Updated 2026-09-12 · 4 min read
Taking payment is the one moment of the day when your calendar and your money have to talk to each other. In most salons they live in different places: the appointment in the booking software, the payment in a till or a card terminal, and somebody reconciling at night with both in front of them.
What gets lost there isn't minutes. It's the payments nobody wrote down, the tips nobody can attribute, and that month-end discrepancy that gets waved through because there's no way to reconstruct it.
The idea: charge where the appointment already is
If the appointment already knows who's coming, what service it is, who's doing it and what it costs, the payment shouldn't start from nothing. You charge from the appointment itself: open its card, take the payment, and the receipt comes out of there.
That changes three things at once. The receipt stays attached to the appointment, so there's nothing to cross-check afterwards. The commission for whoever did the work comes out on its own, because the system already knows who it was. And the client's history is real: what was done and what they paid, on the same card.
The till session: open, charge, close
Opening means stating what you start with. Thirty seconds, and it's what turns the count at the end into something checkable rather than an estimate.
Charging handles what actually happens at a front desk: several methods on one appointment (part cash, part card), tips recorded separately so they don't inflate your takings, and a package visit that's worth zero in money but still counts as a service delivered.
Closing means counting the cash in the drawer and typing it in. The system already knows what it expected.
Whether the count means anything comes down to one thing
Whether you actually count. It sounds obvious, and it's where most closes fall down: if you leave the cash uncounted and hit close, the figure recorded is zero and an enormous discrepancy appears that nobody looks at. From then on the count stops meaning anything.
So it's worth understanding it this way: anything you leave blank is taken as zero, and a discrepancy will show. That isn't a punishment, it's the only way a count ever detects anything. A system that quietly fills the gap with the expected figure gives you a perfect balance every day and never warns you about a thing.
And a discrepancy never blocks the close. It's recorded with whatever you typed and whatever note you leave. Two pounds out on a Tuesday is nothing; the same two pounds five Tuesdays running is information.
What can't be edited, and why that suits you
A receipt that's been issued is never edited. If something went wrong, a new document is issued that corrects it, and both are kept.
At first glance that looks awkward. In fact it's the only thing that makes your figures worth anything: a record that can be rewritten backwards proves nothing, not to an inspector and not to you when you want to understand what happened last month. The same goes for the close: once closed it's sealed. If you miscounted, you fix it with a cash movement, not by rewriting the past.
The receipt is yours, not ours
It carries your salon's name, address and phone number, and goes out however you want: printed, over WhatsApp or by email. On WhatsApp the PDF and the text arrive in the same message, so it reads at a glance and can still be saved.
Whoever receives it bought from your salon. Putting the software's brand on it does nobody any good.
The day's summary, without asking for it
When you close, what happened reaches your WhatsApp: how much came in and by which method, how much in tips, and whether there was a discrepancy. To you, and nobody else.
It's the one report that actually gets read, because it arrives at the moment it matters and there's nothing to go and look for. If some day you don't close, it still arrives at whatever cut-off time you set. And a day with no takings and no close generates no message: a nightly «nothing today» ends up silencing the one that matters.
At the counter, with a tablet
Everything above is done from the dashboard, on the usual screen. But at the counter there's someone waiting with their card in hand, and there the same till has another face: counter mode, drawn for a tablet. Tiles with your services, an on-screen numeric keypad, the change worked out when they pay in cash, and the receipt going out on its own through whichever delivery you have as default. We cover it in full in the till on a tablet.
And in Spain, with its invoicing law
If your salon is in Spain, the receipt comes out the way its law requires: a compliant simplified invoice, with the salon's tax number, VAT itemised by rate, a corrective invoice on refunds, a full invoice if asked for and the tax authority's QR code. The till is switched on per business from your dashboard, with the registration of your tax number, well before the law obliges you.
And if you take more than one currency, each one is counted and balanced separately and they're never added together — which is a subject of its own.