How long a service takes

Your standard cut is 45 minutes. This particular client has been coming for nine years and is out of the chair in half an hour. Booking her for 45 costs you a slot a week, every week.

So the length on a booking isn't fixed to the price list. Every service line on an appointment carries a − and a +, and either one moves that visit only.

Retiming one visit

Each press moves the line by your calendar's slot interval — the same grid you book against, so you can't produce a length that doesn't fit anywhere.

It steps from where the line already is, not to the nearest round number. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a 45-minute service in a salon that books on 20-minute slots would otherwise jump to 40 the first time anyone touched it, with no press that ever gets you back to 45. Here, it goes to 25 or 65, and pressing back returns exactly what you started with.

Once a line differs from standard, a Back to 45 min link appears beneath it. It's the one-press undo, and it goes back to what this visit was scheduled for — not to whatever the catalogue says today.

The four fields on the service itself

Duration is the one that matters. It's the block on the calendar, the space the booking claims, and the length a client sees on your booking page. The four boxes under Timing are for the services that don't fit that simple shape, and on most menus they stay at zero.

Buffer before and buffer after sit outside the visit. The appointment still shows the length you quoted, but the diary holds the extra minutes either side, so nothing else can be booked into them. That's the field for the room that needs stripping down, or the fifteen minutes you want between clients and never get.

Processing and finishing sit inside the duration you already set — they describe its shape rather than adding to it. Setting 45 minutes of processing on a two-hour colour doesn't make it a two-hour-forty-five appointment; it says that of those two hours, 45 are the stretch where the colour is developing and the stylist's hands are free.

That stretch is worth recording because the calendar can find it. Fill gaps in the calendar toolbar lists today's processing windows — who's free, for how long, and which waitlist clients would fit — which is the whole reason the field exists.

What it doesn't do is release the chair by itself. The appointment holds its full window whichever way these are set, so nothing gets booked into the middle of a colour without somebody deciding to put it there.

When an option changes the length

Add-ons carry their own minutes, and choosing one resets the line to its new standard — the catalogue length plus whatever that option adds. Keeping a hand-set 30 minutes while adding a +15 option would silently swallow the extra quarter hour the option exists to add. Step again from there if you still want it shorter. See Options and add-ons.