock comes off in the unit you actually buy in.
Recipes give you an expectation, not the truth. The stock audit is where you compare the two: count what is physically on the shelf, enter the numbers, and Salonipy shows you every product where reality and the system disagree, what that shortage cost you, and lets you correct the stock with the adjustment recorded. Run it monthly on colour and you will know within one cycle whether you have a measuring problem or a walking-out-the-door problem.
Every product carries a low-stock level. When it drops below that, it appears as an alert on the dashboard, so you find out that the 6.0 is nearly gone on a Tuesday morning rather than halfway through a Saturday colour.
Tell the app once that a root colour uses 60 g of colour and 90 ml of developer. Every time you bill it, stock is deducted in real units, and a stock audit shows any gap between what should be on the shelf and what is.
Each stylist has a timeline. Overlaps trigger a warning, not a block, because processing time is real.
Split one line between two stylists by percentage. Service and retail commission rates can differ per person.
Every visit, service and stylist is saved on the client's profile, so the next appointment starts from what was done last time.
Sell take-home shampoo and styling products on the same bill, with low-stock alerts.
In a hair salon, two appointments on one stylist at the same time is not always a mistake. A colour goes on, it processes for thirty-five minutes, and a good stylist uses that window for a cut or a blow-dry. Software that refuses to let you book it is software that gets abandoned within a fortnight.
Salonipy warns instead of blocking. Book something that overlaps and it shows you exactly which appointments clash, for which stylist, and offers the next free slot with a single tap to move to it. You can take the warning or ignore it, because you know whether that overlap is a double-booking or a processing gap and the software does not.
Each stylist also has a weekly day off and an optional monthly sales target, so the diary reflects who is actually in the building and the dashboard shows who is tracking towards their number.
Commission is where hair salons lose the most goodwill, because the rules are genuinely complicated and month-end arithmetic on paper is genuinely unreliable.
Salonipy calculates commission per line rather than per bill. That single decision solves most of the mess:
At the end of the month the payout screen is reading numbers that were built bill by bill, which is a very different conversation from reconstructing a month from memory. There is a longer walkthrough in the staff commission guide.
When a stylist leaves, what usually walks out with them is not the client list — it is the knowledge. The formula, the developer strength, the fact that this client reacts to a particular brand, the reason she asked for warmer tones last time.
In Salonipy that sits on the client profile: notes for formulas and preferences, their favourite services, and a full visit history showing every service and which stylist performed it. If a client comes back after eight months and her usual stylist is off that day, whoever is covering can open the profile and see what was actually done, rather than guessing and hoping.
An empty chair is the most expensive thing in a hair salon, because a colour slot you cannot refill is two hours of a senior stylist's day gone. Salonipy sends appointment reminders and confirmations over WhatsApp using templates you control, so a client who has forgotten is reminded and a client who cannot come has an easy way to say so while you can still fill the slot.
The client health screen goes a step further and flags regulars who have not been back in their usual cycle — the client who came every six weeks and has now been gone eleven. Those are the rebookings worth chasing, and they are invisible without software. There is more on this in the guide to reducing salon no-shows.
Most salons staff by habit rather than evidence. The rush hours report shows when your bookings genuinely cluster by day and hour, which is how you decide whether the Thursday late shift is worth it or whether you need a second colourist on Saturday morning rather than a second receptionist.
Pair that with revenue per chair and per stylist and you can see which parts of the salon are carrying the rest. See revenue per chair for how to read those numbers.
Walk-ins, fast turnarounds and cash-heavy days: bill a walk-in without creating a client record, see the queue by barber, and close the day with cash counted by payment method.
Barbershops usually care about a different half of the app. Speed at the till matters more than the diary, so billing a cut and a beard trim takes a few taps and a walk-in needs no client record at all. Commission and daily cash still work exactly the same, and because every bill records how it was paid, the end of a cash-heavy day is a comparison rather than a count-and-pray.
| Hair salon job | Diary app or paper | Salonipy |
|---|---|---|
| Colour and developer used | Not recorded anywhere | Deducted by service recipe |
| Missing back-bar stock | Noticed when it runs out | Stock audit shows the gap and its cost |
| Two stylists, one client | Argued about at month end | Line split by percentage |
| Service vs retail commission | One rate, or done manually | Separate rate per stylist |
| Colour processing overlap | Blocked, or booked twice by mistake | Warned, with next free slot offered |
| Client formula | Stylist's notebook | On the client profile |
| No-shows | Phoned if someone remembers | WhatsApp reminders and confirmations |
| Lapsed regulars | Invisible | Flagged on the client health screen |
Most salon platforms charge per stylist or per calendar. For a hair salon that is exactly the wrong shape: your software bill rises every time you put someone new in a chair, and taking on a Saturday junior becomes a subscription decision. Salonipy is priced for the salon, not the seat — USD 5 a month, USD 30 a year, or USD 150 once for lifetime access, covering every stylist with every feature included. Prices show in your local currency; see the pricing page for current figures.
Each one with their service commission rate, retail commission rate and weekly day off.
Cuts, colours, treatments and blow-dries with their price and how long they occupy the chair, so the diary blocks realistic time.
The colour, developer, bleach and treatments you buy, with cost and a low-stock level.
Roughly how much of each product a service uses. Approximate is fine — the stock audit will correct your assumptions within a month or two.
Everything else — commission, stock, client history, reports — is produced from those bookings and bills without anyone maintaining a second record.
Most salons are running properly inside half an hour, and you can add recipes gradually rather than all at once.
Pricing, currency and languages change by market. See hair salon software in the UK, the USA, India, Pakistan and the UAE.
Salonipy is one app, so every tool below shares the same clients, bills and stock. See the full feature list.
The best hair salon software combines a stylist calendar, fast billing with commission, and colour stock tracking by weight. Salonipy includes all three, plus client history, WhatsApp reminders and reports.
Yes. Set a recipe for each service with the grams or millilitres it uses, and stock is deducted automatically every time the service is billed.
Yes. Any line on a bill can be split between two staff members by percentage.
Yes. Walk-in billing, per-barber queues, commission and cash day close all work for barbershops.
Yes. Each staff member has a service commission rate and a separate retail commission rate, so you can reward product sales differently from chair work. Commission is calculated per line on the amount before tax.
Yes. If a booking overlaps another appointment for the same stylist, Salonipy shows a warning with the clashing appointments and suggests the next free slot. It warns rather than blocks, because overlapping a processing time is often deliberate in a hair salon.
Yes. Each client profile holds notes for formulas and preferences, their favourite services, and a full history of every visit with the service and the stylist who did it, so the next appointment starts from what was done last time.
Yes. Salonipy sends appointment reminders and confirmations on WhatsApp using templates you control, which is the cheapest way to cut no-shows in a salon where the chair time is already booked.
Use the stock audit. Count what is physically on the shelf, enter the numbers, and Salonipy shows the difference against what it expected along with the cost of any shortage, then corrects the stock and records the adjustment.
Yes. Salonipy keeps booking and billing when the internet drops and syncs when the connection returns. It runs in a browser and installs as an Android app and a Windows desktop app.
Yes. Each branch keeps its own stylists, stock and bills, and the owner can switch between branches from the same login and compare them in branch reports. See salon software for groups and chains for how multi-location works.
Salonipy is USD 5 a month, USD 30 a year, or USD 150 once for lifetime access. That covers the whole salon with no per-staff fee, and prices are shown in your local currency.