A booking system for barbers, walked through one Saturday

Your day is ten hours of fifteen-minute steps, which is a hundred and sixty places a booking could start. Out of the box, any of them that fits is offered — and on a diary of short work that default is the single most expensive setting in the product, because a booking is not just a booking. It is a cut through your day.

Before anything else on a Saturday, decide which starts a guest is allowed to choose. There are four answers and they are genuinely different:

Every free time, the default, offers any start that fits. Only times that sit next to a booking is the tight one: a start has to be up against something solid — the minute you open, the minute you shut, or the edge of whatever is already down for that day, whether that is a cut, a break or time you have taken off. An unbroken run of free time then yields two candidates at most, one at the front of it and one finishing flush with the back. Gaps between bookings first goes further: on a day where the service fits into a gap between two busy blocks, those gaps are the only thing offered. And one after another from the opening is the strict one — each working block offers exactly one start, the earliest where the service fits, so the day packs forward from the moment you open. A split shift is two blocks, so it gives two starts, one for the morning and one for the afternoon.

Work the arithmetic once and you will not leave the default alone. A man books a line-up at 09:15. Fifteen minutes of work. Your 09:00 hour is now three pieces: a quarter of an hour free, a quarter taken, half an hour free. A skin fade wants forty-five minutes and it will not go in either piece. One fifteen-minute booking has just eaten a forty-five-minute one, and nobody did anything wrong.

Switch to the rule where a start has to touch something and the same man is offered 09:00 instead — against your opening — and the forty-five minutes behind him survive in one piece. That is the whole trick, and it is worth more to a barber than to anyone else on this website, because nobody else's list is this short.

The rule that steers the small jobs into the holes is the other half of it. A twenty-minute beard trim between two fades is exactly the booking you want in that twenty minutes, and exactly the booking you do not want in the middle of an empty afternoon.

He is standing in front of you, he wants a buzz cut, and you have twenty minutes. There is nothing to click for this. You cut his hair, and the booking is something you type into your own calendar — tap the empty slot, pick the service, pick him or add him.

When your own rules are in the way, you can overrule them, and this is the mechanism for it. Turn on booking outside your rules — it is a tick box on the web and a switch in the app — and you give the date, the start time and the length yourself. It ignores your opening hours, your minimum notice, your days off, your holidays and your time off. It will let the booking sit on top of one that is already there, with a confirmation first on the web and both surfaces telling you afterwards that the two overlap. It will even take a time in the past, which is the one you actually want here: the cut is finished, and you are writing down what happened.

Two things it still refuses, and the second one is the one that will catch you at the counter. It will not book a team member who does not do the service. And it will not create a new client with neither a phone number nor an email address — so a complete stranger needs one of the two before he becomes a record, which on a busy Saturday is a real decision rather than a formality.

Here is where the honest answer diverges from what a booking system usually tells you to do. Yes, Slotora can take a deposit: connect your own Stripe account and a booking can carry a percentage, a fixed amount, or the whole price, taken when he books. The money lands in your Stripe account rather than ours, we add nothing to it, and the card fee is Stripe's the way it is with any card machine.

But a deposit on a fifteen-pound cut is not the same economic proposition as a deposit on a long, expensive appointment, and pretending otherwise would be selling you something. Ask a man for money up front to reserve fifteen minutes and a good number of them will simply not book. There is also a hard floor underneath it: a card network cannot settle pennies, so in Britain anything under about thirty pence is not chargeable, and Slotora's answer is to skip the deposit and book the appointment rather than quietly rounding the amount up. A small percentage of a cheap cut can therefore come to nothing at all.

What the product gives you instead of one policy for everything is a deposit per service. Put a real deposit on the long work — the cut and beard, the beard shape with the hot towel — and none on the line-up, because they are different risks and they were never going to take the same rule. A named regular can also be exempted from deposits on his own record while everybody else keeps them.

And then the three things that actually move a no-show rate on short cheap work. An email lands in his inbox before every confirmed cut, twenty-four hours out until you tell it otherwise, and you can stack a second and a third on top — two days ahead and two hours ahead is the usual pair. Texts are available too, out of a credit balance you top up, and they send nothing at all until you switch them on. Second, every confirmation carries a link he can use himself: moving the booking closes at your cancellation deadline, a day by default, while cancelling stays open until the appointment starts — which is deliberate, because a cancellation twenty minutes out is still better news than an empty twenty minutes you found out about at the time. Third, marking him as a no-show counts on his record, and a man who does it repeatedly can be stopped from booking online from that same record. He can still ring you, which is the point: it is a door, not a ban.

If you do want a fee rather than a deposit, that works the other way round: he saves his card when he books and the charge comes off it afterwards. A no-show fee is taken automatically an hour after the appointment should have finished — that hour exists so you can undo a no-show you marked by mistake — and you can switch the automatic charge off and decide each one yourself.

Every fourth Saturday, same man, same cut, and he has never once used a link. You can put his standing appointment in yourself from your calendar. The rhythm is weekly, fortnightly, three-weekly or four-weekly; the run is anywhere between two and twelve, and it keeps the hour he already comes at. A date that lands on something you have already got is left out rather than forced, and you get told which ones were. The same rhythms are on your booking page too, capped at eight, if he ever decides to do it himself.

Two limits worth knowing before you lean on it. A repeating booking carries one service, so if his standing visit is a cut and a beard, put the pair on your list as one service at its own length — the product offers exactly that as a starting point at forty-five minutes — rather than trying to repeat two. And most of your regulars will never touch any of this. They turn up. The realistic use of a booking system in this trade is not converting them; it is that the strangers and the Saturday bookings stop landing on top of the hours your regulars fill, and that you stop being the diary.

Short work stacks in this hour, and short work is where the arithmetic bites hardest: a kids' cut at twenty minutes, a buzz cut at twenty, a fringe trim at fifteen. Three of those in an hour is three cuts through the hour, and it is exactly the situation the placement rule was built for.

Two mechanics help here and it is worth being precise about which does what. A man booking his own cut and his own beard trim in one go is one visit: he taps both — up to six services — and Slotora only offers times where they fit back-to-back with the same person, shows him the combined price and length, and books it as a single appointment with each service keeping its own buffers. A father and his son are not that. Two people is two appointments, and the quickest route is you typing the second one in while the first is in progress.

A note on lengths, because they are the thing to get right before anything else on this page matters. The numbers the product offers you at the start are starting points and nothing more: haircut thirty, skin fade forty-five, beard trim twenty, hot towel shave thirty, grey blending forty, line-up fifteen. If your fade is thirty-five minutes, make it thirty-five. Every rule on this page is doing arithmetic with those numbers, and arithmetic with the wrong numbers is worse than none.

Two things worth doing before you leave. Mark anyone who did not come as a no-show, because that is what makes the pattern visible on a record months later rather than a grudge you half remember. And look at your own booking page the way a stranger sees it: it opens on the first day with something free on it, this month or next, not on a today that is full, and on a day with nothing left it offers one tap to the next free day.

There is one more switch worth a thought on a week where Saturday is solid and Tuesday is empty. Off until you turn it on, it holds a completely empty day back until the days that already have something in them are full — per person, per week, Monday to Sunday. It is how you stop a week turning into five half-days.