Someone self-employed works in your salon: whose turnover is it?
The first month somebody else earns in your room, one number quietly stops meaning what it used to. A client pays £65 at your card machine for a treatment you did not do, by a stylist who works for herself, and that £65 lands in the same day's total as everything else — same terminal, same report, same end-of-week arithmetic. It is not your money. On one specific question it matters a great deal whose it is.
That question is the VAT registration threshold, and this piece is about it and nothing else. It does not tell you whether the person working beside you is self-employed in the first place — that comes further down, it is a different question, and it is not one we will answer for you. Every figure here was checked on 27 September 2026 and is dated where it appears, because thresholds move and this page will not move with them.
The test is a rolling twelve months, not your tax year
In the UK you have to register for VAT once your taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any rolling twelve-month period. Rolling is the part that catches people out: not the year to 5 April, not your accounting year — the last twelve months, recounted at the end of every single month. Once you cross it you have 30 days from the end of that month to tell HMRC, and your registration takes effect from the first day of the second month after you went over. The threshold has been £90,000 since 1 April 2024 and is unchanged for 2026/27; the deregistration threshold sits just below at £88,000. Sources, read 27 September 2026: HMRC's own VAT registration guidance and the House of Commons Library briefing on VAT registration.
Ireland is lower and there are two figures. €42,500 for services and €85,000 for goods, both since 1 January 2025, tested over any continuous period of twelve months rather than a calendar year. A salon sells services, so €42,500 is normally the one that governs you: the higher figure only takes over where 90% or more of your turnover comes from goods, which is not a salon that retails a few bottles of shampoo. Registration is due within 30 days of going over. Source: Revenue's 'What are the VAT thresholds?' page, read 27 September 2026.
The number in that test is your supplies — not your terminal's total
Which is why the arithmetic only works if your records can answer one question about every payment: whose sale was this? If her clients pay her directly — her own reader, her own invoice, her own bank — nothing of hers ever enters your figure and there is nothing to separate. The moment her clients pay on your terminal, your terminal's total is a mixture, and a mixture costs you in both directions. Count her takings as yours and you may register on a number you never earned. Leave your own out because it all looked like one pot, and you may register late on a number you passed months ago.
- Whose sale it was — the person who did the work, on every payment, not only the ones you remember at the year end.
- Where the money actually went — her reader, your till, your bank — because that is what an accountant will ask first.
- Which payments were tips, and whose they were.
- What the cash in the drawer should be at the close: yours, on its own. A count against a total that includes her cash tells you nothing about your own day.
Whether she is self-employed at all is a separate question, and not ours
It is the question everybody wants answered first, and it is the one a booking system has no standing on whatsoever. In the UK, HMRC publishes a tool for it — Check Employment Status for Tax, CEST — and the answer turns on how the arrangement actually works rather than on what the paperwork calls it: who sets the hours, who may send somebody else instead, who carries the risk, whose equipment. In Ireland the ground moved recently and it is worth knowing: after the Supreme Court's judgment in Karshan (Midlands) Ltd, trading as Domino's Pizza, Revenue published a Tax and Duty Manual in May 2024 setting out a five-step framework businesses are expected to apply worker by worker — and Revenue said in as many words that they expect it to make more workers employees for tax. If your arrangement was set up before that, it was set up under a different test.
We are not going to tell you which side of the line you are on; ask an accountant, and ask before the first client rather than at the first year end. What does follow from either answer is this. If she is self-employed, her takings are hers and your records have to show it. If she is employed, every penny she takes is your turnover, all of it, and there is nothing to separate at all — the question disappears and a different set of obligations arrives in its place.
What a booking system can settle — and what it cannot
The record-keeping half, Slotora can do. Each person on the team can have her own payment account, so a card payment for her work is charged straight to her own Stripe account: it is not moved on afterwards and it is not held for her, it never arrives in the salon's account at all. And the day close reports what she took as its own figure, beside the salon's, while the cash the salon expects in the drawer excludes hers — which is the only version of that number a count can honestly check. How per-person payment accounts work
What it cannot do matters more, so here it is plainly: there is no tax in any of it. No PAYE, no National Insurance, no gross-to-net, no payslip, nothing filed anywhere, and no money moved on anybody's behalf. What you get is a report and a spreadsheet for whoever does your books — one block per person, what was collected, what commission was agreed, which way the balance runs — and a person still decides what to pay and still pays it. Anything that says otherwise about any booking system is worth reading twice. What Slotora costs
Four things to do before the next client
- Ask your accountant the status question now, with the facts of how you actually work, not with the wording of an agreement.
- Write down which reader each person's clients pay on, and then keep it that way. Mixed months are the expensive ones to reconstruct.
- Close the day against the salon's own expected cash, so a variance means something.
- At the end of every month, add up the last twelve. That rolling total is the test; nothing else is.
None of this is difficult once the records are set up to answer the question. It is only difficult in arrears, in February, with a year of one mixed total and no way back to whose sale each payment was. Salon management software for a whole team · Modelling real hours when several people work different days · Pricing a service so it covers what it costs
