What does a colour service really cost you?

Ask a salon owner what a root colour sells for and you get the answer before you finish the question. Ask what it costs to deliver and there is a pause. Somewhere between "about a tube" and "depends who mixes it".

That pause is expensive. Colour is the highest-margin work many salons do and also the place where product cost varies most from one pair of hands to the next. You cannot price it well, or notice when something drifts, without knowing the second number.

Here is a way to find it. The arithmetic works on paper. We will also show where SalonRadar does it for you.

The three costs inside one service

1. Product. Colour, developer, bond builder, toner, the mask at the basin.
2. Time. The stylist's, including processing time when the chair is occupied and cannot be sold to anyone else.
3. Everything else. Rent, light, towels, foils, gloves, the coffee.

Most owners have a rough idea of the second and third. The first is the one that hides, because it is bought by the box and used by the gram.

A worked example

The numbers below are invented to show the method. Use your own.

Product	Used	Cost per unit	Cost
Permanent colour	60 g	€0.12 / g	€7.20
Developer	90 ml	€0.01 / ml	€0.90
Bond builder	8 ml	€0.35 / ml	€2.80
Toner	30 g	€0.15 / g	€4.50
Foils, gloves, cape			€1.10
Total			€16.50

On a service sold at €75, that is 22 percent of the price gone before anyone has been paid. Not alarming. Now suppose one stylist habitually mixes 80 g where 60 would do, and another adds bond builder to every client whether or not it was sold. The same service costs about €19 in one chair and under €14 in the next, and at thirty colours a week each, the gap between them is around €8,000 a year.

Nobody is stealing. Nobody is even being careless by their own lights. There just is no number, so there is no conversation.

Getting the number without weighing every bowl

Step one: know what you pay per gram

Record deliveries as purchases, with the quantity and what you paid. SalonRadar keeps a weighted-average cost per product from those entries, so when the supplier's price creeps up, your costs follow without anyone updating a spreadsheet.

Step two: write the recipe

Open each colour service and list what one performance should use. If you sell by hair length, give each variant its own recipe: short, medium and long do not use the same bowl. Agree the quantities with your team. The recipe is the standard you will measure against, so it needs to be one they think is fair.

Step three: give each stylist their own stock

Allocate product from the central pool to each specialist. It sounds bureaucratic. In practice it is restocking a trolley once a week and typing in what you put on it.

Step four: let the bookings do the counting

Each completed colour deducts its recipe from the stylist who did it. No one logs anything per client. If a booking is cancelled afterwards or turned into a no-show, the deduction reverses itself.

The number that matters

After a month, open the specialist consumption report. For each person it shows what they were issued, what their completed services should have used according to the recipes, and the variance between the two.

A small variance means recipe and reality agree. A large one means one of three things:

• The recipe is wrong. Sixty grams was never realistic for your clientele. Fix the recipe, and consider fixing the price.
• Product is going to work that is not on the calendar. Models, friends, touch-ups, training nights. Log them as off-book procedures and the gap closes.
• Someone mixes heavy. Now you can have a friendly conversation with a figure in it, which is a different conversation from "I feel like we go through a lot of colour".

What gets poured down the sink or passes its date goes in as a stock adjustment marked as waste, so it shows up as its own line. Waste is worth seeing separately, because the fix for it, smaller orders or smaller bowls, is different from the fix for over-use.

What to do once you know

• Price by what it costs, not by what the salon down the road charges. If long hair uses twice the product and takes forty minutes longer, the variant should reflect both.
• Sell extras as extras. If bond builder costs you nearly three euros a time, it should be an add-on the client chooses, not a habit.
• Review once a quarter. Supplier prices move. Recipes drift. Ten minutes with the report four times a year is enough.

A word on tone

Bring this in as a way to price fairly and order sensibly, and most stylists will help you get the recipes right. Bring it in as surveillance and they will resent it, with reason. The report compares an allocation with a recipe. It is a starting point for a question, never the answer to one.