Saturday morning, one of your stylists calls in sick. He has six bookings today. Whoever is at the front desk opens the appointment book, works out when the other two stylists are free, and starts phoning customers one by one. Meanwhile a walk-in customer is standing there waiting, and the shop phone won’t stop ringing.
A one-stylist shop has one schedule. A shop with three stylists has three schedules that need to be seen at the same time, and each one has its own rules. One stylist is off on Mondays, another starts in the afternoon, a third does colour and needs longer to clean up afterwards. A single paper book can’t hold all of that, so it ends up in the head of whoever takes the bookings.
The general causes of double bookings are covered in our post on booking clashes. This post covers only the part that appears once a shop has more than one stylist.
Three things the schedule needs to know about each stylist
1. Which days they work, and from when to when. A stylist who starts at 1 pm shouldn’t have a 10 am slot open for anyone to book, whether the person booking is a customer or the front desk.
2. Which extra days they take off. Time off that was only mentioned in passing is time off the person on the other shift doesn’t know about.
3. How much buffer they need before and after each booking. A colourist and a stylist who only cuts need different amounts of time to clean up. One number for the whole shop will be too much for one and too little for the other.
If the schedule knows these three things, it can turn away a wrong booking by itself. If it doesn’t, the person taking bookings has to remember for it.
Where to set these three things in QueueD
Go to the staff page and tap each stylist. There are three sections.
- Weekly working hours: the days and times this stylist works.
- Personal days off: added one day at a time. Bookings already made on that day aren’t deleted; the system warns you so the shop can move them itself.
- Buffer before and after bookings: set separately for before and after. The default is 0.
Set it once, and the customer booking link only shows times when that stylist can actually take a booking.
One schedule page, every stylist side by side
The booking schedule shows stylists as columns side by side on one screen, with a day view and a month view. If the shop has more than one stylist, there’s a filter to show only the ones you want.
Time outside a stylist’s working hours looks different from an ordinary empty slot. At a glance you can tell which slots are empty because nobody has booked them yet, and which are empty because the stylist isn’t there.
When a stylist is suddenly off
Back to that Saturday morning. The six bookings of the stylist who is off sit in his column. Drag each booking into another stylist’s column, or move it to another time that day, in 15-minute steps.
The system refuses the move in three cases:
- The destination is outside that stylist’s working hours.
- The booking would run past that stylist’s finishing time.
- The destination already has another booking.
Bookings that can be moved are those waiting for confirmation or already confirmed. Completed or cancelled bookings can’t be moved.
Customers who have linked their LINE get a message with the new stylist and time every time their booking is moved. Move it three times and the customer gets three messages, so be sure before you drop it.
Customers who don’t pick a stylist
The booking page has an “Any stylist” option. If the customer chooses it, the page combines every stylist’s free time, so the customer sees more times to choose from than when picking one stylist. When they book, the barbershop booking system finds a stylist who is actually free at that time and puts the booking with them.
Among the stylists free at that time, the system picks the one with the fewest bookings that day. If there’s a tie, it goes by the shop’s staff list order. So bookings don’t pile up on whoever is first on the list.
The system counts bookings, not time. A stylist with two colour jobs is counted as less busy than a stylist with three haircuts.
Number of stylists and plans
The number of stylists is what makes the biggest difference between plan prices. The Free plan allows 1 stylist, Basic 3, Pro 8, and Business unlimited. Details are in our post on pricing.
What QueueD doesn’t do yet
- It doesn’t move bookings for you when a stylist is off. The system warns you, but the shop decides which booking goes to whom.
- It doesn’t notify customers who haven’t linked LINE when their booking is moved. The shop has to tell those customers itself.
- It doesn’t suggest which slot to book. The schedule shows which slots are free; it doesn’t choose for you.
How to start
- Add every stylist, and set up their weekly working hours before anything else.
- Ask each stylist how many minutes they need to clean up, and enter that as the buffer after bookings.
- Enter all the time off you already know about for this month.
Try QueueD free for 14 days. No card needed, and the Free plan stays available after the trial ends.