Setting up for a nail salon

A gel fill is booked. She sits down, decides she wants them shorter, adds art on two fingers, and needs the old set soaked off first. The appointment on your calendar said 45 minutes and none of those three decisions were in it. A nail menu that can't absorb that is a menu you'll be fighting all day.

Build a small menu with a big options list

The instinct is a service per combination — gel with art, gel with art and removal, acrylic with removal. Forty services later the booking page is unreadable and every price change is a morning's work.

That last step is the whole playbook. Options and add-ons covers how they price and time themselves; the sample menu's per-nail art line is the shape to move away from once you have five minutes.

When something genuinely takes longer for one client than the menu says, retime that visit rather than editing the service — see How long a service takes.

Two chairs, two friends, one card

Nail salons check out in pairs more than any other trade, and separating them is the fiddliest thing a busy front desk does. Both appointments can go onto a single bill and settle once. Learn it on the sample data before a Saturday makes you learn it live — One bill for several appointments.

What to record, and what not to bother with

Nails needs less charting than it looks. One template with a Nail design field — shape, length, polish code, design — is enough, and its value is the polish code: "the one she had at Christmas" is a real request and an unanswerable one without it. See Build a chart template.

Skip consent forms unless you do something that warrants one. Most nail work doesn't.

Turn this on first

The client brief. Two sentences at the top of a client record saying who is about to sit down and what she books — which, in a salon where three-quarters of the book is regulars on a three-week cycle, is most of what you need to know before she's through the door. See The brief before every visit.

Then set the habit of rebooking at the chair while she's paying. Book the next visit is one tap and already filled in, and it is worth more to a nail salon than any marketing you could send later.

Skip these for now — with one exception

Campaigns, flows and forms can wait. The exception is worth naming: a package of six manicures, sold once and redeemed visit by visit, fits this trade better than almost any other because the cycle is short and predictable. It isn't a week-one job, but put it on the list — What a package is.

Three technicians puts you on Starter, which covers five and brings payroll and tip pooling. A single-chair nail tech is what Solo is for, at one staff member and no team tools at all.