Diary coverA covered day in order, 08:00 to 19:00

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 building

The hours, the diversion and the login

Owner to owner. This is the shape of a day in which your phone rings here instead of at your reception.

Cover is Monday to Saturday, 08:00 to 19:00. Eleven hours, six days, sixty-six hours a week, and the same hours every week: there is no rota here that you have to keep track of. Sunday has no cover at all and is not sold as having any.

The diversion is set up by your telephone provider, not by us, and it is yours to switch on and off. We will tell you exactly what hours to point at us and we will ask you to record the out-of-hours message in your own voice, naming the next time the desk opens. Clients forgive a closed line. They do not forgive a line that rings out.

Inside the software we work on a login you create and can delete in a minute without ringing anybody. Diary read and write, and nothing beyond it. If your system has a role that fits that description, use it; if it only has owner-level access, say so and we will work to a written list of what we will not open rather than pretend the software is protecting you.

The handover, written at the close

At 19:00 the diaries are closed and one email per salon is written. It carries five lists and then the following morning. Bookings taken, with the slot and the resource. Appointments moved, with where they moved from. Cancellations. Anybody marked as not arrived. Anything we could not settle, named against your escalation list. Then the first and last appointment standing for the next trading day, so you know before you set off whether it is a 09:00 start or a 10:30 one.

What this means if you are the one ringing a salon

To you for a paragraph, because you may have reached this page after a call that was answered somewhere other than the salon you rang.

If a salon has handed us its diary, the person who answered you was reading and writing the salon own diary, under the salon name, and the booking you were given is real and is in it. What that person cannot do is agree a price that is not on the salon list, add time to an appointment, or settle a complaint. Those go to the owner the same evening, in writing, with your name and number against them.

For the Aylesham salon itself, the phone is answered at the salon while the door is open; see Booking an appointment.

The day, hour by hourMonday to Saturday, the same every week

What happens when, on a covered day
Time	At the desk
08:00	Diaries opened, one browser tab per salon. The diversion is already live.
08:00 to 08:20	Overnight voicemail and messages worked through oldest first, each logged against the time it arrived rather than the time it was heard.
08:20 to 13:00	Calls answered as they come. Reminders for the next day go out on each salon lead time. Anything that cannot be settled is written into the escalation line as it happens, not at the end.
13:00 to 13:30	Quietest half hour of the day. Skin-test windows for the week ahead are checked by hand, because software rarely checks them and a colour booked inside the window has to be moved by somebody.
13:30 to 18:45	Calls, and the late-afternoon run of moves and cancellations for the following morning.
18:45	Last pass of the diaries. Tomorrow first and last appointments noted for each salon.
19:00	Diaries closed. The handover for each salon is written and sent, and the diversion drops back to the salon own voicemail.
Monday	The same eleven hours, plus the reconciliation of the week just finished against the takings sheet you send.

One thing deliberately absent. There is no promise on this page about how quickly a call is answered or a message returned, because that depends on how many lines are ringing at once and we are not going to invent a number for it. What is promised is where it ends up: in the diary, in the log, and in that evening handover.