Stock management for salons: from the delivery box to the treatment room

Most salons know what they spent on supplies last month. Far fewer know where it went. The invoice says forty tubes of colour came in. Nobody can say how many are left, which chair used the most, or whether the expensive treatment mask is being applied with a teaspoon or a ladle.

Stock in SalonRadar is built to answer those questions without turning your team into warehouse clerks. This is a walk through how it fits together and how a small salon would use it in a normal week.

The idea in one paragraph

Everything you buy lands in a central pool. From there you hand it out, either to a cabinet (a shared place such as a treatment room, a styling station or the front desk) or directly to a specialist. Each service can carry a recipe: the products it uses up and how much. When a booking is marked completed, the recipe is deducted from that specialist's stock automatically. Anything that does not fit the pattern has its own small form. That is the whole model.

Setting it up once

Products, categories and suppliers

Start in the catalogue. A product has a name, a base unit and a default pack size, so "Coconut shampoo" measured in millilitres with a pack of 250. The base unit matters more than it looks. You buy in packs but you use in grams and millilitres, and the system lets you enter either one anywhere a quantity is asked for.

Categories keep the list tidy. Suppliers are optional but worth the two minutes, because spend reports can then be split by who you buy from. Products you stop using get archived rather than deleted, so old records still make sense.

Cabinets

Create one cabinet for every shared spot your team draws from. A two-room beauty studio might have "Room 1", "Room 2" and "Front desk". If you retire a room, deactivate the cabinet. It stops being offered as a target and keeps its history.

Recipes

This is the part that saves the most time later. Open a service, go to stock consumption and list what one performance of it uses. A root colour might be 60 g of colour and 90 ml of developer. If the service has variants (short, medium, long hair), each variant can have its own recipe that overrides the default.

A normal week

1. A delivery arrives. Record a purchase: supplier, date, a line per product with quantity and total paid. The central pool goes up, and the product's average cost is updated from what you really paid. The same entry doubles as your supply-expense record.
2. You restock the rooms. Allocate from central to a cabinet or a specialist. Central goes down, the holder goes up by the same amount. Nothing is created or lost in between.
3. The team works. Completed bookings deduct their recipes from the specialist who did them. If a booking is later changed to cancelled or no-show, the deduction is reversed. You do not have to think about it.
4. Someone does a service outside the calendar. A quick fringe trim for a friend, a model for training. Log it as an off-book procedure so the products are still accounted for.
5. Shared consumables run down. Cotton pads, gloves and cleaning spray have no recipe. Record cabinet consumption against the room they came from.
6. A bottle gets dropped. Post a stock adjustment with a reason. Damage, expiry and spillage are counted as waste, separately from a simple recount, so you can see what you lose rather than use.

What you learn from it

Three reports sit on top of all this, under Reports.

• Stock on hand shows what every holder has right now and what it is worth at average cost. Useful before an order, and useful at year end.
• Supply spend shows real purchase totals by supplier, category and product for any period.
• Specialist consumption compares what each person was allocated with what their completed services should have used. A gap is not an accusation. It is usually a recipe that is too optimistic, or a product being shared between chairs. But it is the first time most owners see the number at all.

Things people ask in the first week

Will a booking be blocked if stock runs out?

No. A specialist's balance is allowed to go negative. A client in the chair matters more than a tidy ledger, and a negative number is simply a signal that a delivery or allocation was not recorded.

What if I change a recipe later?

Past bookings keep the quantities and costs they were completed with. The new recipe applies from the next completed booking onwards.

Do I need all of it?

No. Plenty of salons start with purchases and recipes for their five most expensive products and ignore the rest. You will get most of the insight from the products that cost the most per gram.

Where to start

Pick the one product line you suspect is leaking money. Add those products, record what is on the shelf today as a purchase or an adjustment, write recipes for the services that use them, and run it for a month. If the numbers surprise you, extend it. If they do not, you have lost an hour and gained some peace of mind.