Salon team management software: hours, attendance, commission and payroll files

Staff admin grows faster than the team. Three stylists share a diary and a group chat and it works. At six or seven, or the day a second site opens, the same setup starts producing double bookings, lost holiday requests and a commission calculation at month end that nobody quite trusts.

This post walks through what salon software can take off your hands on the staff side, using Salon100X staff and payroll as the example, and is clear about what stays with you.

Where the manual version breaks

The symptoms are familiar. A stylist is booked twice because the receptionist on the late shift did not see the morning's change. A holiday agreed in a chat thread is forgotten when the online diary keeps taking bookings for that week. Commission is worked out from a notebook, queried by the stylist, and reworked. An owner with two sites cannot see who is in today without ringing.

Each of those is a data problem: the information exists, but in three places that do not talk to each other. Fixing it means one record of hours, one diary, and one ledger of what each person sold.

Working hours that drive the booking page

Start with hours, because everything else depends on them. In Salon100X each stylist has weekly working hours and breaks. A schedule can be copied from week to week, and staff can edit their own. Those hours, minus breaks, are what the online booking page and the Booking Assistant offer to clients in 30-minute slots, so a change to somebody's Thursday is reflected in what clients can book.

One thing to know: time off shows on the calendar but does not block online bookings, so when a stylist books a holiday, also adjust their working hours for that week or add a block to the diary. It takes a minute and it saves an apology.

Attendance and leave, recorded by a manager

Salon100X includes manager-recorded attendance and leave tracking. A manager keeps a check-in log for each staff member, records leave by type (sick, special, weekly off), logs overtime, and sees a monthly leave ledger. Staff can also check themselves in from their own dashboard.

It is not GPS clock-in, and it does not build rotas or shifts. The working hours above are the pattern, and attendance is the record of what happened against it. If your salon runs rotating shifts, plan to keep the rota where it is today and use the software for hours and attendance.

What performance should mean

Punctuality is the least useful measure of a stylist. The measures that tell you who is building the business are all in the reports.

• Rebook rate: how many of a stylist's clients book again.
• Sales by staff, and average ticket.
• Staff utilisation: booked hours against available hours.
• Retail mix: how much product goes out with each service.
• New versus returning clients.

Salon100X reports each of these with date, location and staff filters, exportable as CSV or PDF, and can email them to you weekly. A stylist with a full column but a low rebook rate needs different help from one with gaps in the diary and clients who always come back. See reports.

Commission statements and payroll files

This is where the month-end argument ends. Service and product commission in Salon100X is written to a ledger with the transaction behind it. Staff see their own commission statement; managers see everyone's, with the transaction list.

At the end of a payroll period the software builds the period from that ledger and exports it as a generic CSV, or in Xero, QuickBooks or UK IRIS format, on a weekly schedule if you want it, with a to-the-penny reconciliation check. Your accountant or payroll bureau takes the file from there.

Be clear on the boundary. Payroll export covers commission. It does not calculate wages, hours or deductions, and it produces files rather than pushing figures into Xero or QuickBooks. If someone is on a basic plus commission, the basic still comes from your payroll provider; the commission line comes from the file.

A login for every member of staff

Each employee has their own login showing their appointments, availability, profile and commission statement, which removes a large share of the questions reception fields every day. Owners and managers set custom roles from around eighty base permissions, so a junior sees their diary, a senior stylist sees their column and their statement, and neither sees the takings.

Creating a staff member sends them a welcome email with their login. The Front Desk Copilot can create staff too, and every change it makes is confirmed first and logged.

Across more than one location

With two or more sites, each location in Salon100X has its own manager login, opening hours, settings and Stripe account. The owner's dashboard shows totals and a performance table across every location, and the owner can log in as any location to see what the manager sees. Staff reports filter by location, so comparing the two teams is a filter rather than a spreadsheet. See multi-location.

Setting it up in the right order

1. Enter working hours and breaks for every stylist, and check the booking page offers the right slots.
2. Add each person's services to their staff profile, so clients can only book them for what they do.
3. Give every staff member their login and set roles.
4. Switch on attendance and start recording leave from the first of the month.
5. Run the first payroll export in parallel with your current method for one period, and compare to the penny.

Attendance, commission statements and payroll export are switched on for your salon when you ask for them, so the menus stay simple until you need them. If you would like to see the payroll file with your own commission structure, book a demo and bring last month's numbers.