What Salon Booking OS does: an overview
9 min read
Table of Contents
Salon Booking OS by OsDot™ is appointment software for small and medium-sized salons and beauty parlours — hair, barber, nails, facials, make-up, waxing and threading. You install it on your own hosting. One installation serves one salon.
Video tutorial #
How to check your version, licenses and updates in Salon Booking OS by OsDotâ„¢ 1.0.0
Scheduling is staff-based: every appointment belongs to the staff members who do its services, and a booking that would overlap a staff member’s other appointments is refused. There is no room or station booking.
Who works with it #
| Who | What they do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Installs the software, configures the salon, decides who may do what. The owner can use every part of the administration area. |
| Manager / Front desk | Runs the calendar: desk and phone bookings, walk-ins, moving and cancelling appointments, call-backs and the end of the day. Sees the client records and the messages sent to clients, and handles shop orders, returns and stock. |
| Staff | See their own appointments and hours, start walk-ins and mark their own appointments (arrived, started, completed, no-show, confirmed by phone). |
| Clients | Book on your website once you take bookings online, see and change their visits under My bookings, buy in your shop, and download their own data under Privacy and my data. |
The roles and what each one sees are described in Roles and permissions. Each member of your team can have their own sign-in (see Your team’s sign-ins). Do not share the owner’s password: the owner’s account can change everything.
Good to know #
Overview → Get started lists most of these too, under Good to know.
- Online booking is yours to turn on. Clients book on your website once you turn on Take bookings online under Front desk → Online booking. It can be turned on only once your site’s e-mail is set up, because clients confirm with a code sent by e-mail. Until then clients book through the front desk (Front desk → New booking, or a walk-in), and the website’s header offers “Call to book” with the phone from the Location page (or “Contact us” when no phone is set). See Booking online.
- Messages go out only once e-mail is set up. Until you set up your site’s e-mail under System → E-mail (SMTP), nothing is e-mailed — no confirmations, reminders, receipts, setup links or sign-in codes, and no shop e-mails. Text messages are optional. Messages sent through the website’s contact page wait under Website → Enquiries: nobody is told when one arrives. See Messages, reminders, text messages and push.
- Deposits are taken only with online booking. A client pays a service’s deposit online when booking, through a payment gateway set up under System → Stripe, PayPal or Razorpay; while you do not take bookings online, leave a service’s deposit at “None” (see Deposits and paying at the salon).
- The shop shows on your website only while something is on sale. “Shop” appears in the website’s header and footer once a product is active with an active variant (see The shop).
- Clients can continue with Google on the website’s sign-in page once you set up System → Google sign-in (see Booking online).
- No import or export of lists. Clients, services and appointments are not imported or exported as CSV files in this version. Each client can download their own data, you can download one client’s data, and Shop → Shop reports downloads a period’s shop orders as a CSV file (see Client data in this version).
What this version contains #
- A browser installer that checks the server, creates the database tables and the owner account, and then locks itself (Installation).
- An administration area with its groups of pages — Front desk, Salon, Clients, Reports, Payments, Shop, Website, People, Messages and System among them — and a Get started checklist for the owner (First admin and configuration).
- Your team’s own sign-ins, each with a role whose permissions the owner sets (Your team’s sign-ins, Roles and permissions).
- Online booking on your website, once you turn it on: services and options, staff and times, a code by e-mail to confirm, and My bookings to change or cancel (Booking online).
- Sign-in with Google for your clients, once you set up System → Google sign-in (Booking online).
- E-mails to your clients and your team, once your site’s e-mail is set up: booking confirmations, changes, cancellations, reminders, receipts and the shop’s order e-mails; optional text messages; and the owner’s morning summary (Messages, reminders, text messages and push, The owner’s daily summary).
- A shop on your website for the products you sell — hair care, styling products or tools, for example: collected at the salon, delivered locally or shipped at your own rates, with returns (The shop).
- Payments pages for orders, payments taken at the salon and refunds; deposits for online bookings and shop orders paid online with Stripe, PayPal or Razorpay (Deposits and paying at the salon).
- The salon’s location, business hours, closures and holidays (Location, hours and closures).
- Staff members with their working hours, breaks, time off and one-off changes (Staff and schedules).
- A services catalogue: each service’s working time with an optional processing gap, preparation and clean-up time, options, prices, deposit rules and who can do it (Services catalogue).
- The front desk: the calendar by day and by week, desk and phone bookings, walk-ins, status actions, the end-of-day list, the call-back list and “My day” for staff, on desktop and on phones (Front desk).
- Client records: each client’s visits, orders and messages in one place, whether messages reach them, their data download and the completion of a deletion request (Clients and their data).
- Reports: your salon’s month in numbers (Reports).
- Your salon’s website — home page, pages, blog, questions, team, contact page and legal pages — in three themes, Linen, Onyx and Bloom, each in Light and Dark (Appearance: themes, colours and motion, The website, the team and your profile).
- The source of a customer app for your clients’ phones, under your salon’s name: you (or your developer) build it and publish it under your own developer accounts (The customer app).
- A REST API (version 1) for the customer app and for integrations (Developer API).
- In the licensed edition, a software license activated with the key from your purchase (Software license).
Times are stored in UTC and shown in the salon’s time zone. Prices are kept in the currency’s smallest unit with its currency code. Phone numbers are stored in international (E.164) form.
What cannot be deleted #
To keep the salon’s history and the audit log complete, most records are ended rather than deleted:
| Record | Instead of deleting |
|---|---|
| An appointment | Cancel it. It stays in the history with its status. |
| A staff member | Set them Inactive. Move or cancel their future appointments first: an inactive staff member’s appointments no longer show in the calendar. |
| A service | Set it Inactive: it is no longer offered for new bookings. |
| A shop product | Set its status to Archived (Shop → Products). |
| A shop order | Cancel the order on its page (Shop → Shop orders). A paid order is refunded in full when it is cancelled. |
| A person without a sign-in (People) | Archive them. |
| A closure or holiday | It can be removed, under Salon → Closures and holidays. |
Client data in this version #
- What is kept: for each appointment, the client’s name, phone number and (if given) e-mail address, the services, the staff, the times, the status and its history, and any note; for a visit at the client’s address, that address. A client who confirmed their e-mail address or phone number with a code (booking or ordering online) has a client record that brings their visits, orders and messages together; a client with an account (My bookings, or Google) sees their own.
- Who sees it: the owner, and the manager / front desk role (See client records; phone numbers and e-mail addresses need See client phone numbers and e-mail addresses). Staff see their own appointments. Clients never see each other’s details.
- How long: appointments and their history are kept. A home visit’s address is removed 90 days after the visit. The scheduled tasks also remove technical records (calendar time cells 30 days after an appointment, booking links that open nothing any more, and one-time-code records 30 days after they expired).
- Export and erasure: a client downloads their own data under Privacy and my data; the owner downloads a client’s data from the client’s page. A client asks for deletion from their profile; once you complete the request, their contact details, their visits’ addresses and their sign-in are erased (orders are kept for your accounts). See Clients and their data.
Version, licence and support #
System → About this software shows the product, the version of its files, the publisher, the package you installed, and this installation’s installed version and date. The same version is in the VERSION file of your package, and each version’s changes are listed in the changelog that comes with it. System → Licences shows the licence notice, the “Powered by OsDotâ„¢” attribution and the third-party fonts the website uses with their licence texts. System → Updates shows the installed version against the version of the files and whether any database change is waiting (see Installation, Installing an update).
Your licence and what it includes are set out in the licence that came with the edition you bought. For help, use the support channel on the publisher’s website named on the About page.
Words used in this documentation #
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Appointment | One client’s visit: one or more services, each with a staff member, at one start time. |
| Staff member | A person who does services. A staff member may be linked to a team account (Staff sign-in). |
| Processing (stylist free) | A gap inside a service — for example while colour develops — during which the staff member can be booked by someone else. |
| Preparation before / Clean-up after | Time a staff member needs before or after a service. It blocks the staff member’s time but is not part of the client’s appointment. |
| Walk-in | A client served now, without an earlier booking. |
| Soft rule | A rule the front desk may override with a written reason, such as booking a named staff member outside their working hours. Every override is written to the audit log. |
| Appointment status | Booked, Confirmed, Arrived, In progress, Completed, No-show or Cancelled. |
