Commission is where salon software most often fails, and the failure is quiet. The register records something plausible, payroll runs on it, and the argument arrives three weeks later when a stylist works out that their numbers do not match the day they remember.
Here is what the register actually has to get right.
The five things that have to be true
The sale attributes to the person who performed it, not the person who rang it. On a ticket with a colour by one stylist and a blow-dry by another, both have to be credited. A system that assigns the whole sale to whoever was at the desk produces wrong numbers from day one.
Services and retail are separated. They are almost always paid at different rates, and a system that lumps them produces a figure nobody can check.
The rate that applies is the rate that applied then. If you change a stylist's commission in March, February's numbers must not move. Systems that recalculate history retroactively will eventually restate a period someone was already paid for.
Discounts have a decided owner. When the desk takes twenty per cent off, does the stylist's commission come off the original price or the discounted one? Both are legitimate policies. The software will pick one for you if you do not pick first, and whichever it picks will surprise somebody.
Tips are separate from commission, attributed per person, and recorded by payment type.
The discount question, specifically
This is the most common source of bad feeling and it is entirely avoidable.
A client has a hundred-dollar colour with a twenty-dollar loyalty credit. The stylist is on forty per cent. Is the commission forty dollars or thirty-two?
If the salon is funding the discount as a marketing cost, forty. If the discount comes off the service value, thirty-two. Neither is wrong. What is wrong is not deciding, because then the software decides and your staff discover the policy by noticing it in a pay packet.
Write it down, tell your team, and configure the register to match. Ten minutes, and it prevents the single most common commission argument in a salon.
What to configure before go-live
- Each person's rate, by service and by retail
- Whether commission is on gross or net of card fees
- Who carries discounts, comps and gift-card redemptions
- How a refund reverses commission already earned
- How a two-person ticket splits
- Whether product used on a service is deducted
The refund one catches people. If a client is refunded next month for a service paid this month, the commission has already been paid out. Whether the system claws it back, and how, should be a decision rather than a discovery.
What the reports must answer
You should be able to run payroll without a spreadsheet. That is the whole test.
Per person, per period: service sales, retail sales, commission at each rate, tips by payment type, and the total. If you are exporting to a spreadsheet to finish the calculation, the system is not doing the job, and you will be doing that every fortnight for years.
Ask to see this report in the demo, with a two-stylist ticket and a split tip in it.
The parts that are not software questions
Two things the register will record faithfully whether or not they are lawful.
Deductions from commission. Taking product cost, card fees or breakages out of someone's pay has rules, and they vary by state. A POS will happily apply a deduction that is not permitted.
Tip pooling. Who may lawfully share in a pool is not a configuration setting. We went through it in tip pooling rules, and the card-fee question in the card fee on a tip and who pays it.
Settle both before configuring anything.
Choosing between commission and booth rent
Worth revisiting periodically rather than once. The crossover — the weekly revenue where renting starts paying a stylist more than commission does — moves as your prices move. Nail tech commission structures compared lays out the common structures, and the salon commission calculator does the arithmetic against booth rent with your own numbers.
Sonorch POS handles per-technician commission and tips at the register; pricing is flat by team size, so adding a stylist does not raise the software bill.