Staff Scheduling That Actually Works

Sarah works Monday to Thursday. James does Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Emma's full-time but takes every second Monday off because her kid's daycare closes. Then somebody goes on holiday, somebody else swaps a shift, and the schedule you built on Sunday night is out of date by Wednesday lunch.

Running a solo chair, your availability is whatever you say it is. The moment there's a second person in the salon, scheduling stops being a personal thing and starts being a system. And most booking software handles teams the way it handles one person, just repeated, which falls apart the first time someone has an irregular week.

Each person, their own hours

Every staff member in TimeToBook has their own working hours, set per day of the week. Start time, finish time, or marked as not working at all.

The booking page reads from those hours directly. A client trying to book James on Wednesday won't see Wednesday as an option. James isn't there. No "please call to check availability" caveat, no double-handling, no client showing up on a day the stylist isn't in.

Entering it for a whole team is the kind of admin nobody enjoys, so there's a copy-to-weekdays shortcut on the staff page. Set Monday, click once, and Tuesday through Friday inherit the same hours. Then you adjust the few days that differ (Emma's Mondays, James's missing weekdays) instead of typing out the whole week five times.

Bookable vs not bookable

Not everyone on the team needs to appear on the booking page. The apprentice who washes hair and folds towels shouldn't be a selectable staff option for a colour. Same for a senior who only takes existing clients by phone.

Each staff member has a bookable toggle. Off means they're still in the system, still on the calendar, still able to be assigned bookings manually, but they don't show up as an option when a client picks a stylist online. It's the difference between "exists" and "exists publicly," which sounds obvious until you've used software that doesn't separate the two.

Pricing without making fifteen versions of every service

A junior charges less than a senior. A senior often charges more than the master pricelist. They're all doing a women's cut, but the women's cut isn't the same price depending on whose chair it's in.

The slow way to handle this is to duplicate every service for every staff member and edit each price by hand. Twelve services times five staff is sixty rows to maintain, and every time you change a base price you do it sixty times.

TimeToBook uses price tiers instead. You define a few tiers (Junior, Stylist, Senior, Master, whatever your structure looks like) and give each one a percentage or flat adjustment. So Junior might be -10%, Stylist is the base (no adjustment), Senior is +20%, and a Master tier could be +35%.

Then a women's cut at a base price of $80 automatically becomes $72 with the junior, $80 with the stylist, $96 with the senior, and $108 with the master. Change the base price to $85 and everything recalculates. One number to maintain.

When one stylist is an exception

Tiers cover the pattern. They don't cover every edge case. You'll have a senior who specialises in balayage and charges a premium for that one service while still doing standard-priced cuts. Or somebody who's technically a stylist but their blow-dries are faster than everyone else's, so the duration should be shorter only for them.

Per-staff overrides handle this. Set a specific price or duration on one staff member's version of one service, and that wins over the tier adjustment. The lookup goes: specific override first, then tier, then base service price. So you keep the tier system for everything that fits the pattern, and only override the genuine exceptions.

Invites, archives, and the in-between

Adding a stylist to the system sends them an email invite. They click through, set their login, and they're in: viewing their own calendar, taking their own bookings. You can see who's accepted and who's still pending on the staff page, and resend an invite if it got lost in a junk folder.

When someone leaves (and in salons, "leaves" is often "leaves for now") you archive them rather than delete. The history of every booking they ever took stays attached. If they come back six months later (it happens), you restore them and the previous data is still there.

The point of all this is to stop the schedule fighting the salon. You shouldn't have to redesign your team to fit the software, or talk clients out of booking with the stylist they actually want because the system can't represent her hours properly. Set it up once to match the team you have, and the booking page should do the rest from there.

Set up your team in TimeToBook.