Makeup artist booking software built around one wedding, not one appointment
A bride does not book an appointment. She books a trial in March, a morning in September, and a conversation in between about how many faces are in the room — and if any one of those three falls through the others are worth nothing. This page follows one job from the first message to the call time, and names what Slotora does at each date.
Built for the individual professional — one person, one diary.
0% of what you charge, no monthly fee and no card to register. Text messages and the AI extras run on a credit balance you top up, and stay switched off until you want them.
A diary with no rhythm in it
Almost nothing in a makeup artist's year repeats. A nail tech knows her client is back in four weeks and a lash tech knows it is three; you may do a bride's face twice in her life and never see her again. That one fact rearranges everything a booking system is usually good at. There is no cycle to protect, no rebooking to prompt, and a waiting list is close to useless when the thing people want is a specific Saturday in June that only one person can have.
What replaces all of it is weight. A wedding morning is not one slot, it is the whole day — you will not take a second job after it and you probably cannot take one before it — so a date that falls through does not cost you ninety minutes, it costs a Saturday you turned other work away for. Everything below is organised around protecting that, in the order the dates actually arrive.
One wedding, in the order it actually happens
Twelve months out
The message that starts it
The first contact is almost never a booking. It is a question about a date and a price, and what you need back from her before you can answer is the venue, the call time, the number of faces and a picture of what she has in mind. Those are questions, and Slotora will ask them for you in two different places depending on what they are for.
A question can be attached to the booking form itself, so she answers it at the moment she books, or it can go on a form you send ahead of the appointment, or both. The distinction matters more than it sounds: a required question in the booking flow will stop a booking going through, which is right for a consent tick and wrong for a long paragraph about her skin. A question can also depend on another one, so that asking whether she has had a reaction to anything only produces the follow-up when the answer was yes.
She can attach up to three pictures to her booking. For this trade that is the single most useful field on the form: a saved post, her dress, the bridesmaid whose brief is different from everybody else's. They arrive with the booking instead of scattered through a message thread you will be scrolling at seven in the morning.
Six months out
The trial, which is its own booking and its own price
A trial is not a shorter version of the wedding morning and it should not be a variant of it on your list. It is a separate treatment with its own length, its own price, and usually its own weekday, and it sits months away from the job it belongs to. Put it on your list as its own service and set the time it really takes, including the part where she looks at it in three different lights and asks about the lashes.
If you only work trials on certain days, a service can be offered on chosen weekdays and on no others, so a Tuesday-evening trial never appears as an option on a Saturday. And if you would rather the trial carried no deposit while the wedding morning carries a large one, that is a per-service setting rather than a choice you have to make once for your whole diary.
At the moment she says yes
Holding the date, and what holding really means
Connect your own Stripe account and a booking can be made to carry a percentage of the price, a fixed sum, or the whole thing, taken when she books. The money lands in your account rather than ours, and Slotora adds nothing to it; the card fee belongs to Stripe the way it would with a card machine on your counter.
You can set that amount per treatment. A wedding morning can ask for two hundred pounds while an occasion booking asks for nothing, because the deposit rule lives on the service and falls back to your general policy only when the service has none of its own. That is the setting this trade needs most, and it is the one most likely to be missed.
If you would rather approve a date before you accept it — and for a wedding most artists would — there is a mode where a booking arrives as a request. Be warned about exactly one thing before you switch it on, because it is not obvious and it has bitten real salons here: a business taking requests cannot collect money at the moment of booking at all. Whatever deposit you have configured, nothing is taken while the request is pending. What you get instead is a payment link emailed to her when you approve, which means she has to have given an email address, and it means the date is not paid for until she opens it.
Eight weeks out
The party, and the sentence nobody tells you
A service can be set to take more than one person, with an extra price for each one beyond the first. That is how a bridal party is priced: one treatment, a maximum number of faces, and an amount added per face. She chooses how many are having makeup and the total follows.
Here is the part that is easy to find out too late. A treatment sold per person cannot be combined with another treatment in the same visit. So if your own bridal service is priced per head, the bride cannot add a separate item to it in one booking — a hair trial, a second artist's slot, an early-access charge — and you will be putting that in yourself, as a second booking, or building it into the per-head price. It is not a bug and there is no setting that changes it; it is a boundary, and it is better to design your list around it than to discover it on a Tuesday with a bride waiting.
The practical shape that works: one per-head service covering everybody having makeup, with the length set for the whole morning rather than for one face, and anything that is genuinely separate kept as its own booking on the same day.
The morning
The call time, the address, and the hour before anyone is awake
Mark the service as one you travel for and the form will collect her address and keep it with the appointment. Beyond storing that line of text the product understands nothing whatever about the journey — the massage page in this cluster works through the consequences at length — and for a wedding morning the short version is that the address is a note to yourself, not a plan the diary has read.
What the morning actually needs is the buffer. Set an after-buffer on the wedding service long enough to cover packing down and the drive, and a before-buffer long enough to arrive and set up, and your diary will stop offering a five o'clock on a day you are already committed to. Each existing booking is widened by its own service's buffers, so the wedding protects itself against whatever you try to put next to it rather than depending on you remembering.
An email reaches her ahead of every confirmed booking, twenty-four hours out until you say otherwise, and more than one is allowed — a fortnight before the trial and two hours before the call time are the pair that earn their keep in this trade. Nothing is charged for those and nothing caps them. Texts are the other option: they come out of a topped-up balance and stay dormant until you deliberately enable them.
The page they judge you on
Your booking page is a public address of the form slotora.io/b/your-name, and it opens in the browser on her phone — she downloads nothing and makes no account. For this trade it is a portfolio before it is a diary, so the two places that hold pictures matter more than the rest of the page: a gallery of up to twenty-four of your own photographs, and a photograph on each treatment, so that a bridal morning and an evening look are not two lines of text.
Every one of those is a file you upload. Nowhere in the product is there a box asking for the web address of a picture, and that was decided rather than overlooked — a photograph you merely point at lives on a machine you do not control, and the morning it stops answering, or starts answering with something else, the hole is in your portfolio.
What to pick when you register
There is no makeup category, and it is better that you hear that here than find it in a dropdown. The trades Slotora recognises are nails, hair, barbering, beauty, lashes and brows, massage, fitness, yoga, counselling, coaching, tutoring, tattooing, photography, childcare, pet grooming and a general option — and makeup sits inside beauty, whose starter list includes a sixty-minute makeup service among a dozen others.
In practice this costs you a minute. The starter treatments are suggestions with a length attached and no price, and every one of them is editable the moment it exists; most artists delete the facials and write their own four rows. What the choice really decides is which twelve treatments you are offered as a shortcut, not what you are allowed to sell.
Two things that will not do what you expect
A deposit is money in your account. It is not a lock on the date. The setting that decides whether you keep a deposit when she cancels is a number of hours before the start, and it arrives set to zero — which means that until you change it, a cancellation at any point is refunded in full. Even with a window set, it only bites strictly inside it, a cancellation exactly on the boundary is refunded, and a booking you cancel yourself always refunds whatever the setting says. So the honest description of what a deposit does here is that it makes cancelling cost her something, if you have configured it to; nothing in the product prevents a bride from cancelling in March the Saturday you have been holding since last June.
And a bridal party is not one booking with five names on it. What you get is one appointment for a treatment priced per head, with a count and a total. There is no list of five people, no individual times inside the morning, no per-person notes and nothing that lets a bridesmaid fill in her own questions. If you need to know that the mother of the bride is at half past seven and has a latex allergy, that is your own running order on your own phone, not something the diary will hold for you.
What bridal artists ask before they move a diary across
Can I approve a wedding date before it is confirmed?
Yes, by taking bookings as requests rather than instant confirmations. The thing to know before you turn it on is that a business in that mode cannot take money at the moment of booking, whatever deposit you have set — the payment branch is closed for the whole request. After you approve, a payment link is emailed to her, which means she must have given an email address and the date is not paid for until she acts on it. If collecting at booking matters more to you than approving first, keep instant confirmation and rely on the deposit instead.
How do I charge for the bride and four bridesmaids?
Set the treatment to take more than one person and give it a price per extra face; she picks the number and the total follows. Set the length for the whole morning rather than for one face, because the diary reserves the time the service says it takes, not the time multiplied by the headcount. The limit to design around is that a per-person treatment cannot be combined with another treatment in the same visit, so anything genuinely separate goes in as its own booking.
Does the trial have to be linked to the wedding booking?
It is not linked, and nothing in the product joins two bookings into one job. They are two appointments for the same client, months apart, sitting on her record together with whatever you have written on it. If you want them to read as one piece of work, the place that holds that is the client's own notes, and there is a separate field for anything that is a warning rather than a note — an allergy, a reaction to a product — so it does not get lost in a paragraph.
Will it sync with the calendar on my phone?
Do not plan on it. Calendar sync exists in the code for several providers and it sits behind a switch that is not on in this environment, so the honest answer today is that you should treat your Slotora diary as the place your bookings live and not assume your personal calendar will know about them. What you can rely on is the confirmation and reminder emails, which arrive whatever else is switched off.
Is it actually free, and where is the catch?
Nothing monthly, and we take no share of your fees — book as much as you like, keep as many clients as you like, and register without a card. Three things are sold separately and none of them is required: texts come out of a topped-up balance, so does anything the assistant draws or writes for you, and the telephone receptionist is bought as a pack of minutes up front. Taking a card payment is not one of the three. That money moves through the Stripe account in your own name, and the only charge on it is Stripe's own.
Will being on Slotora bring me brides?
Assume not. There is a public directory, free to be listed in and taking no cut of anything booked through it, and you can be found in it by treatment and by town. It is also small, and bridal work is booked on recommendation and on Instagram rather than by browsing a listing, so it is not a channel to plan a season around. You will not appear there until something on your list carries a real price, which is deliberate. Everything below assumes the enquiry came to you because of your own work.
I am one person with one kit. Is this built for a studio?
It is built for you. Slotora's beauty product is written for the individual professional working with her own hands and her own diary. Once there is somebody else steering the day while your hands are on a face, the shape of the problem has changed, and a different Slotora is written for that one.
The settings this page named, 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 trial and the morning in as two different things
Registering takes a few minutes and no card. Write in your bridal morning at the length it really takes, your trial as its own treatment on the days you actually do them, and a deposit on the one that matters. The next bride who messages you about a date gets a link instead of a conversation.