Should a 60 and a 90 minute massage be two services?

Yes. They're different prices, different lengths and different things to book, and a client choosing between them is making a real decision.

How do I leave time to change the table between clients?

A buffer on the service. It keeps the time occupied without adding it to what the client booked, and it's the closest thing to a "leave me a gap" control.

How do I get the intake form filled in before they arrive?

Send it ahead of the appointment rather than handing it over. That's the whole point of it — a form completed at the door is a clipboard with extra steps.

Is there a SOAP note template?

There's a SOAP-shaped chart in the sample data, and you build your own the same way — four long-text fields, one for each letter. Nothing structured is needed; the value is that last visit's answers carry forward.

What does the sample studio start me with?

A massage menu — Swedish, deep tissue, sports and prenatal at 60 minutes, hot stone at 90 — and two therapists. A worked example, not your menu.

Setting up for a massage studio

Every treatment is the same shape: they arrive, they fill something in if it's their first time, they're on the table for an hour, and then the room has to be reset before the next one. There is very little to configure here, which means the few things that matter, matter a lot.

One service per length, not one service with a note

Massage menus are short and the only real decision is how to handle length. Handle it by making each length its own service. A client booking online is choosing between sixty minutes and ninety; that's a decision they should be able to make on the booking page, not in a comments box.

1
One category is enough. Everything is massage.
2
Add each treatment at each length you offer — Swedish 60, Swedish 90, deep tissue 60, and so on. Five or six lines covers most studios.
3
Price them individually. Ninety minutes is rarely exactly one-and-a-half times sixty, and pricing per line lets you say so.
4
Put a buffer on every one of them. Ten or fifteen minutes after, for linens and the room. It keeps you occupied without charging the client for it — see The rules bookings follow.

The buffer is the step people skip, and it's the one that decides whether your day runs on time. Do it while you're building the menu, not after a week of running fifteen minutes late by lunchtime.

If a particular client genuinely needs longer, retime that visit rather than adding a service — How long a service takes.

The intake form is the setup job

This is where a massage studio differs from everything else in this list: the paperwork happens before the appointment, and if it doesn't, it happens in your treatment time.

Build one intake form and set the habit of sending it when the booking is made. Health history, medications, areas to avoid, and a signature if you take one. See Build a form and Send a form before the visit.

The measure of whether you've set this up properly is simple: the client walks in and goes straight to the room.

SOAP notes after

Your chart is four long-text fields — subjective, objective, assessment, plan. There's nothing structured to configure, and there doesn't need to be; the value is that the last note carries forward when you start the next one, so a course of treatment reads as a course rather than four unrelated hours.

Build the template once, then chart while the client is getting dressed rather than at the end of the day. See Build a chart template and Chart a visit.

Turn this on first

Nothing, for a fortnight. This is the one trade in this set where the honest answer is to leave the AI alone at the start — it reads your history, and the history that makes it useful here is the charts, which don't exist yet.

Once you have a month of notes, the client brief is the one to open first: two sentences on who's booked in and what they've had, which in a studio where a therapist may not have seen the client before is the whole handover.

Skip these for now

Campaigns, flows, memberships, packages, tip pooling. A massage studio runs on a menu with buffers, an intake form and a chart template — everything else is a later decision.

Two therapists puts you on Starter, which covers five. A sole practitioner renting a room is exactly who Solo is for, at one staff member and one location, with no payroll or time clock — which a sole trader doesn't need.