Setting up for a hair & colour salon

A ten o'clock full head is in the chair. She'll be here ninety minutes, and for twenty-five of them she is sitting under a timer doing nothing while you could be cutting somebody else. Almost everything that makes hair software good or bad comes down to whether it understands that.

Your menu, grouped the way a client reads it

Colour salons have the longest menus in the trade and the most temptation to model every variant as its own service. Resist it. Put in the ten you book most weeks and add the rest when they come up.

Length and thickness are where the menu usually sprawls. One Haircut with a priced option for long hair beats three near-identical services — see Options and add-ons.

The one setting that pays for itself

Fill in processing time on every colour, then allow overlaps. Processing time doesn't lengthen or shorten the appointment; it marks which minutes inside it are yours, and those minutes are the ones the calendar will offer you for a blow-dry or a fringe trim.

Without it you have a 90-minute wall. With it you have 90 minutes containing a 25-minute gap somebody can pay you for. The confirm step is deliberate rather than a wall — real salons squeeze people in. Overlaps and processing time has the setting and the sums.

Do it while you build the menu. Retrofitting it across forty services later is the job nobody does.

Charting is what makes a regular a regular

Build one chart template before your first colour client comes back. The field you want is Hair colour formula, which splits into brand, base colour, target colour, developer volume, processing time and technique — six boxes rather than a paragraph, which is what lets last visit's answers carry forward into this one. Length change is the other one worth having.

That's the difference between "what did we do last time?" and a formula on screen before she sits down. Build a chart template covers the palette; you need one template, not five.

Turn this on first

The client brief. Two sentences at the top of a client record, written from their own visit history, telling you who is about to sit down and what they book. It costs nothing to read and there is nothing to switch on — open a client and it's there. See The brief before every visit.

Leave the rest of the AI until you have a real month behind you. It reads your history, and in week one there isn't any.

Skip these for now

Memberships, campaigns, flows and forms are all worth having and none of them is what stops you taking a booking today. Three stylists on the books puts you on Starter, which covers five and brings payroll, the time clock and tip pooling with it — worth knowing before you price the decision, not on the day you hire.