The free booking system for hairdressers that sells the half hour your colour is developing
Every diary you have ever used thinks a ninety-minute colour is ninety minutes of you. It is not. For thirty of those minutes she is sitting under the clock on her phone and your hands are empty — and that is the only half hour in this trade that can be sold twice. Slotora is built to take two numbers off you and put those minutes back on your booking page.
Built for the individual professional — one person, one diary.
£0 a month · 0% of what you charge · no cap on bookings or clients · no card to register · what costs money is separate and optional: credits for texts, credits for the AI pictures, and the telephone receptionist's prepaid pack
An hour of development is an hour of your working life
Count the developing time in one ordinary week. Two root tints, a full head colour and a set of highlights is somewhere between ninety minutes and two hours of standing about — your premises open, your lights on, your phone in your hand, and no second client able to book any of it because your diary says you are busy. Nobody bills for that hour. It is not a gap in your day; it is your day, spent.
This is the part where booking software is usually wrong about hairdressing, and it is wrong in a specific way. It models an appointment as a single block of your attention, because that is true of almost every other trade it was built for. A colour is not one block. It is your hands, then a clock, then your hands again, and a system that cannot say so will protect the middle third as fiercely as it protects the first.
The rest of this page is one worked sum and then the limits of it. If the arithmetic does not apply to you — if you are a dry-cut and blow-dry diary with no colour in it — the honest answer is that the most valuable thing Slotora does for a colourist does nothing for you, and you should read the sections after it instead.
Ninety minutes, itemised
Take a full head colour at the length the product offers you to start with. Here is the same appointment written out as three thirties instead of one ninety.
Minute 0 to 30
Sectioning, mixing, applying. Foils if she is having them.
Yours. Nothing else can happen in it.
Minute 30 to 60
Developing. She is under the clock, reading her phone.
Hers, and currently nobody's. This is the row the sum is about.
Minute 60 to 90
Rinse, toner if she needs one, cut, dry off.
Yours again, to the last minute.
In Slotora that middle row is two boxes on the service, and they are the only two numbers you have to get right. ‘Processing starts after (min)’ is 30 — how far into the appointment the waiting begins. ‘Processing time (min)’ is 30 — how long it lasts. In the phone app the same pair reads ‘Processing starts (min into the service)’ and ‘Processing lasts (min)’. Save, and minute 30 to minute 60 of every booking of that colour goes on sale.
It is worth being precise about what just happened, because it is the opposite of what every other setting on a service does. A duration fills your diary. A buffer fills your diary. Processing time is the one box in the product that empties it, and the half hour it hands back was already paid for by the colour.
What fits in thirty minutes, and what does not
The gap is thirty minutes wide and a booking has to fit inside it whole — its own length plus whatever buffers that service carries. That is a shorter list than it sounds, and the arithmetic is unforgiving in a useful way:
- A blow dry at the length the product starts it on, thirty minutes, fits exactly — and only if it carries no buffer. Give it five minutes of clearing down afterwards and it needs thirty-five, so it is not offered.
- A treatment, thirty minutes, the same. A kids' cut, thirty, the same.
- A dry cut at forty-five does not fit. A cut and blow dry at sixty does not fit. Another colour obviously does not.
- So the realistic answer for most colourists is that the developing window sells a blow dry, a treatment or a quick cut for a child — and that if you want it to sell anything at all, those services need their buffers looked at rather than left where they were.
Three colour clients in a week is an hour and a half of developing time. You do not need all of it: two of those windows filled is one extra appointment a week that costs you no extra hours, because the hours were already in your diary and you were already standing in them.
The rules of the gap
This is the honest middle of the page rather than a footnote, because a colourist who sets those two boxes and expects something the mechanism does not do will conclude it is broken. Every line below is a limit, and the third is the one most people assume the other way round.
- The waiting has to sit strictly inside the appointment. It must end before the service does — a window longer than the service will not save — and a window that starts at minute 0 is not offered at all unless the service has a buffer in front of it.
- The gap frees the person, and on a one-person diary the person is you. Whoever books into it is booking YOU: you are rinsing one client's colour out of your mind and cutting somebody else's hair in the same half hour, on your feet, in the same space. The setting makes that possible. It does not make it pleasant, and nothing in Slotora will tell you which colours are the wrong ones to do it on.
- Only the same team member's diary opens up. The second booking is with her, and her own service — its buffers included — has to fit inside the gap. It is not a way of making the salon busier in general.
- It is a constant on the service, not a dial on one booking. A colour that you can already see is going to develop faster today cannot be told so; the window is whatever the service says it is, every time that service is booked.
- The gap behaves like ordinary free time everywhere else. It shows on your booking page the way any other free half hour does, and it is there when you book somebody in by hand.
- A group class has no processing time at all — not a smaller one, none.
- And this is the only overlap a guest is ever offered. Somebody choosing a time on your public page cannot be handed a slot that sits on top of an ordinary appointment; the sole exception in the product is a processing window. Putting a booking on top of another one is something you do deliberately, from your own calendar, with a confirmation in front of you.
Four more things a colour day needs
The sum above is the distinctive part. These four are the ordinary parts, and a colour week goes wrong on them just as reliably.
Toner is a service, not a courtesy
The product offers toner as its own row at forty-five minutes, which is a number worth arguing with rather than accepting — yours may be twenty. What matters is that it exists on the list with a length and a price of your choosing. A toner you add in your head is forty-five minutes your booking page believes are empty, and the client who books into them is the reason you eat at four o'clock. If it is something a colour client has nearly every time, the cleaner answer is a second version of the colour at a longer length, so she chooses once.
The patch test, and what the form actually captures
Slotora has a patch-test form template you can add in one click and then edit. Its own questions ask whether she has had the treatment before, whether she has ever reacted to a patch test or a product, the date the patch test was carried out, and for a tick against the sentence that a patch test is required forty-eight hours before treatment — then she signs. Set ‘Applies to’ on each question so it goes out for the colour services and not for a dry cut, turn on sending a chosen number of hours ahead, and pick email, or text if you have credits on your balance. She taps the link, fills it in on her phone, signs with her finger, and the answers and the signature attach to the appointment and stay on her record. What that gives you is a dated record in her file. It is a record, not a ruling: what your insurer or your training body asks of you is between you and them, and no form in any product decides it.
What she reacts to lives in its own box
A client record has a separate field for the things that have to be known before anything is mixed — allergies, sensitivities, medication. It is deliberately not the general notes box, because notes is where ‘prefers the radio off’ goes and it grows until you scroll it. Put ‘reacts to PPD’ in the box built for it and every screen that shows you that person shows it at the top. It is treated as health data throughout: it is in her export, it is erased with her record, and nothing in Slotora sends it anywhere or feeds it to anything.
The four-week root, booked from your own calendar
A regular whose roots show at four weeks is a repeat, and you set it once: every week, every two, three or four weeks, anything from two visits to twelve, all at the same time of day. Dates that clash with something already in your diary are skipped and you are told which ones, so week nine is not a surprise in week nine. She can set the same rhythms herself from your booking page, up to eight visits. One real limit to know before you rely on it: a repeating booking carries a single service. If her standing appointment is a root tint AND a cut and blow dry, either put the pair on your list as one service at its combined length, or book the series as the colour and add the cut to each visit yourself.
When a balayage cancels on Friday night
A three-hour hole is the most expensive thing that happens to a colourist's week, and it usually happens while you are asleep. Slotora's waiting list is the one thing that works on a hole that size without you touching your phone.
The chair comes back on sale through five different doors, not one. A client cancelling is the obvious one; so is you cancelling. Rescheduling counts too, from either side, because the old hour is now empty. Marking somebody down as a no-show before their slot has even arrived counts. And so does a deposit checkout left half finished, which quietly releases the hold it had been keeping. Whichever door it came through, the twenty-five longest-waiting for that service on that date are emailed the hour.
Now the limits, because this feature is easy to oversell and we have oversold it before. Nothing is held for anybody — the mail names a time and whoever books first has it, so a client who waits to hear back from you loses it to one who did not. It goes out to the first twenty-five people waiting, not to a list of any length. It is an email and only an email; there is no text and no notification. And a slot that frees up inside your own minimum-notice window is not mailed at all, on the grounds that an email about a time your booking page will refuse is worse than no email.
Where this page stops being useful to you
Slotora keeps no colour record. There is no formulation field, no history of what went on which section at what volume, nothing that carries last time's mix forward to this time. What you get is a free-text note on her record and the separate box for what she reacts to. If your colour book is the thing you would most like to stop keeping on paper, this product does not replace it, and you should know that before you move your diary rather than after.
The developing window is also narrower than it first sounds, and the section above spells out why: half an hour, whole bookings only, buffers counted, your own diary and nobody else's. On a week of cuts and blow dries it does nothing whatsoever. It earns its place on a colour week, and the more colour you do the more it is worth — which is the opposite of how software is usually sold to this trade, and it is the truth.
Reminders reach your client by email or by text, and by nothing else. There is no app on her phone to notify and no message into any social inbox — Slotora does not read or send direct messages, anywhere in the product. Email costs you nothing and has no cap; text is paid for out of a credit balance you top up and sends nothing at all until you switch it on.
The questions a colourist asks first
Is the free version the one with the colour gap in it, or is that the paid one?
There is one version. Processing time is a box on a service and every account has it, the same as the booking page, the reminders, the repeat appointments and the waiting list. There is no monthly fee, no percentage of what you charge, no cap on how many bookings or clients you have, and no card is asked for when you register. What costs money is separate and optional: credits for text messages, credits for the pictures the assistant makes, and the AI telephone receptionist as a prepaid pack. Card payments are not on that list — those run through your own Stripe account and Stripe's fee is Stripe's.
What if my colour develops for twenty minutes, not thirty?
Then the numbers are twenty and the gap is twenty, and almost nothing will fit in it — which is the honest answer rather than a discouraging one. The two boxes take whatever you put in them; the question is whether the window you are left with is long enough for a real service to fit inside, buffers and all. Below about thirty minutes, most lists have nothing that does.
Can somebody book my gap while a colour is still being applied?
No, and it is worth seeing why. The window you defined starts at minute 30 of that appointment and ends at minute 60, and a booking has to fit inside those two edges completely. Minute 25 is your hands in her hair and the booking page treats it exactly as it treats any other busy minute.
I do a dry cut in forty-five minutes. Will Slotora let somebody book a forty-five in a thirty?
It will not, and there is no setting that persuades it to. The service plus its buffers has to sit inside the window whole. If you want longer work to fit, the lever is the colour: a full head that develops for forty-five minutes has a forty-five minute window, and that is a different list of things you can sell into it.
Can I still put a client on top of an existing appointment when I need to?
Yes, from your own calendar, and it is a separate mechanism from the one this page is about. Entering a booking yourself, you can tick the option to work outside your own rules: you give the date, the start time and the length, you have to say which team member it is for, and it will ignore your opening hours, your minimum notice, your days off and your time off. Drag an existing booking onto a taken time and a tick box appears under the refusal letting you move it there anyway. Afterwards both the browser and the app tell you the two bookings overlap, which is the point — you are meant to be able to see what you did.
Does a client need an app, or an account?
Neither. Your booking page is a public web address of the form slotora.io/b/your-name; she opens it in the browser on her phone, picks the service, picks a time, leaves a way of reaching her, and that is the whole transaction. The confirmation and the reminder arrive by email, and the confirmation carries a link she can use to move the booking or cancel it herself — moving closes at your cancellation deadline, a day by default, and cancelling stays open until the appointment starts.
I rent a space and work in it by myself. Is this written for me or for a salon?
For you. Slotora's beauty side is written for one person with one diary, and that is the design rather than a smaller version of something else. Should it ever become several of you, with someone else holding the floor together while your hands are busy, that is a different problem entirely and we build something else for it.
Where each of these lives, step by step
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 the two numbers on your colour tonight
Registering asks for no card and takes a few minutes. Add your colours at the lengths you actually work to, set the developing window on each one, look at your own booking page, and see what your Tuesday looks like when the middle of a colour is for sale.