How to set service duration

Service duration looks like a detail you enter once and forget. In fact it is the number that decides whether your day holds together or falls apart every time it fills up.

The reason is simple: every free slot a client sees is calculated from that number. If the number is wrong, so are all the slots, and it does not show immediately.

The error does not show with the first client

If a haircut is entered as twenty minutes but really takes thirty, the first client of the day causes no trouble. You are ten minutes behind and nobody notices.

The second client waits ten minutes and starts twenty minutes late. The third waits twenty. By the fourth you are half an hour behind and the day is gone, even though every individual appointment looked reasonable.

That is why running late in a salon is almost never caused by one slow client. It is usually caused by durations that are each a few minutes short, and add up.

Measure the whole appointment, not just the work

The most common mistake is entering only the time the work itself takes. A haircut takes twenty minutes, so twenty minutes goes in.

But the appointment does not begin when the scissors start. The person comes in, takes off a jacket, sits down, says what they want. At the end they stand up, pay, chat at the door. The chair gets cleared before the next one.

That is somewhere between five and ten minutes that happen every single time and are recorded nowhere. If they are not counted, every appointment runs exactly that much late.

A practical way to check: next time, note the clock when the client walks in and when they walk out, not when you start and stop working. The difference is usually larger than expected.

Long services get misjudged most

Everyone knows how long a haircut takes because it is done all day. Colouring and treatments done once a week are estimated from memory, and memory tends to be optimistic.

With longer services the consequence is larger too. Colouring entered as an hour but taking an hour and a half does not push the day by ten minutes but by thirty.

For services like that it is worth timing the real thing a few times before entering it, rather than guessing.

Waiting time inside a service

Some services include time where nothing is being done to the client. Colour that needs to develop is the typical case.

That time is part of the appointment and must be recorded, because the chair is occupied and the client is there. Salons running more advanced schedules use that window for short services in between, but that requires doing it deliberately and knowing exactly how long it lasts.

For most salons it is simpler to enter the full duration and not complicate things. Better a little idle time than two clients colliding.

Same work, different people

If several stylists work in the salon, the same haircut does not take everyone the same time. One works faster, one more thoroughly, one has clients who like to talk.

For that reason duration is better attached to the person doing the work rather than to the salon. If an average is used, the faster stylist has idle time and the slower one runs late every day.

Padding that should not be too generous

There is a temptation to add ten minutes of padding to every service just in case. That fixes lateness but creates another problem.

If every service is stretched by ten minutes, across the day you have lost an hour that you neither worked nor rested. That is still empty time, only spread into small pieces that are not visible.

A sensible measure is the time it takes on an ordinary day, including the client walking in and out. Bad days will still run late and that is normal, but not every day will.

How to check whether the numbers are right

The best indicator is the end of the day. If you regularly finish later than the last appointment should have ended, with nothing unusual having happened, the durations are too short.

If you regularly finish early with gaps you cannot fill, they are too long.

It is worth revisiting them after the first month of using a system, once you have a feel for how a full day actually looks. The first entry is always an estimate, and that is fine, it just should not stay untouched forever.