The appointment book is full. The sales report may be counting the wrong people's clients.
If a stylist rents a chair and brings their own clients, the rent is your income. Their service tickets are not. Those clients paid the stylist, or they paid you only as a convenience that you owe back to the stylist. Putting those tickets in your sales inflates the salon and hides whether the rent is even being collected. A commission stylist is the opposite. The service is your sale, the product you provided is your cost, and the stylist's percentage is your cost too. One sales account called 'services' cannot hold both arrangements. It will look busy and you will not know if the floor is profitable.
For each chair, write one sentence: this person pays rent, or this person is paid a percentage, or this person is paid a wage. Rent collected is income, and it should show up as rent even if you collect it in cash at the desk. Commission services are your sales, and the payout is a cost on those sales. Wages are wages. If a person switched arrangements mid-year, the file should switch on that date, not average the two into a third thing that never existed.
Tips follow the person they were left for. A tip for a commission stylist is not your sales. A tip for a booth renter is not your sales either. It is their money passing through, if it passes through you at all. Mixing tips into service sales is how a strong tip week becomes fake growth.
Write the sentence down even when everyone at the desk 'already knows.' The person entering the ticket six months from now will not remember who switched from rent to commission, and the report will not remind them unless the chair's arrangement is recorded somewhere the ticket can see. A note in a group text is not a bookkeeping system. A field on the person, or a one-line list taped to the coding habit, is enough.
A bottle has a cost you can point at. A haircut's cost is time, product used, and the payout. If retail and service live in one income line, and the product purchases live in one supplies line, you cannot tell whether the shelf is carrying the floor or the floor is carrying a shelf that does not turn. Separate retail sales from service sales. Put the retail product into inventory, or at least into a retail-cost bucket, when you buy it, and move the cost when it sells. Backbar product that guests never buy is a supply of the service, and it is allowed to be a supply. Do not make it pretend to be retail.
A membership or a package of visits is cash now and appointments later. The same rule you would use anywhere else applies here. Unearned visits are a liability. Performing the visit is the sale. Selling a package and a visit as two sales, or as none, are the two common ways to get the year wrong in opposite directions.
A commission percentage that is high, plus product, plus a discounted ticket, can leave the house with almost nothing. You will not see it if you only look at the appointment count. For a sample week, put the service price, the discount, the product used, and the payout on one row per stylist. The row is the truth. The busy calendar is the mood. Owners keep unprofitable chairs for good human reasons. The books should not be one of the reasons they cannot see it.
Booth rent that is late is a receivable, not a quiet reduction of sales. If you only record rent when the stylist happens to pay, a skipped week vanishes. Record what they owe, record what they paid, and let the difference sit where you can ask about it.
A list of who rents and who is on commission, a recent week of tickets, the retail shelf invoices, and the bank account. The first product is that week restated: rent as rent, commission sales as sales, payouts as costs, retail separate from service, tips out of sales, and any package money that is still unearned labeled as unearned. Nobody has to be moved to a new arrangement for the books to tell the truth about the arrangement you already have.
The argument on the floor is usually about fairness. The file cannot settle fairness. It can stop the argument from being about a number that mixed two businesses into one.
No. If the money belongs to the renter, you are holding it for them. Your sale is the rent. Recording their tickets as your sales overstates the salon and confuses what they still owe you for the chair.
Not in sales. A tip is the guest's money for the person who earned it. If it passes through your register, it passes through as their money, not as a service you sold.
Only if you already did six visits, which you did not. The cash is real. The visits you have not done are still owed. Recognize them as they happen.
If your file looks like this, start with a free look: salon and spa QuickBooks cleanup.