What the desk doesBack office · written to whoever owns the salon
One company, two jobs — choose which leads
Front of houseChairs, basins and the side room at Aylesham Back officeAnother salon diary, held from the same buildingDiary cover, reminders and the Monday reconciliation
This page is owner to owner from here down. If you are a client of the Aylesham salon, the short column underneath is the one addressed to you.
We hold your appointment diary. Your calls divert to us inside the covered hours, we answer in your salon name, and we book, move and cancel inside the software you already pay for, on a staff login you create. The login needs diary read and write. It does not need, and should not be given, card details, the takings screen, staff records, the price list or anything that lets a password be changed.
Reminders go out on the lead time you set, from your own account where your software allows it, so the client sees your name and replies to you. If your system cannot send on our instruction, we send nothing and the reminders stay yours; we will not route your clients through an address of ours, because a client who replies to the wrong place is worse than no reminder.
Somebody who does not arrive is marked in the diary as not arrived and appears under that heading on the day handover. We do not apply a charge, chase a payment, or ring the client back to ask why. Those are decisions about your money and your relationship, and they stay with the name on your escalation list.
On Monday — the day our own door is shut — the week is reconciled. You send the takings sheet for the week just finished; we set it against the diary as we left it on Saturday evening and send back the differences line by line, named by appointment and time rather than totalled. A total tells you something is wrong. A list tells you where.
The whole shape of a covered day is on Diary cover, what has to exist before any of it starts is on Taking on a salon, and the hours nobody is here are on Quiet hours and cover.
If you came for a haircut, this page is not about you
Now to you, the client, and briefly, because this is the honest thing to say rather than pretend one page speaks to both.
This half of the company sells office work to other businesses, and none of it changes your appointment. One thing it does explain: Monday. The salon door is shut on a Monday and the people in the building are answering other salons phones and reconciling their weeks, so Monday is not the day to ring about your own booking.
What you want is Booking an appointment, or the door hours on the front page.
Back-office diary load sheetYour numbers, our arithmetic, printed in full
How much desk time a week does holding a diary actually cost? Put your own figures in. The sheet multiplies out the appointments, multiplies again by the minutes each one costs in admin, then divides to hours, and shows both steps. The figures it opens with are an example for working with — they are not a count of salons, and nothing here is a quotation.
One week, across every salon on the sheet
Appointments to handle in the week4 × 118 = 472 appointments in the week
Multiplied by the admin minutes each472 × 3 = 1,416 minutes at the desk
Divided to hours1,416 ÷ 60 = 23.6 hours
Which reads as23 hours 36 minutes of desk time a week
4 salons × 118 appointments = 472; × 3 minutes = 1,416 minutes; ÷ 60 = 23.6 hours a week, spread over six covered days.
A guide for sizing the work, not a price and not an offer. Three minutes an appointment is a reasonable figure for a booking taken, confirmed and reminded; a salon with a lot of moves and a lot of first-time colour clients will run higher, because skin-test windows have to be checked by hand.
What is written down against every single contactThe same seven fields, whoever rang and whichever salon
Date and time it arrived
The time of the call, not the time it was dealt with. For anything that came in overnight on your own voicemail, both are recorded, so you can see how long it sat.
How they reached us
Diverted call, text to the salon number, or a message through whichever channel you have pointed at us. Written down because it tells you where your clients actually are.
Name and number, read back
Repeated to the caller digit by digit before the call ends. An unreadable mobile number in a diary is the commonest cause of a reminder that never arrived.
Which salon
Obvious when there is one salon and essential when there are several, because the handover is written per salon and nothing may cross between them.
What was asked for
In the caller words where they matter. If somebody asks for a service you do not list, that goes down as asked, not translated into the nearest thing on your sheet.
What was done in the diary
Booked, moved, cancelled or nothing, with the slot and the resource. If nothing was done, the reason is written: no slot clear of the skin-test window, room already held, caller ringing off.
What is left for you
Anything outside what we are allowed to settle: a refund, a complaint, extra time on a short appointment, a price not on the sheet. It is named in the handover under your own escalation list.
The log is sent on with the handover each covered evening, and the whole period comes back to you as one spreadsheet if cover ever ends. It is your record of your own business, and it leaves with you.