Brow artist booking software for a diary made of short appointments
Shaping, threading, waxing, tinting, henna, lamination — most of what you do is over in twenty to forty-five minutes, and almost every booking problem you have comes from that one fact. This page is not a feature list. It is the questions a brow artist asks a booking system, answered with the setting that answers them, including the two where the answer is no.
Built for the individual professional — one person, one diary.
Free to use, with none of your takings taken · no limit on bookings or on clients · a card is not asked for at registration · text messages and the AI tools are bought as credits, and are silent until you turn them on
Short appointments lose money quietly, and three treatments keep three clocks
A trade built on short appointments loses money in a way a long-appointment trade never does. Nobody books over you and nothing runs late; what happens is that a twenty-minute tint lands at eleven o'clock, and the hour on either side of it is now too short to sell and too long to ignore. Do that three times in a week and you have paid yourself for one appointment out of four hours in the room.
The second thing that makes a brow week awkward is that your treatments keep different time. A tint can be repeated whenever she likes. A lamination should not be, for weeks. Semi-permanent work has a follow-up that belongs in a different season altogether. One diary has to hold all three, and the honest answer is that Slotora holds two of them well and the third with your help — which is the part this page spends the most words on.
Seven questions a brow artist asks a booking system
How do I stop a twenty-minute tint being offered in the middle of my morning?
Settings, then Booking rules, then the setting called 'Which free times guests see'. Out of the box it offers any start that fits, which is exactly how the middle of your morning gets taken. Change it to 'Gaps between bookings first' and on a day where the tint fits into a gap between two busy blocks, only those gaps are offered; on a day where nothing fits in between, it falls back to the narrower rule: a start has to butt up against something — the hour you open, the hour you close, or an existing entry — so an open run of time can only be eaten from one of its two ends, never bitten out of the middle.
There is a switch under it, off until you turn it on, that holds back an entirely empty day until the days you have already started this week are full. It works per person and per week, Monday to Sunday. And all of this changes what a guest is offered and nothing else: your own column, your team's and the app's still show every free minute you have.
A lamination cannot be repeated for weeks. Can the system refuse it?
No. There is no rule anywhere in Slotora that stops a named client booking a particular treatment again too soon — the only time limits on the booking path are how soon from now a guest may book at all and how far ahead she may go. If she wants a lamination five weeks after her last one, the booking page will sell it to her.
What you do instead is two things, and neither of them is a workaround. Her record has somewhere purpose-built for a warning, kept apart from ordinary notes and headed 'Allergies, sensitivities, anything to know first'. It is drawn in red, above everything else on her card and repeated on the appointment itself, so the sentence arrives before you reach for the lotion. And you take the timing out of her hands by booking the next one yourself while she is still in front of you. The repeat tool will not do a six-week cycle for you — its rhythms run weekly, fortnightly, three-weekly and four-weekly, for two to twelve visits — so at six weeks it is a date you put in by hand, once, on the spot.
Where do the tint patch-test answers go?
Onto the appointment they were given for, and onto her record, where they stay. The ready-made patch-test form asks whether she has had the treatment before, whether she has ever reacted to a product, the date the test was done, and takes a signature she draws on her own screen with your consent wording above it.
The part worth knowing is that you choose where each question is put to her: while she is booking, on the form that goes out before the visit, or both. Sending that form by email costs nothing; by text it comes out of your credit balance. Answers attach to the visit rather than overwriting the last one, so a year of tints leaves you a dated history instead of a single most-recent answer.
Someone wants brows and lashes in one visit. Does that book as one appointment?
Yes, and she does it herself. She taps more than one service on your booking page — up to six — and Slotora offers only people who do every one of them, then looks for times where the services sit back-to-back with the same pair of hands, each keeping its own buffer before and after it. The combined length and the combined price are on screen before she confirms.
It goes in as one visit with one confirmation, and the link in that email covers the whole of it: moving or cancelling applies to everything in the visit. She cannot drop one treatment out of it online and leave the rest standing — that is a phone call to you, and then a change you make yourself.
Semi-permanent work: how do I take a deposit that holds the date, and book a top-up months away?
Connect a Stripe account in your own name and decide what a booking has to carry before it counts: a percentage of the price, a fixed sum, or the whole thing, taken at the moment she books. It lands in your account rather than ours, Slotora adds nothing to it, and the card fee is Stripe's, the way it would be with any terminal. If there is one client you would rather not ask, her own record has a tick that exempts her and leaves everybody else alone.
The top-up is a question about one number. 'Bookable ahead (days)' under Booking rules decides the last day a guest may reach, and it is ninety unless you change it — which is why an eighteen-month top-up looks impossible until you raise it. It goes up to seven hundred and thirty. If you would rather a stranger could not book the top-up cold, mark that service 'Returning clients only' and it disappears from your booking page for anyone who is not already on your books, while you can still put anybody into it yourself.
What do I set up as a service, and what as an optional extra?
A service is something a person would buy on its own. An optional extra hangs underneath one, carries its own extra minutes and its own extra price, and — this is the whole point of it — those minutes reach the part of the product that works out your free times, so a shape with a tint added to it is never offered a shape-length slot.
The test is whether she would ever book the thing by itself. A brow tint at twenty minutes is a service, because plenty of people come in for nothing else. A tint bolted onto a shape is an extra, because nobody books it that way. One service can carry up to thirty extras, which is considerably more than any form a stranger will finish, so the ceiling is not the thing to design around — the honesty of the minutes is.
Which trade do I pick when I register, when there is no brow option?
You pick 'Lashes & brows', and it is better to say plainly why than to let you hunt for a row that is not there: the product's trade list has sixteen entries and brows is not one of them. It is the one thing on this page we would change if the list were ours to change today.
What the name hides is that half the starter services behind it are brow work — lamination at sixty minutes, a shape and tint at forty-five, a brow tint at twenty, henna brows at forty-five — sitting alongside the lash ones, which you can delete in a minute if you never touch a lash. Those durations are starting points with your own numbers to go in, and not one of them arrives with a suggested price: we trade in six currencies, and a printed figure on a professional's price list reads as advice.
Two things to know before you move your diary
Nothing in Slotora will refuse a client a treatment because she had it too recently. There is no minimum interval between a person's repeat visits, per client or per service, and no warning when one comes round too soon — so the six-week rule on a lamination lives with you, in the note on her record and in the appointment you book for her yourself. It is the answer above, repeated here because it is the single most likely reason a brow artist would want a different product, and burying it in the middle of a page would be a way of not telling you.
The other one is about being found. There is a public directory you can be part of, searchable by treatment and by town, free to join, and taking nothing out of a booking that comes through it. Be realistic about the size of it though: it is new, and on a Wednesday evening the number of people in your town looking through it is not going to keep your chair busy. One condition to know — until something on your list has a genuine price against it you will not show up there at all, which is intentional, because sending a stranger to a column of zeros does you no favours. Build your week on enquiries your own work brings in, and count anything the listing adds as extra.
The step-by-step behind each answer
Each setting named above has a guide of its own: which free times guests see, notice, how far ahead and the cancellation deadline, lengths, buffers, extras and returning clients only, several treatments in one visit, patch-test forms before the visit, connecting your own Stripe account, and the client record and its red line. All of them are written for somebody with a client due in twenty minutes.
Is there a team on your floor?
If several people work in your salon, and somebody else keeps the day running while you are with a client, that is a different job from one diary — and there is a Slotora written for it.
See Slotora for busy salonsPut your own minutes on your own treatments
Opening an account is a few minutes' work and no payment details. Give the tint, the shape, the lamination and the henna the lengths they really take, say which free times a guest may be offered, and your booking page is live on an address you can paste anywhere. The twenty-minute tint stops costing you an hour the same afternoon.