Business software for beauty and personal care

A salon or a self employed stylist has two businesses stacked on top of each other. One sells time in a chair. The other sells product off a shelf. They have completely different margins, and mixing them together in your head is how people end up thinking a good month was better than it was.

Product cost is sneaky. Colour, developer, disposables and back bar stock get used up gradually and bought in lumps, so the spend and the usage never line up in the same month. Buying three hundred pounds of stock in one week does not mean that week was expensive, it means you bought stock.

Then there is the rent question. Chair rent or booth rent is fixed and lands whether or not you were busy. For anyone renting, the single most useful number in the business is how many clients a week clears the rent, and almost nobody has worked it out.