Busy Not Broke
You are seeing clients all day. The money is coming in. And at the end of the month there is nothing sitting there.
This is the spreadsheet we built to work out why.
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Why we made it
You need your numbers. And you do not have a spare six weeks, a monthly retainer, or another call in the diary to get them.
You opened a salon because you are good at what you do. Then you found out the job is targets, rosters, stock, margins and payroll, and that nobody is going to sit you down and explain any of it.
So most owners run on a feeling. The month felt busy, so it must have been fine. The account says otherwise and you cannot work out where it went. You set a target by dividing one number by however many people you have. You pay commission because that is what everyone does.
Tracking your numbers is the hardest thing to keep hold of when you are also on the floor, and it is the thing a business lives or dies on. This is the sheet that does it for you. One payment, no subscription, nobody to book a call with.
What is inside
You export your own reports from whatever software you already use. You paste. It does the rest. Nothing in it assumes what you sell, so you name your own service categories and set your own rates.
01 — Start here
Named screen by screen for Timely, Phorest, Kitomba, Fresha, Shortcuts, Simple Salon, Square, Mindbody and Cliniko. Plus the four data mistakes that quietly make every number downstream wrong.
02 — Your month
Operating costs, old debt, tax to quarantine and profit, kept in four separate buckets. Out comes the real number your month has to hit, and four bands to judge it against.
03 — Team targets
True bookable hours per person with every break deducted, then a target built from the hours someone actually has. Live utilisation for each of them and for the whole business.
04 — Service profit
Not margin. Your chair, room or bed is the thing you actually sell, and margin ignores how long a service ties it up. Ranks your whole menu on what an hour of it is really worth.
05 — Bonus calculator
A share of profit above a line, with gates, tiers and a split that protects you in a quiet month. Name your own service categories. Not commission.
06 — Dashboard
Reads from everything else. Cash, capacity and team in one view, with nothing to type.
The real thing
Real screens from the file. The cream cells are the only ones you type in. Everything else works itself out.
Tab 02 — Your month
Your running costs, whatever you still owe, and the tax you have not put aside, kept in separate buckets instead of one pile. Out the bottom comes the figure you have to take before you have earned a dollar, and four bands to judge the month against.
Tab 03 — Team targets
Rostered hours are not bookable hours. Take out every break on every day worked and you get the real number. Then a target built from that, per person, instead of one big figure divided by however many people you have. In this example there are 89.6 hours nobody sold.
Tab 04 — Service profit
Look at the top row. It has the worst margin of the lot and it is the best earner in the building, because margin ignores how long a service ties up the chair. Rank on the last column and your whole menu reorders.
Tab 05
Commission pays on what someone took, not on what you kept. A big service loaded with product can pay a fat commission on revenue you barely made a dollar on, and the person doing it has no reason to care. You are paying full price for turnover instead of profit, every single fortnight.
And if you are in cosmetic, injectable or any regulated treatment, there is a second reason and it is more serious. An incentive that pays more when more treatment happens is a written reason to recommend treatment a client does not need. That is exactly what a regulator looks at.
This tab pays a share of profit above a line instead. Nothing pays below ninety percent of target. Above it the rate steps up, and the top tier is uncapped on purpose, because that is the first question a good practitioner will ask you. Half is paid regardless, half is held against the business hitting its own number, and the held half never rolls forward. A quiet month costs that month only.
Who built it
We built this for ourselves, because nothing we could buy did the job.
We run SSKIN on the Gold Coast. Six rooms and a full team now, but we started the way everyone does and made every mistake on this list ourselves. We have set a target that turned out to be impossible. We have pushed the wrong service for a year. We have paid commission without thinking about what it was actually paying for.
This is everything we have learned putting real business thinking onto a salon floor, in the sheet we use every month. It has not been dressed up for sale.
The clinic behind it has been featured in
What you get
Before you ask
Yes. Nothing in it assumes what you sell. You name your own service categories, set your own margins and enter your own costs. The maths of a chair, an hour and a wage is the same whether it is a colour, a brow lamination, a set of acrylics or a facial.
Yes. That is the whole design. It never connects to your software, so it does not care which one you use. You export two things, revenue per team member and hours they delivered, and paste them in.
No. Every cell you type in is shaded cream. Everything else calculates itself. The first tab tells you what to pull and in what order to work through it.
No. One payment, and the file is yours.
Yes, and arguably more. Four of the six tabs work with no staff at all, and knowing what your month has to earn and what each service really keeps matters more when there is nobody else to carry a bad month. Tabs three and five are the team ones. They sit and wait until you hire, and they are there when you do.
$147
$197 while we are launching · one payment, yours to keep
No subscription, no coaching call, no six week programme. Download it now and you can have tab two finished before the end of the day.
Get the toolkit $147Instant download · Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets