How to keep the books in a salon
Published:
Money moves through a salon every day in dozens of ways: cash, card, prepayment, gift certificate, pay, a supplier's invoice. Paperwork for the tax office has nothing to do with it. The books are there so that on any day you can answer a simple question: how much did the salon earn, and where is that money now. Below is how we set them up.
Every hryvnia in its own account
Start with a list of the places the salon's money sits: the cash desk, the bank account where card payments land, the safe. Each place is a separate account in the books, with its own balance.
Money moved from the cash desk to the safe, or paid into the bank, is a transfer, not income and not an expense. Record it as an expense and the month looks worse than it was.
The cash desk: open, close, count
The cash desk is opened with the morning balance and closed in the evening once the cash is counted. The program knows how much there should be; a person counts how much there is.
Say there is 2,000 UAH in the morning, 8,500 UAH taken in cash during the day, 1,200 UAH paid out to a master, 300 UAH for water. There should be 9,000 UAH. The count says 8,950, a 50 UAH shortage. It is recorded, not topped up from someone's purse.
Every receipt goes through the program at the moment of payment and with the exact method: cash, card, transfer, deposit, bonuses, certificate. If the salon issues fiscal receipts, they should come from that same operation rather than be typed in separately.
Money taken in advance is not revenue yet
A prepayment, a deposit top-up, a gift certificate or a package sold is money for a service the salon has not given yet. Until the service is given, it is the salon's debt to the client, not income.
In December the salon sold certificates for 20,000 UAH, and by the end of the month 6,000 of them had been used. December's income from certificates is 6,000 UAH. The other 14,000 the salon still owes clients in services.
Book all 20,000 in December and December comes out brilliant, while February, when the certificates come in, comes out a loss. The same goes for bonuses: bonuses granted are a promise that will have to be kept one day.
Expenses by category
Every expense is recorded with a category: rent, utilities, advertising, receptionists' pay, taxes, equipment upkeep, small household items. Keep the list short, 10–15 categories, or at the end of the month there is nothing to compare with the last one.
Buying colour or shampoo is not the month's expense but stock on the shelf. Bought materials for 12,000 UAH in March and used 4,000 worth in March: March's cost is 4,000, and 8,000 sit on the shelf for the months ahead.
Stock and the cost of services
Goods arrive with an invoice, with a quantity and a price. They leave in three ways: sold to a client, used on a service, or written off (spoiled, taken for work, given as a gift). Every movement is recorded, so the stock level can always be explained.
The cost of a service is the materials that actually went into it, at the price they were bought for. It is fixed at the moment of the service and never recalculated: colour got dearer in May, April's services did not get any more expensive.
Once a month, a stock count: count what is on the shelves and compare it with what should be there. The gap is better shown in hryvnias than in units. "Three tubes short" sounds calm, "1,140 UAH short" does not.
Masters' pay: the rule, the accrual, the payout
The pay rule is written down once, for every master: a percentage of services (of the full price or net of materials), a rate per service, a percentage of product sales, a rate per shift. It matters that the rule is written down rather than kept in the owner's head.
Accrual and payout are different things. An accrual appears with every service given; a payout is when the master actually gets the money. The difference between them is the balance: how much the salon still owes her, or how much she took in advance.
When a master sees her own accruals every day, there is nothing to argue about on payday, and she fills her free slots more willingly.
The month's result
Profit is counted from what the salon actually earned in the month, not from how much money came into its accounts:
| Line | Example, UAH |
|---|---|
| Services given | 310,000 |
| Products sold | 42,000 |
| Materials used on services | −38,000 |
| Cost of products sold | −25,000 |
| Masters' pay | −118,000 |
| Receptionists' pay | −30,000 |
| Rent | −45,000 |
| Other expenses | −22,000 |
| Profit | 74,000 |
The money in the accounts at the end of the month can be more or less than the profit: certificates sold, stock bought for months ahead, last month's wages paid. So the two figures are looked at separately.
A daily checklist
- in the morning, open the cash desk and check the balance against last night;
- every receipt through the program, with the right payment method;
- every expense paid from the cash desk recorded at once, with its category;
- materials for a service written off when the visit is closed;
- in the evening, close the cash desk with a count and record any difference;
- once a week, review expenses and accruals; once a month, do a stock count and the month's result.
In Perukar the cash desk, stock, pay and reports are one program, so all of this adds up by itself, without spreadsheets. Leave a request if you would like to see your own salon in it.