How to set salon working hours

The hours on your door and the hours in a booking system are not the same thing. The first is information, the second is the rule from which every free slot a client sees is calculated.

Because of that, mistakes in working hours have consequences that are not visible straight away. A client books a time when you are closed, you do not notice for two days, then you call to cancel and explain.

Per day, not for the whole week

Few salons work the same every day. Saturday often opens and closes earlier, Monday is closed, Thursday runs late because that is when most people come.

A system with a single set of hours for all days forces you to enter the widest possible range and then manually turn away people who booked when you are closed. That is worse than having no system, because the client received a confirmation for an appointment that does not exist.

In practice, hours should be set for each day separately, including the days you do not work. A day without hours is a closed day and nobody can book into it.

The break is part of working hours, not an exception

A lunch break that is remembered will eventually get filled. Someone calls, there is room at two, it gets written in, and that day the break does not happen.

It is cleaner to split the day into two blocks: say nine to two and half past two to eight. Then there simply are no free slots between two and half past, because the system does not know time exists there.

The same goes for any regular commitment. If you never work Friday after six, that is working hours, not an exception.

Exceptions get entered immediately

A holiday, time off, an afternoon at the doctor. These are one-off changes for a specific date and they have their own place.

The mistake almost everyone makes at least once is to change regular hours because of a single day and then forget to change them back. The result is that three weeks later nobody can book on a Friday and nobody knows why.

That is why exceptions need to live separately: this date is closed, or this date closes early, while regular hours stay untouched.

A practical rule: the moment you learn about a closed day, enter it. Anything remembered as an intention eventually fails.

Several stylists, each with their own hours

If more than one person works in the salon, the salon's opening hours are the least useful piece of information there is. What matters is when a particular person works.

A client coming to a specific stylist should see that person's free slots. If the system shows the salon's shared hours, it will offer slots at five in the afternoon with a stylist who left at two.

That is why hours are set per person. The salon is open for as long as at least one person is inside, and that is a consequence rather than something you enter.

How far ahead to allow booking

There is no exact answer here, but there are two bad extremes.

Allow booking only two days ahead and you lose the people who plan. It is easier for them to go where they can reserve for next week.

Allow booking six months ahead and you get appointments nobody will remember and that will fall apart. The longer the gap, the higher the chance of a cancellation or a forgotten slot.

For a salon, two to four weeks is usually sensible. Enough to plan, not so much that it becomes uncertain.

What working hours do not solve

Honestly: neatly set hours do not bring clients. They only make sure the ones who come do not run into an unpleasant surprise.

Also, hours that are too wide will not fill the day. A salon open twelve hours with six hours of work is not busier than one open eight hours, it is just open longer.

It is worth occasionally looking at which parts of the week are permanently quiet and asking whether you should be working then at all. That is a decision working hours can carry out, but cannot make for you.