A single month for a six-chair salon turning over about £400,000 a year. Same business, same month, read two ways: the way a set of year-end accounts reads it, and the way a finance director does.
Book a free 30-minute review →Not takings per stylist — takings per hour of capacity you are paying for whether it sells or not.
| Chair | Takings | Hours available | Hours booked | Utilisation | Per available hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chair 1 — senior | £6,800 | 160 | 152 | 95% | £42.50 |
| Chair 2 — senior | £6,150 | 160 | 148 | 92% | £38.44 |
| Chair 3 | £5,400 | 160 | 141 | 88% | £33.75 |
| Chair 4 | £4,900 | 160 | 128 | 80% | £30.62 |
| Chair 5 — junior | £3,600 | 160 | 119 | 74% | £22.50 |
| Chair 6 — part time | £4,550 | 96 | 96 | 100% | £47.40 |
The part-timer is the most productive person in the building. Ninety-six hours, fully booked, £47.40 an hour of capacity — more than either senior stylist. The full-time junior, on sixty-four more hours, returns £22.50.
On a wages line those two are simply staff costs. Here they are two completely different businesses. The obvious question — can the part-timer have more hours, and what is the junior's column actually for — is a question no annual account has ever prompted anybody to ask. At these rates the gap between the best and worst columns is worth around £4,000 a month, which is the difference between a good year and an ordinary one.
Wages of £16,870 against revenue of £33,750 is 50.0%. For a salon that is the top of the workable range — survivable, with nothing spare. Below about 45% there is room to breathe; above about 55% no amount of work on anything else rescues the year.
It is one number, it takes a minute to produce, and most owner-managed salons have never seen it for their own business.
| Revenue | Cost | Gross profit | Margin | Share of revenue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Services | £31,400 | — | — | — | 93.0% |
| Retail | £2,350 | £1,222 | £1,128 | 48% | 7.0% |
Retail is seven per cent of revenue at a forty-eight per cent margin. It is also the only part of the business that carries input VAT you can recover, in a trade where the main cost is labour and labour carries none. Shown as one combined sales figure, none of that is visible. Shown separately, the question becomes obvious: is seven per cent the ceiling, or is it just what happens when nobody is measuring it?
| Amount | Share of revenue | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | £33,750 | 100% |
| Staff | £16,870 | 50.0% |
| Rent | £2,800 | 8.3% |
| Products used in service | £2,180 | 6.5% |
| Retail cost of sales | £1,222 | 3.6% |
| Everything else | £3,410 | 10.1% |
| Profit | £7,268 | 21.5% |
That bottom line is the only figure of the four that a set of year-end accounts would ever have given you — and it would have given it to you the following autumn, about a decision you took last spring.
The ledger behind it is the bookkeeping you are paying for already. Turning it into the four numbers above is Managed, £395 + VAT a month — and on this example that is a little over one per cent of revenue, against a gap between the best and worst chair worth several times it. See the full price list, or read how it works for hair and beauty specifically.
Seven questions, answered from memory. No logins and no exports — an honest read on whether the numbers behind your business can be trusted.
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