Cut, colour, blow-dry.
Booking, sorted.

Colour manufacturers and most salon insurers expect an allergy alert test before a colour service, typically around 48 hours ahead, and a new client who books a tint for tomorrow morning has already made that impossible. You find out when they walk in, and then you are the one having the awkward conversation.

The fix is unglamorous and it works: say it at the point of booking, not in the confirmation email nobody reads. Each service carries its own note, shown while the client is choosing, so anyone booking colour is told what they need to do and when to come in for it before they pick a time.

You can also add the test itself as a short free appointment, so a new colour client books the test and the colour in one go and both land in the diary properly.

We are not going to pretend software makes this risk go away. It moves the conversation to the moment it is useful, which is the most any booking page can honestly claim.

The longer the appointment, the worse a no-show hurts, and colour appointments are the longest thing most salons do. An empty three-hour Saturday afternoon is not a gap you fill at short notice.

You can take a deposit at booking, as a percentage or a fixed amount, and set it per service so a £25 fringe trim is not treated like a full head of foils. You can write your own cancellation policy: how much notice you want, what a late cancellation costs, what a no-show costs.

If someone cancels inside the window or does not turn up, the fee is charged automatically to the card they booked with. Solovi takes none of it. All of it reaches your account minus the standard card fee, because we make our money from the subscription and nothing else.

Plenty of salons run with no deposit and simply want the diary to fill itself, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to work. It is there for the day a lost Saturday has annoyed you enough.