Are you ready to take bookings

Settings has twenty-three doors behind it, and none of them tell you whether the salon actually works. So the answer is put in front of them instead.

The band at the top

Open Settings and the first thing on the page is a line saying whether your salon can take a booking and get paid for it. It's read fresh on every load, there's no button, and no AI is involved — five rules over your own settings, which is why it can afford to run every time.

When something is wrong the band lists it, and the card it belongs to badges itself further down the page: Needs setup in red, Incomplete in amber. That pairing is the useful part. The band tells you what; the badge tells you which of twenty-three doors to open.

The five rules

Three of them stop you trading:

• No active location. There is nowhere for an appointment to happen.
• No active staff. There is nobody to do it.
• No active services. There is nothing to book.

Two are warnings rather than walls:

• Card payments aren't connected. You can still run the calendar and take cash. You just can't take a card, which is a decision plenty of salons defer for a week.
• A fee is set to be added automatically, but card payments aren't set up. This is the one that catches people. The fee goes onto every bill with no way to charge it.

When something is flagged

What it doesn't check

This is worth being blunt about, because a green tick is easy to over-read. The check asks one question: can this salon take a booking and get paid for it. It does not look at whether your opening hours are set, whether your public booking page is switched on, whether a stylist has any shifts, whether your services have sensible durations, or whether anything is being sent to your clients.

All of those are real ways to be live and not working, and none of them will ever show up here. Green means you can trade. Go live is the walk-through for whether you should.

The card underneath

Setup health also carries Sample data — the button that clears the practice salon you were given to learn on. It sits here because clearing it is the last step of getting ready rather than a separate act of destruction, and because this is already the page that answers "am I finished". It disappears once there's nothing left to clear. Your first hour covers what goes and what stays.