What’s new

Ticking Backbar / professional use on a product has always said "not sold to clients". Until today, it didn't do that. The litre of colour stayed in the checkout product picker alongside everything on the shelf, for every role, usually at a price nobody had set because it was never meant to be sold.

That's fixed. A product marked back bar — or sitting in a category marked non-retail — is not in the picker, is not returned by a product search, and cannot be added to a bill by anyone, including you. If it belongs on a bill, it isn't back bar: carry a retail size as its own product, which is what most salons selling the same shampoo they wash with already do.

Nothing changed about the product itself. It still tracks stock, still takes professional-use movements, still shows in your product list with its Backbar badge, and still counts in your cost of goods. It just isn't something to ring up.

Junior stylist is now Stylist

The role picker offered five roles. Two of them were the same role: Junior stylist granted exactly what Stylist granted — same calendar, same clients, same checkout, same charting, same everything. Our own help page said so.

So it's gone, and anybody who held it is now a Stylist with precisely the access they had yesterday. Nothing they could do is different; nothing they couldn't do has opened up. What's different is that the picker no longer offers you a choice that isn't one — an owner picking "Junior stylist" was reasonably entitled to believe they had restricted somebody, and they hadn't.

There are four roles to hand out now: Manager, Front desk, Stylist and Read-only. The fifth is Owner, and there is exactly one of those.

Read Who can see what and Your product list.

Finding a client you'd entered twice used to be a search you had to think of doing: type a surname into the client list, read down the Email and Phone columns, and hope you'd picked the right surname.

Clients → Duplicates → Check for duplicates does the reading. It goes through every client on your list and comes back with the pairs that share a phone number or an email address and have a matching name. It's deliberately cautious about that second half — a mother and daughter on one phone number are not the same person, and they won't be suggested.

Nothing runs the check on a schedule. It finds nothing until you press it, and we'd rather say so than show you a tidy "0 duplicates" that nobody has earned.

Each pair tells you how many appointments and sales sit on each of the two records, because that is the thing that decides what to do next. Merging keeps one record and archives the other, and appointments and sales stay on the one that gets archived — they're still on your calendar and still in your reports, but you can't open that record again. So the screen puts the two counts side by side and says, in a sentence, which way round is safe: merge the empty one into the one with the history. Where both sides carry history, it says that too, rather than letting you find out afterwards.

Merging itself hasn't moved — it's still on the client's own record, under the ⋯ button beside Edit, where the dialog spells out what it does. This screen finds the pairs and hands you to it. If a pair isn't really the same person, Not a duplicate takes it off the list for good.

Owners and managers only, the same as merging.

Read When you have the same person twice.

The Ask box on your reports page has always offered to keep a good question. Until today, pressing that button didn't give you anywhere to find it again.

Now it does. A kept question sits at the top of Reports under Questions you kept, and re-runs every time you open the page.

What's pinned is the question, not the answer. The tile shows the figures as they are now, not as they were when you saved it — and it prints the period it just covered, so a question about June and a question about the last 30 days are never mistaken for each other. That's the point of the period line: a question about June stays about June, and a question about last month rolls forward with the calendar.

Each tile links to the full report behind it, and the bin icon takes it off the page. Removing a tile removes nothing else — the report is untouched and you can ask the question again any time.

Two things it deliberately doesn't do: nothing is emailed, and nothing runs overnight. A kept question waits on the reports page and runs when you look at it.

You'll need financial report access to see any of this, the same as the Ask box itself.

Read Ask your reports a question.

Until today, a client's Automated messages setting and their marketing contact settings were independent: the first governed reminders and automated messages, the second governed campaigns. Our own guidance said to change both when somebody asked to stop hearing from you.

That's no longer necessary, and it no longer matters which one you reach for. Whichever of the two says stop is honoured on every send. So:

• Setting a client to Reminders only — no marketing takes them off your campaign list for that channel, as well as stopping flow marketing.
• Setting them to None stops everything on that channel.
• A client who replies STOP to a text is out of every text you send from that moment — campaigns included, without anyone at the desk having to see the reply.
• A client who uses the unsubscribe link in any message is out of both.

Reminders and confirmations are unaffected by Reminders only, which is the whole point of that setting. It stops marketing, and a campaign is marketing.

One thing you'll notice: some audience counts are lower than they were. That is the change working — those clients had asked not to be marketed to on that channel, and the count now says so. The pre-send check on a draft campaign spells it out, telling you how many recipients you have and how many are being held back by an opt-out.

Read Quiet hours and opting out and Who gets it.

Sixteen message slots on Settings → Notifications. Fourteen of them were the wording of a real message. Two of them — Receipt, email and text — could be rewritten, drafted with AI, saved, badged Customized, and never reached a single client. The screen said "Sent with the receipt after a sale is closed", and nothing was.

They work now. What you write there is the line at the top of a receipt you send, and the subject line on an email version.

The receipt itself has not moved. The line items, the total, the tip and how it was paid are printed underneath whatever you wrote — because a receipt somebody asked for at the counter has to be a receipt, not a sentence about one. What's on it is still yours to set in Settings → Checkout & receipts: the footer, whether each line names who did it, and the optional AI opening line.

Three smaller things came with it.

Untick "Send this message" and the receipt still sends — with no greeting. Everywhere else on that screen, off means the client hears nothing. A receipt is different: somebody is standing at the counter having asked for it, and one unticked box should not turn Send receipt into a button that reports success and delivers nothing.

A walk-in gets the receipt and no greeting. The standard wording opens with the client's first name, and a sale with nobody on it hasn't got one.

Two merge tags started working and one was withdrawn. sale.amount and sale.dateAt had been in the tag list since the day templates shipped, with nothing anywhere filling them; they resolve now. sale.receiptLink is gone — there is no page in the product that shows a client their receipt, so it was a tag that always rendered as nothing while the preview showed a real-looking web address.

What clients are sent covers the screen; Receipts covers sending one.

"When do I get paid?" is a Stripe question, because the money is in your Stripe account and never passes through RewireBox. That part hasn't changed and won't: every card charge is created on your account, you're the merchant on the client's statement, and Stripe pays you out from your own balance.

What has changed is that there's now a door to it. Settings → Payments → Open Stripe dashboard opens your Stripe account, already signed in. What's on its way, what's already landed, the schedule it runs on, and the bank account it lands in — all one click from the app instead of a separate login.

It's also the only place your bank details can be changed, and that's the part we had wrong. The old Manage Stripe setup button said it was where you "update your business or bank details". It wasn't. Once your account was fully set up, that button opened a Stripe page with a single sentence on it and a button back to RewireBox — nothing to edit. Two pages in this Learn Center repeated the claim. Both are corrected, and the button now says what it really does.

That button is still there, renamed Re-run Stripe setup, because it does one genuinely useful thing: it re-requests the permissions your account needs to charge cards. If card payments worked last month and are failing now, that's the fix. And while Stripe is still verifying something, the same button reads Continue Stripe setup or Finish Stripe setup and takes you to whatever it's waiting for.

Owners and managers only — a Stripe login link hands over the whole account.

Read Where the money lands.

Settings → Calendar had a card called Waiting Room, with one checkbox — Enable Waiting Room — and a line underneath saying it would "check clients in when they arrive and track who's waiting".

Ticking it saved. Nothing else happened. The arrival check-in it claimed to turn on was already on and never consulted the setting, and the list of who's waiting did not exist to be shown. The card has been removed, along with the column behind it.

Nothing you can do today has changed. Checking somebody in is still the Check in button on the appointment itself, exactly as before, whether that box was ticked or not.

The AI Rules assistant could set it too, and that was the worse half. Type "let clients check in when they arrive" and it would show you Waiting Room check-in · Off → On with a sentence of reasoning, and report success — the product telling you a feature worked. Ask it the same thing now and it says plainly that it can't: no such setting exists.

A proper walk-in queue — take somebody who has just walked in, see who is waiting and for whom — is a real thing we intend to build. When it arrives it will be a screen you can use, not a checkbox that agrees with you.

Answering a website chat has always had one blind spot: you couldn't tell whether the person was still on the page. A reply reaches a browser, not a person, and there was no way to know which of those you were doing.

Now there is. A web-chat visitor with your site open in front of them gets a green dot on their row in the Inbox, and their card in the rail reads on your site now in place of the usual seen 20m.

That single fact changes what you do. Dot lit, and answering in the next minute reaches someone who is looking at their screen — worth interrupting yourself for. No dot, and you're leaving a message for whenever they come back, which is also the moment to ask for a phone number so you have a way to reach them that isn't their browser.

Three things it deliberately doesn't do:

• It doesn't show you traffic. The dot only ever appears on people who have already sent you a message. Someone reading your prices who never says a word isn't in your Inbox at all, and nothing here counts visitors to your website.
• It doesn't count a buried tab. If your page is sitting behind twenty others, they're not on your site in any sense that matters, and they get no dot.
• It doesn't stick. It clears itself about a minute and a half after they leave. There's nothing to switch off and nothing to refresh, so a dot you can see is a dot you can trust.

Nothing to turn on, and no change to what visitors see — the chat widget has been quietly capable of this the whole time.

Read Answering a chat.

You could always write an agreement. What you could not do was attach one to anything — so the terms sat in Settings and no client was ever asked to sign them.

The New plan dialog for a membership or a package now has an Agreement field. Pick one when you create the plan and every purchase of it asks for a signature first: the text appears, the client ticks I have read and agree and types their full name, and the sale completes. That happens at your own front desk now, not only in online checkout.

What's stored is the typed name, the version of the agreement, the date, and a word-for-word copy of the text as it was shown — so it still means something in a year, after you've rewritten the wording twice.

One thing to know before you use it: plans can't be edited after they're created, so the agreement is chosen when the plan is born. To add one to a plan you're already selling, make a replacement with the agreement attached and archive the old one. Agreements clients sign has the detail.

Settings → Locations has always had a Status column reading Active or Inactive. Until today nothing in the product could move it off Active.

That mattered more than a column usually does. Everything downstream already read that flag: the online booking page, the calendar, the new appointment panel, time blocks, recurring appointments, the waitlist, checkout, cash drawer sessions, the time clock, staff working hours. All of it was built to leave a closed branch alone. There was simply no way to tell the product a branch was closed.

So owners closed one the only way that was left — taking its opening hours down to closed on every day of the week — which stops it offering times but leaves it sitting on the booking page for clients to pick.

The row menu now offers Deactivate. It asks first, and says what it costs: the location comes off your booking page and out of every picker in the product, and every appointment, sale and till session already recorded against it stays exactly as it was. The row stays on the list, dimmed and reading Inactive, with Reactivate in the same menu for when you reopen.

If it's your only location, the confirmation tells you that too — you'd be leaving the salon with nothing bookable and nowhere to ring a sale up, which is a reasonable thing to want during a refit and a bad thing to do by accident.

Where your salon operates covers the whole screen.

Every text and email RewireBox has sent for you has been measured: which channel, which day, how many segments, what it cost. To fractions of a cent.

We could see it. You couldn't. The article on what a message costs said so in a box near the bottom — that the measurement existed, that it wasn't shown to you, and that saying so was better than implying a screen existed.

Settings → Messaging usage is that screen. It sits under Your plan, beside your AI allowance, and shows the month so far: what your texts cost, what your emails cost, and how many segments those texts came to.

That last number is the one worth reading, and it's the one you've never had. A text is charged per 160 characters — but a single emoji, or a curly quote pasted in from somewhere else, drops that to 70. So the same message to the same 800 clients can be one text each or three, and the message count looks identical either way. If your segments run far ahead of your messages, something in your wording is costing you triple.

Underneath, the screen says what the total comes to as a share of what you pay for RewireBox. If your messaging starts approaching your subscription, it says so plainly — because that's a figure you should meet here rather than on a statement.

There's no limit attached to any of it. No allowance to run out of, no bar filling up, no point at which sending stops. Texts and emails are passed through at what the carriers charge us, with nothing added, so this is a meter and not a budget. It reads the same measurement we bill from, which is why it's worth a look before a big campaign rather than after.

The five areas the Learn Center started with — calendar, clients, inbox, sales and the client portal — were the thinnest, because they were written first. Nineteen articles later they aren't. Among them:

• Fill a gap in the day — the waitlist, and what happens when somebody cancels at half past one.
• Things worth remembering about a client — the one-line facts a stylist sees at the chair, and the four kinds of them.
• Client account balances and When you have the same person twice — the money side of a client record, and how to tidy one up.
• What a message costs — texts and emails are passed through at cost, and a single emoji can turn one text into three.
• Closing the day and Receipts.
• Three on the client portal, including what a client can do with an appointment and their card on file.

Two product changes went out with them, both found by writing the articles.

Searching a client's full name now works. Typing "Maya Chen" into the client list used to match nobody — the search looked at first name, last name, email and phone one at a time, and nobody's first name is "Maya Chen". Every word you type now has to match something, so a full name finds one person and a surname still finds the family.

Two pieces of copy that overpromised are now accurate. The merge dialog said a client's appointments moved to the record you keep; they stay with the archived one, and it now says so before you press an irreversible button. And a receipt printed its date as 2026-08-13, which is not how anyone says a date out loud.

Money could get onto a client's account four ways — you put it there, you refunded a sale to it, you voided one to it, or it came across in a merge. It could only come off one way: somebody opening the Wallet tab and charging it down by hand, next to a separate payment taken at the till for the same visit.

That worked, and it asked the front desk to do arithmetic in two places while somebody stood at the counter waiting.

There's now an Account balance tile at Payment, beside Cash and Gift card. It appears when the sale has a client and that client has something on account, and a walk-in never sees it.

Press it and it says what you're working with before you commit — how much is on account, and whether that covers this sale or only part of it. A $30 balance against a $50 sale takes the $30 and leaves $20 to pay another way, and the button names the figure rather than leaving you to work it out.

It never overdraws. The most it takes is what's on the account. A balance can still go negative — an IOU is a real thing to record — but only deliberately, on the Wallet tab, where it lands in the history with your name and a note against it. Not by accident at a busy counter.

And if a sale paid this way is voided, the money goes back onto the account — always, whatever you pick for the rest of the refund. It came off their account, so that's where it returns. It was never cash, and the till won't hand it back as cash on your behalf.

Client account balances has the whole thing.

The Learn Center has always been organised by the part of the product you're looking at, which is only useful once you know which part you want. These are organised the other way round: by the kind of salon you run.

Playbooks — one per trade, each covering the same six things. What your menu should look like and where it usually sprawls, the one booking rule that matters most for that work, the forms or charts worth building before your first client, the AI moment worth turning on first, and — as much use as any of it — what to leave alone for now.

They're setup instructions rather than a tour, so each section ends with something to do. A colour salon starts with processing time; a barbershop starts with the pay split; a lash studio connects card payments before it can set a deposit at all. None of that is obvious from the screens themselves, which is the point.

Selling two of the same retainer, or charging thirty units of a treatment priced per unit, meant adding the same line over and over — or working the total out in your head and using Change price.

The Service and Product buttons in a checkout now have a Qty box. Set it, pick the item, and it goes on as one line at that quantity, priced accordingly. It resets to 1 every time you open the picker, so the normal case is still one tap and nothing to think about.

On a service, quantity means units at that price — it doesn't lengthen the appointment. If somebody is genuinely having two separate treatments, add the service twice so the visit is booked for the time it actually takes.

Every line on every sale RewireBox has ever rung up carries a tax rate, stamped on it at the moment it goes into the cart. The till computes the tax from it, the receipt prints it, the reports total it.

The rate came from your location — and nothing in the product could set it. So it was zero, for everybody, always.

The odd part is what already worked. Settings → Products has a per-product tax override for the item that isn't taxed at your normal rate, and it worked fine — meaning a salon could override a base rate it had no way to establish.

Settings → Locations → the row menu → Edit now has a Sales tax field. Type it as a percent — 8.25, not 0.0825. It's per location on purpose: two shops either side of a state line charge different rates, and each one's rate belongs on its own row.

One thing worth knowing before you change it. The rate is stamped on each line as it's rung up, not worked out afterwards, so setting it changes what you charge from now on and leaves everything you've already taken exactly as it was. A closed sale is a record of what a client actually paid, and a rate you change in March must not quietly rewrite what you charged in January. The same applies to a checkout sitting open on the till — it keeps the rate it started with.

Where your salon operates has the field and the detail.

An agreement is only worth the moment you have to produce it. Somebody says they were never told cancelling takes thirty days, and the answer you want is the wording they actually agreed to, on the day they agreed to it.

Until today the product held all of that and showed you none of it. Signing worked — the text appeared before the sale, the client typed their name, and the signature was stored with its version and a word-for-word copy of the text. But there was no screen anywhere that listed one afterwards. The record existed and you couldn't look at it.

Open a client and there's now an Agreements tab. Everything they have ever signed, newest first: what it was, which version, who signed and when, and which membership or package it was for. View opens the whole artifact — the exact wording as it stood that day, the name they typed, and the time it was signed.

Two details worth knowing. The list lives on the client rather than on the plan, because that is how the question arrives — someone is standing at your desk and you want their history, not the plan's. And nothing here can be edited or deleted: a signature is a record of something that happened, so if a membership was started in error you cancel the membership, and the signature stays as a note of what was agreed at the time.

Agreements clients sign covers writing one, attaching it to a plan, and now reading one back.

Somebody other than the client signs an agreement more often than you'd think. A parent signs for a fifteen-year-old. A partner pays for the membership and puts their own name to it. A friend brings the deposit in. None of that is a problem, and all of it is worth having written down.

The signature record has always had room for it: the name on the client's account and the name that was typed were kept as two separate things, precisely so a difference between them would survive. In practice there could never be one. Both paths that capture a signature — your own desk and the online storefront — filled both from the single box the client types into, so the two were always the same word for word, and a signature by somebody else looked identical to a signature by the client themselves.

They come from two places now. The name on the client's account is taken from the record, and the typed signature is what was written into the box. Open a signature under a client's Agreements tab and both are shown, labelled apart — Client on record and Typed signature. When they differ, a line underneath says so, and the list shows the name that was typed, so a membership signed by somebody else is visible without opening it.

It is deliberately not framed as a warning. Most differences are a shortened first name or a family member doing something entirely normal. The record just says what happened and lets you decide whether it matters — which, a year later when it does, is the only thing you actually wanted from it.

Signatures taken before today still show the two names matching. That is a consequence of how they were written, not a statement about who signed them.

Agreements clients sign covers writing an agreement, attaching it to a plan, and reading one back.

Everything about where your salon is — the street clients walk to, the number they call, and the timezone that decides what time an appointment is — lives on a location. And until today, unless you were on Scale, you couldn't open the screen it lives on.

That was the wrong boundary. Running more than one location is a Scale feature; owning the one you already have is not. A salon that moved, changed its phone number, or picked the wrong timezone during setup had nowhere to go.

Settings → Locations is now on every plan. It's back in the apps launcher, the row menu opens the same Edit form it always had, and the six fields save the way you'd expect. The plan boundary moved to the one control it actually describes: on Solo, Starter and Growth there's no Add location button, and a line where it would be tells you what your plan covers.

The field to check first is the timezone. It drives all scheduling at that location — what time an appointment is, when the day starts on the calendar, what a client is offered online — and it's the one that quietly prefills from wherever you were sitting when the salon was set up. If it's wrong, everything already in your calendar is being read at the wrong hour.

Where your salon operates has the whole screen.

The calendar's Assist panel answers gap questions one day at a time. Asked something week-shaped — "where are the gaps this week?" — it used to answer for a single day while describing it as the week, which could tell you the calendar was empty on a week that was nearly full.

It now says which day it looked at, and says plainly that it can't speak for the others.

The second half of the same fix: when a day has no gaps, the answer used to guess at why — "fully booked, or no staff entered". It now knows the difference, so a Sunday you're closed reads as closed rather than as booked solid.

And there's a new AI in RewireBox section in the Learn Center: what the AI does and never does, what it costs you, what it's told about your clients, and the places it shows up.

When a shift's cash count comes out more than a certain amount away from what was expected, the close still happens — but the session is flagged for an owner or manager to sign off. That amount was $5.00, the same for every salon, with no way to change it.

Settings → Cash drawer now holds it. A busy salon taking a lot of cash across a long day may want more room than five dollars; a quiet one may want none. Set it to $0.00 and every difference of any size asks for a signature, up to a maximum of $1,000.

Only owners and managers can change it, which is the same reasoning as the sign-off itself: front desk can open a drawer, take cash all day and close it, and shouldn't be able to widen the check on their own count.

Changing it affects closes from that point on. Whether a past session needed approving was decided when it closed and stays decided, so last month's records don't change meaning underneath you.

Charting is the treatment record — the formula, the developer volume, the technique, the thing you need in front of you six weeks later when they ask for the same again. It was only ever visible to owners and managers, which put it in front of the two people least likely to be holding the scissors. Everyone else got No access to Charting.

Apps → Charting now opens for stylists and junior stylists as well. They can build templates, start a chart, copy last visit's formula forward, complete it, correct it, and read a client's whole chart history and the side-by-side comparison.

Front desk and read-only roles still don't see it, and that's deliberate: a chart is a clinical record of work somebody did, not a desk tool.

Two things worth knowing before you tell your team:

Building a template is the same permission as filling one in, so anyone who can chart can also publish and archive templates — and a template published by one person is published for the whole salon. Agree the two or three you want first.

Charting is not scoped to your own clients. Anybody who can open it can read every chart in the salon, which is what makes covering a colleague's client on a Saturday possible.

Nothing was taken away from anyone, and no chart changed. This only opens a door that was shut to people who already held the key.

The checkout settings screen has been writing your answers down and then ignoring them. You could set your tip buttons to 18, 20 and 22; every till in your salon still showed 15, 18, 20 and 25. That is fixed, along with seven others.

Your tip buttons are your tip buttons. The percentages on the payment screen come from Settings → Checkout now. So do the three settings around them: whether to ask for a tip at all, whether to ask on a sale that's only products, and whether to offer the preset buttons or leave just the custom amount. Turn the prompt off and the tip section doesn't appear.

Receipts can carry your own words and your team's names. The custom footer prints at the bottom of the receipt in place of the default "Thank you!", and Show the service provider on the receipt puts the stylist's name beside each line. Both are captured when the receipt is issued, so a receipt from March keeps the name it was printed with even after somebody moves on.

Requiring a staff member actually requires one. With it on, a sale won't take payment while a service or product line has nobody assigned — and it names the line, so you're not hunting through a cart of nine items. It's checked at the till, on every payment type, which is the point: an unassigned line is a commission nobody ever gets paid.

Three controls have been removed

Ask clients for a signature, Enable check payments and Show a receipt preview on the customer display described things RewireBox has never had — there is no customer display, no signature pad at checkout, and no Check button to take a check with. Leaving switches on a settings page for features that don't exist is worse than not offering them, so they're gone rather than quietly kept.

If you'd turned any of them on, nothing about your salon changes: they never did anything. And if you want to take checks or capture a signature, tell us — those are features to build, not switches to flip.

Every new account arrives full of a plausible sample salon — a booked week, clients with visit histories, sales that were checked out — so nothing is empty while you find your way around. Until now, getting rid of it meant asking us.

Settings → Setup health → Clear the sample data. It removes every sample client, booking, sale, product, staff member, pay period and gift card in one go — along with the sample menu, forms and chart templates — and leaves anything you added yourself exactly where it is.

It can't be undone, so it asks you to type a word before the button will work. Worth doing before your real client list goes in rather than after: outside the Sales list nothing on screen marks a row as sample, so once the two are mixed they look identical.

One thing worth knowing while you set up: build your own menu rather than renaming the sample one. An edited sample service is still a sample service, so it goes when you clear the rest. Add yours alongside and let the samples be deleted.

Forms is one app doing two jobs. Building a form is a considered decision an owner makes once; reading what comes back is something that happens ten minutes before the client sits down. Only the first job was reachable, and only by owners and managers — so the medical history sitting in the system last night was invisible to the person who needed it this morning.

Forms → Submissions now opens for front desk, stylists and junior stylists. They can read a completed form, fill one in on a client's behalf, and approve one that needs a signature.

Opening Forms from Apps takes them straight to Submissions. The Templates tab isn't shown, because building and publishing forms stays with owners and managers — a published consent form is a document your salon stands behind, and that isn't something to change on a busy Saturday.

One thing improved along the way that you'd never have seen as a permission problem: a submission records only which form it is, by id. Reading the form's name and its questions needed the build-forms permission, so opening this up without that would have handed your team a list of unlabelled rows. Reading a form is now part of reviewing one, which is what it should always have been.

Until now a stylist going on parental leave left you choosing between two imperfect options: terminate them, which can't be undone, or untick Service provider, which took them off the calendar but still used one of your plan's staff seats.

Open anybody's record now and there's a Status control at the bottom, reading Active or Inactive. Inactive takes them off the calendar and out of online booking, and it stops them taking up a seat — so a summer hire who's away until spring isn't costing you a place on your plan. Everything else stays: their record, their login, their past appointments, their pay history. Set it back to Active the week they're back.

Setting somebody back to Active takes a seat again, so if your plan is full at that moment the product will say so and tell you which plan has room.

The control only appears for people who are already working with you. Somebody who hasn't accepted their invitation yet becomes active by accepting it, and terminating is still its own separate, deliberate action.

Making one service staff-only used to mean going through Bulk edit and describing the change in words — which is a good tool for a whole category at once, and a long way round for a single service.

Open any service now and there's an Online booking control under its category, reading either Bookable online or Staff only, with a line under it saying what that means for this service. Staff only takes it off your public booking page and leaves everything else working: your team can still put it on an appointment and still ring it up.

Bulk edit hasn't changed, and it's still the right tool when you want to move a whole category at once.

Referral rewards work by pointing Settings → Referral rewards at an offer that is marked as a referral thank-you. Only offers with that mark appear in the picker — which is what stops a seasonal flash sale being wired in by accident.

The gap was that nothing in the app could put that mark on an offer. Unless your salon happened to start with one, the picker was empty and the programme couldn't be switched on at all.

The New offer drawer now has a What it's for control, just under the name: leave it on A normal offer, or set it to A referral thank-you. Make the offer, then go to Settings → Referral rewards and pick it.

It's set when the offer is created and doesn't appear when you edit one later, so an ordinary edit to your thank-you can't quietly turn it back into a normal offer and switch your referral programme off.

Every plan has come with a monthly AI allowance for the tools you press — Ask, Design, Explain, Brief me, describing a booking in a sentence. Until now there was no screen that showed it to you. We could see the number; you couldn't, and the only way to tell you were near the end of it was that a tool started answering plainly instead of in prose.

Settings → Your plan → AI allowance now shows what your plan includes, what you've spent so far this month, what's left, and the date it resets. It costs nothing to look at — the figure is already stored, and reading it doesn't ask the AI anything.

Nothing about the allowance itself has changed. It is still a ceiling and not a bill: you cannot spend past it, so a busy Saturday still can't cost more than a quiet one, and going past it has never been possible to be charged for.

Underneath is the everyday AI — the brief at the top of a client record, the clash flagged on an overlapping booking, the add-on suggestions on a cart. It shows one word, Running, and no figure, because it isn't drawn from your allowance and doesn't stop when that runs out.

Owners and managers can both see it. Managers press most of the heavy AI, so showing it only to owners would have hidden it from the person doing the spending.

The full rules — the two kinds of AI, what happens when the allowance is gone, and what is not the allowance — are in What the AI costs you.

A till that closes further out than your allowed difference gets flagged for a manager to sign off. That has always worked. What it never had was a place to look: the flag sat on the session, and finding it meant already knowing which session to open. A drawer flagged on a Saturday night was, in practice, found by nobody until somebody happened past it.

Cash drawer → Variance review is now the list of every close still waiting. Each row carries the whole question in one line — when the till closed, which till and which location, how far out it came, and the name of the person who counted it. That last one is the point of the control rather than a detail of it: a second signature means very little if you can't see whose count you're signing.

You don't have to remember to check. The Cash drawer page carries the count beside the button and says so plainly when something is waiting, so the manager who opens the app on Monday morning meets Saturday's shortfall without going to look for it.

From a row you can open the session — where the ledger and Explain this variance are — or sign it off in place when you already know what happened. Either way you can now leave a line saying why. That note goes on the session and into the ledger beside your name and the date, and it answers the one thing the record can't answer by itself: not what the difference was, but how it happened.

Owners and managers only, which is the same reasoning as the sign-off itself. Front desk can work the till all day and cannot read the list of its own counts awaiting a check — the people an approval exists to check shouldn't be the ones clearing it.

Approving still changes no figures. It records that a named person read the discrepancy and accepted it.

The full picture — why a short drawer still closes, what a flag asks for, and how to set your own allowed difference — is in When the count doesn't match.

If you have web chat on your website, its header tells visitors whether you're Online now or Away — back at a particular time, and the AI assistant's After hours mode uses the same answer to decide when it should speak.

Both were reading your business hours in UTC rather than your salon's own timezone. Depending on where you are that could make the chat bubble announce a reopening several hours early, and it could make the assistant answer as though you were closed while you were still on the floor. Now both use the timezone of your location — the same one your calendar and your booking page have always used.

Nothing to change on your side. If you turned After hours off because it was speaking up during the day, it's worth turning back on.

Some clients simply take longer. There's now a −/+ control on every service line — both when you're editing a booked visit and when you're taking a new booking — so you can give one client the time they actually need without touching the service in your menu.

It moves in whatever slot size your calendar uses, up or down from the time already there. The price doesn't change; only the space on the calendar does.

You can add short notes to a client that say what they like, what they don't, anything to be careful about, and the habits worth knowing. They appear in the booking pane, on the appointment's details panel, and on the client's profile, with a marker on the client list so you can see at a glance who has them.

They're deliberately short — one line each. This is the sentence you'd say to a colleague covering for you, not a paragraph nobody reads before a client sits down.

When a returning client books on your public page, we confirm their phone number and then ask whether they're someone we already have. Pick them, and the booking lands on their existing record — with their history, their notes, and everything you already know about them.

Before this, every online booking created a new client, and somebody had to notice and merge them later. Usually nobody did.

If they're genuinely new, or they'd rather not be matched, Someone else creates a fresh record as it always did.