Salon & Barber Income Tracker
This salon and barber income tracker works out what every service earns per hour of chair time, after card fees, product cost and staff commission.
A full diary and a thin week are often the same week. The service that feels like the big one holds the chair long enough to earn less per hour than the quick one before it, and nothing on the till receipt or the day sheet says so.
What is in it
- Eight working tabs: Start Here, Settings, Services, Staff, Appointments, Clients, Monthly and Overview.
- Services — 70 rows. Type the price, the minutes it takes and the product cost, and the gross per hour appears next to it.
- Appointments — 700 rows. Card fee, product cost and staff commission come off each booking, leaving net profit per appointment.
- Staff — 20 rows, each with its own commission rate, so takings split by stylist as well as by service.
- Clients — 300 rows with visit history. Anyone past the number of days you set in Settings is flagged GONE QUIET — call.
- Monthly — twelve months of takings, services, product sales and net, with an Overview tab that puts the year on one screen.
Who it is for
Salons and barbershops with a few chairs, self-employed stylists renting a chair, and mobile hairdressers who work out of a car. It works whether you have one pair of hands or twenty, because the Staff tab simply stops being interesting when there is only one row in it. It is aimed at people who already know their week is busy and want to know which parts of it are worth the room.
The worked example
The clearest thing in the example is the price list read against the clock. A $95 colour that takes 2h 30m earns $30.60 an hour. A $28 cut that takes 45 minutes earns $35.73 an hour — more, on a third of the ticket.
The $14 beard trim, the cheapest thing on the board, earns $40.20 an hour: more than either of them. That is the whole argument of the file. The example workbook carries the same logic through 700 appointment rows, 70 services, 20 staff rows and 300 clients, with card fees, product cost and commission taken off before the per-hour figure is worked out.
How it works
Compatible with Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ons, no account to create, nothing to install.
The download has two workbooks: one with the example above already filled in, so you can see what every column expects, and the same file completely blank for your own figures. A plain-English guide comes as a PDF. Buy it on Etsy — $9
Sold through my Etsy shop, ThePlainLedger, so the download, the payment and the buyer protection are all handled by Etsy.
Questions people actually ask
How do I find out which service actually makes me the most money?
Type the price, the minutes and the product cost into the Services tab and it shows gross per hour for each service. In the worked example a $95 colour taking 2h 30m earns $30.60 an hour while a $14 beard trim earns $40.20 — the cheapest thing on the board is the most profitable use of the chair. Card fees and staff commission come off before that figure.
Does it work if I rent a chair and work on my own?
Yes — put one row in the Staff tab and set the commission to zero, and everything else behaves the same. The Services, Appointments and Clients tabs are the ones you will use, and the per-hour figures work exactly as they do for a salon with twenty chairs. Nothing in the file requires employees.
Will it tell me which clients have stopped coming in?
Yes — the Clients tab holds 300 clients with their visit history, and anyone who has not been in for longer than the number of days you set in Settings is flagged GONE QUIET — call. You choose the number of days, so a six-weekly colour client and a twice-a-year cut are judged on their own rhythm.
Can I use it in Google Sheets instead of Excel?
Yes — it is built as .xlsx and opens in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Apple Numbers as well as Excel. For Google Sheets use File, then Import, then Upload, and choose Replace spreadsheet; the formulas carry over. Excel 2016 or newer works on Windows and Mac.
Is it a booking system?
No — it does not take bookings, block out the diary or message clients, and it never connects to a card terminal, a payment processor or a bank. You type appointments in after they happen and the file does the arithmetic on your own computer. Utilisation figures are estimates built from the minutes you enter, and there is no tax modelling in it.
Need it built around your business?
This file assumes appointments priced per service, staff on the salon’s books, and retail sold alongside the service. If your salon runs differently — independent stylists renting chairs and keeping their own takings, memberships or maintenance packages instead of one-off bookings, or several branches whose takings need to land in one place — I can rebuild the same arithmetic around the way your salon actually works.
All other templates are listed on the Excel & Google Sheets Templates page.