Everything, answered

Yes, and it takes a few minutes — on the website today, and in the Slotora app too from the next app update. Export your clients from wherever they are now (Fresha, Booksy, Treatwell or your own spreadsheet) and upload the file in the Import Centre: an Excel file (.xlsx or .xls) or a CSV, up to 2,000 rows at a time. We never ask you for a link to a file — you pick the file itself. Slotora reads the column headings itself and shows you a preview before anything is written. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, your own notes and your tags all come across, and so does a blocked client, together with the reason you wrote beside her. Visit counts, cancellations, no-shows and the date of the last visit land as a line on the client's card rather than as past appointments — Slotora will not invent an appointment it never saw. Birthdays do not import yet. Two things to know: a row matches an existing client only when the email address and the name both match exactly, so a row with no email address always creates a new card, and running the same file again adds those people a second time. Accented letters are handled, but leave the .csv or .xlsx ending on the file — a file with no extension at all is read as a spreadsheet, and accents can come out wrong there.

Yes, both ways. In Settings you connect your own Google account: your Slotora appointments are written into a separate calendar called Slotora that we create there, and the hours you are already busy in Google stop being offered to your clients — so nobody books you while you are at the dentist. Google sends us the busy times and nothing else, so we never learn what your own events are called. It runs on a fifteen-minute cycle, which makes it quick rather than instant, and it is per person: you connect yours, a colleague connects hers. One detail if you work from your phone — Google does not allow its sign-in inside an app, so the one-off connection opens in your phone's browser; after that the app shows the connection and can disconnect it. An iPhone calendar (iCloud) connects the same way. For Outlook, or any other calendar app, there is a private read-only subscription link instead: it shows your appointments and sends nothing back.

Yes — it is where most owners actually work. The Slotora app is free on iPhone and Android, and the day opens as a diary: every half hour is drawn, the free ones as plainly as the full ones, so you can see where somebody would still fit. You book a client in, drag an appointment to another time, cancel, mark a no-show, take the money at the end and block out your own time off — all natively, on the same live data as the browser, with a push notification the moment a booking lands. Clients, services and their lengths, your team and your opening hours are all edited there too. Your own clients need no app whatsoever: they book on a web page. Importing your client list works on the website, and in the app from the next app update — with a preview of what it will do before anything is saved.

Yes — and here is the honest shape of it. Slotora is built around one person who does the work herself, and a colleague who joins her costs nothing: there is no charge per person and no cap on how many people you add. Each one gets her own login — you enter her email address and she is sent an invitation. Each has her own working hours (including alternating weeks and one-off exception days), her own list of the services she does, her own colour and her own column in the diary, and her own time off. On your booking page the guest either picks who she wants to come to or says anyone will do, and only the people who actually do that service are offered to her. Settings, billing and the team page stay with you. All of it works in the phone app as well. If your salon is several people, and somebody else keeps the day running while you are with a client, that is a different job from one diary — look at Slotora for busy salons, which is the product written for it.

Yes — every service carries its own length in minutes, typed in freely, and its own price, so a 45-minute manicure sits beside a 75-minute pedicure and a 20-minute gel removal. Put them in a Manicure group and a Pedicure group and your booking page shows them exactly that way, as folding groups. There is more of it if you need it: optional extras with their own additional minutes (nail art, a French finish) that lengthen the appointment the moment a guest ticks them; setup and clearing-up padding before and after a service; a waiting window inside a service, so the time a product spends working is free for somebody else; and a different length and price for the same service when one technician takes longer than another. All of it is editable on the phone too, not only in the browser.

Yes. The platform is free — unlimited bookings, unlimited clients, your whole team, reminders, gift cards, passes, marketing tools, the mobile app, all of it, with 0% commission. No card is needed to sign up. Nita answering your guests on your booking page is free too: you switch it on once and it stays on. What costs money is text messages and the AI that makes something for you — a post, a campaign, a picture, the list of regulars worth winning back — and that runs on credits: you top up when you want to, every action shows its price before it runs, and credits you buy never expire. The AI phone receptionist, which answers your real line, has a fixed price: £49.99 for 100 minutes, prepaid. There is no AI subscription.

Never. 0% commission on bookings, gift cards and passes. Your prices are your money.

No catch: no ads, no selling your data, no commission. We built the platform to be radically cheaper to run than the incumbents, and we grow by salons recommending us.

Card payments are optional and run on your own Stripe account. Slotora adds 0% — you only pay Stripe's standard card processing fee (about 1.5% + 20p for UK cards), the same as any card machine.

Yes — text messages cost money, because every message costs us money to send. You buy credit up front, you see the price of a send before you confirm it, and the rate depends on the country you are texting. Email reminders and confirmations are unlimited and free, and a salon that never touches SMS never pays us anything.

About 15 minutes. A guided 7-step setup wizard walks every new account through the essentials — business basics, your services, your team, money at the counter, working hours, booking rules and sharing your booking page — explaining what each setting does, and your page is live at slotora.io/b/your-name.

Yes — usually in a day. Export your client list from your old system and use our Import Centre: it accepts any Excel or CSV file, auto-detects the columns, and imports clients, services with prices, and photos.

Any time. Your clients, bookings and services can be downloaded as CSV files, or everything at once as a JSON bundle. Your data is yours — you're never locked in.

No. Clients book on your web page in a few taps — name, email, done. They get email confirmations, reminders and a self-service link to reschedule or cancel.

Yes — per-person weekly hours, split shifts (several time slots a day), one-off date exceptions, and their own services with custom durations or prices. Clients pick a professional or 'Anyone'.

Yes. Set a processing window on a service (e.g. colour developing) and your calendar automatically frees up for another client while the product works.

Yes — capacity-based sessions (yoga, masterclasses, group PT) that fill up spot by spot, with a waitlist when they're full.

The guest gets a cancellation email, the slot opens instantly, and anyone matching on your waitlist is notified automatically so the gap gets refilled.

Drag & drop any booking to a new time or to another team member — a small dialog confirms the exact time before anything changes, and the client is emailed automatically.

Three ways, and you choose: an email, a push notification on your phone, and a bell inside Slotora that keeps the list even when your phone is in a drawer. Bookings, cancellations, moves, payments, forms and reviews each have their own switch, so you can be told about money and left alone about everything else.

Yes. Build your own forms — allergies, patch tests, medical questions, consent — and attach them to the services that need them. The client fills them in when they book or from a link afterwards, the answers sit on their record, and questions can appear only when a previous answer makes them relevant.

Yes, and with Google or your iPhone's calendar (iCloud) you can go one better. Connect either one and your bookings appear in a calendar Slotora creates for you there, while the hours you are already busy in it stop being offered to clients. For Outlook — or for any calendar, if you would rather not connect an account — subscribe once with a private, read-only iCal link, with a per-staff link if each team member wants only their own day. Either way it stays up to date on its own, and a subscribed calendar can never change a booking.

Yes — the AI phone receptionist is an optional paid add-on: £49.99 per 100 minutes, prepaid, no subscription. You apply from the admin, choose the answering window (say, the AI takes calls every day from 6pm to 7am while your team answers in the day) and forward your line with the codes shown there. It speaks the caller's language, reads your real services and prices, books free slots straight into your calendar (labelled 'phone AI'), offers fresh alternatives when a time is taken, and takes complaints politely as a message for you. If a service requires an online deposit, it directs the caller to your booking page instead of taking an unpaid booking.

Yes — optional card payments via your own Stripe account: a percentage, a fixed amount, or full payment at booking. You choose, and you can turn it off any time.

Yes. Set your fee and your cancellation window; the client's card is saved securely by Stripe at booking, and if they don't show or cancel late the fee comes off it by itself about an hour later. Switch that off and it waits for you to charge it in one click instead.

Automatic email reminders go out before every appointment (you choose how many hours ahead), in the client's own language, with a reschedule link — most 'no-shows' are really just forgetfulness.

Yes — allowing on-site payment alongside (or instead of) online payment is a single toggle, and Slotora records what you take at the counter. Every booking shows the balance still owed; press Take payment for a QR code the guest scans to pay by Apple Pay, Google Pay or card, or record cash, your own card machine or a bank transfer. Tips, emailed receipts, refunds and a day-end cash count are all built in.

It depends on what your front desk is, so here is the whole picture. If it is a phone, Tap to Pay makes it the reader: on an Android phone or iPhone with the Slotora app the guest taps her card or phone against yours — everywhere we serve except Germany and Austria. If your front desk is a computer, a Stripe Terminal reader does the same job with no phone involved. If you want no hardware at all, the QR code works on any counter. And if you already have a card machine, keep it — take the card on it and record the payment against the booking. Slotora takes 0% of all four; a Stripe reader and the processing fee are Stripe's.

Yes — put your booking link in your Instagram bio and action button, a Story 'BOOK' highlight, and your Facebook page's Book Now button. Our help centre has the exact clicks for each.

Yes — a booking button, a popup widget or a fully embedded booking page. Ready-made snippets and step-by-step guides for WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Webflow.

Both built in: sell gift cards with emailed codes, and multi-session passes (e.g. 10-session gel pass) redeemed with their code at booking or at the counter, with the balance coming off by itself from then on.

Yes — send offers to all clients, lapsed clients or tagged segments, with an AI copywriter to draft the text. Coupons with validity windows and usage limits are included.

Yes — a points scheme. Clients earn points for every visit, you set how many points a reward costs and what the reward is, and it runs on its own from the bookings you are already taking. One mechanism, not two: there is no digital stamp card, and no paper one to carry either.

Yes — a native app for the business on iPhone, iPad and Android, with push notifications for new bookings. It runs the calendar (including drag-to-reschedule), the counter till, the client book, gift card and pass lookup, the day-end cash count and reports, on the same live data as the browser. Your clients don't need any app: they book on a web page.

Yes, for the part of a salon POS that matters at the desk. Every booking shows what is still owed, and you take it as a card, cash or bank transfer: a QR code the guest scans, Tap to Pay on an Android phone or iPhone, a Stripe Terminal reader from a computer, or the card machine you already own. Tips are recorded separately from service revenue, receipts are emailed, refunds and part-payments are handled, and the day-end close counts the drawer and shows the difference. What it is not is a barcode-driven retail till: there is no scanner and no shelf-goods checkout. Products themselves are covered — see the stock question below — but only as stock: marking a bottle sold moves the shelf and records no payment, so retail takings are not in the day-end figure.

Yes, and not only the ones you sell. Tell a service what it consumes and completing the appointment takes it off the shelf on its own — you never type a stock movement for ordinary work. It counts whole things and measured amounts alike: one box of tint, or a 50 ml bottle of polish that a manicure takes 20 ml out of. Set the level you want to be warned at, per product, and your dashboard says so before you run out mid-appointment. Miscounts are fixed with a stocktake that records the difference as its own line rather than quietly agreeing with whoever typed last.

Yes. Because the shelf knows what each appointment consumed, Slotora can subtract it from what the appointment took and show contribution per service — revenue minus materials, per job, so a £120 colour that eats £34 of product is compared honestly against a £45 pedicure that eats £2. It also writes the sentence for you: 'Your balayage contributes 18% more per appointment than your highlights.' The word is contribution, not profit: rent, wages and card fees are not in it, and we would rather name it accurately than have you plan around a number that has not paid the landlord.

On your dashboard for the day at a glance, and in Reports for anything longer: takings by day, week or month, split by payment method, plus your busiest hours, your best-selling services and who your regulars are. There is a day-end summary you can close the till against, and everything exports to CSV.

Yes, both ways, with either one. Connect your Google account or your iPhone's calendar (iCloud) and Slotora reads the hours you are already busy there and stops offering them, so a client cannot book you while you are at the dentist; your Slotora bookings travel the other way, into a calendar called Slotora that it creates in that account. A few things to be clear about. It runs on a fifteen-minute cycle, so it is quick rather than instant. Slotora keeps only the times you are busy: Google sends us busy times and nothing else, so we never learn what your events are called, while your iPhone's calendar sends the events themselves and Slotora keeps only their times — never titles, guests or locations. You connect your own calendar and it closes only your own hours; colleagues each connect theirs. For the iPhone you create an app-specific password at account.apple.com and paste it into Slotora once; it is stored encrypted, and you can revoke it at Apple any time. Outlook subscribes to a private, read-only iCal link that shows your bookings and sends nothing back.

The product works in English, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian and German. Your clients see the booking page in their own language, and their emails follow it too.

Data is stored encrypted in the EU/UK (London region), we use only strictly necessary cookies, and we never sell data or run ad trackers. Full details in our Privacy Policy; account deletion and complete data export are built in.

Slotora is operated by Belavin Limited, a UK company registered in Birmingham (company no. 16735157), registered with the ICO. Support is answered by humans: hello@slotora.io.

Yes — several premises on one account, at no extra charge. You add the second (or third) address under Locations, just below Settings — on the website today; the same screens come to the phone app with its next update. In each person's working hours you say which premises she is at on which day, and the salon's opening hours are kept per premises too. On your booking page the guest chooses the premises first and is offered only the people working there that day, and the emails she gets about the booking name that premises' address. The limits, so you know them before you move: one account stays in one country and one time zone. Within it, a service can be offered at some premises only and priced per premises, and takings and stock can be read per premises; the pay statement and the day-end close stay whole-account. And if what you actually need is separate money per person — a team member who works for herself — that exists too: switch the business to per-person payments and her takings go straight to her own account, with the day-end close still showing the whole salon broken down by person.

Yes. In Settings → API & webhooks the owner or an admin creates a key for each tool and chooses what it may see. The API reads your bookings, clients, services and free times and can book a time the salon offers, and a webhook tells your tool about every new or changed booking within about a quarter of an hour. There is no Slotora app in Zapier's or Make's directory yet — „Webhooks by Zapier” and Make's webhook and HTTP modules do the job without one — and none of it costs extra. Alongside it: two-way calendar sync with Google and iPhone (iCloud); a read-only iCal feed for Outlook and any other calendar app; the booking widget and popup you paste into any website; CSV import for clients, services and prices; and CSV or full JSON export of everything whenever you want it.