Software for beauty and hair salons: what you need

A beauty or hair salon's day starts with the calendar. Who's coming at nine, does anyone have an allergy, did yesterday's client pay. Then come the phone calls ("is there anything free tomorrow?"), and at the end of each visit an invoice with the service, the colour used and the shampoo the client bought. At the end of the month the stylists' commission is worked out — often in Excel, pieced together from three places.

If bookings are in one program, product sales in another and the online store in a third, every visit is repeated in several places and something always gets lost somewhere.

What salons complain about most

• "Colour gets used up, but nobody knows how much. By the end of the month the shelf is empty."
• "A client booked a slot online that had already been given away over the phone."
• "Working out stylist commission takes half a day and the numbers never match the till."
• "We sell the same products in the salon and online, but the stock is in two places."

How NUNDINAE carries the salon's day

NUNDINAE is a platform where bookings, the till, the online store and the stock are one application. A salon is one possible user among many, but the system knows salon work well.

Morning. The dashboard shows "In the salon today": the day's clients in time order, with the service and the stylist. A client card warning (an allergy, for example) appears in red under the name. Each stylist logs in with their own account and sees "My day" with only their own clients. At 6 pm the evening before, they already got an email with tomorrow's appointments.

During the day. You book a client in over the phone — the confirmation with a calendar file goes out straight away. Online, clients book themselves. Double bookings are impossible in the system, even when the same stylist offers services of different lengths. When a slot frees up, the system offers it to someone on the waiting list.

End of the visit. Clicking on the booking opens a side panel with the whole invoice: the service is added automatically, and you add the colour used and any products bought. You record the payment (card, cash or transfer) and email the invoice to the client.

Evening. The day has to be finished on the same day: after midnight (or at a time you set) the past day locks and only the owner or manager can correct it. That way every job reaches the payroll.

Colour in grams, shampoo by the bottle — the same stock

A salon's stock comes in two kinds, and NUNDINAE handles both:

• Materials such as hair colour: price and stock level are in the same unit. Sold by the gram, the price is the price per gram and a 60-gram tube means a stock level of 60. You put the actual amount used on the invoice, say 35, and exactly that much comes off the stock. Such a product is marked "Salon only" — it doesn't appear in the online store and no discount applies to it.
• Fixed materials — if a service always uses the same amount, you attach it to the service and it comes off the stock when the visit is marked as completed.
• Retail products — shampoos and styling products are the same products in the online store, at the till and on the visit invoice.

And this is the biggest difference compared with separate programs: the online store and the stock are one application. When a stylist sells the last conditioner on an invoice, it disappears from the online store at the same moment. You receive the supplier's box with a barcode scanner — every beep adds one unit — and the goods are on sale both in the salon and online straight away. When something is running low, you see it on the dashboard and can produce a supplier order sheet by brand.

Stylist commission without Excel

The reports include a payroll calculation for each stylist: number of clients, services total with and without VAT, and materials and products shown separately (they don't count towards pay). A service discount reduces only the service total; colour stays at full price. The table downloads as CSV. Exactly how it calculates is explained in staff commission on service sales.

Clients, prepayment and repeat visits

• Client card: contact details, warnings, visit history and notes. Health data (allergies, contraindications) is stored encrypted in the database, and every opening of a card goes into the audit log.
• Prepayment on online bookings via Montonio, with a free cancellation window in hours. Bookings made over the phone or in person don't ask for a prepayment.
• Automated messages: a repeat-visit reminder based on the service interval (e.g. six weeks after a cut, if no new appointment has been booked), a feedback request and a birthday offer with a personal code — only to clients who have given consent.

What to check when migrating

For a salon, client history is where most of the value is. Clients and visits come across from CSV (from your old salon software or Excel) with column mapping, and products from your old online store. Before migrating, check:

1. Are client warnings in a separate field in the old system? Then they go straight in as client card warnings.
2. Are materials sold by the gram or by the piece? That determines how the product is set up.
3. Who sees what? Stylists, the manager and the online store administrator get different permissions.

I do the migration and setup myself. If you'd like to see how this looks across your salon's day, order NUNDINAE or ask for a demo. For bookings more broadly, read booking system: what it needs to be able to do.