Using Salon Software to Manage Staff Holidays and Sickness

Everyone looks forward to their holidays, allowing you and your employees time to recharge. However, managing your staff holidays can be difficult if you don’t have a set of regulations in place to do so. This article will discuss how salon software can help you manage staff holidays far more effectively.

We all love a holiday – fact!

When managing a salon, the business may have a lot of different ways of processing holiday requests, such as through email, an HR system, pen and paper requests or even using your salon software.

A team member taking a holiday at an inopportune time can have a big impact on your salon revenue. So to maintain your salons ability to function, it is important to only have a certain number of people off on leave at any one time. Managing this effectively will ensure that you can monitor the holiday time taken, so that staff leave does not affect your salons ability to take on customers.

If you do not track your team’s holiday plans effectively, you can find yourself in a sticky situation rather quickly. You can even end up with too few stylists in the salon to stay open.

There are many points to consider when using a holiday tracker:

• Who will you nominate to manage your leave requests and holiday planner for your salon?
• How much notice will you need to be given for any holiday time taken?
• Is there a maximum amount of ‘holiday days’ that can be taken by a member of staff at any one time?
• Can your team cancel their holiday? If so, how much notice do they need to give?
• How many staff members can you have away on holiday at a time without reducing your effectiveness?
• What cover may you need to consider (such as in stock control management) when certain team members are on holiday?
• Have you worked out how much holiday everyone is entitled to?
• Can the holiday planner be easily seen by everyone so they can coordinate their holiday plans?

These simple rules are regulations that you should have in place for your hair and beauty salon and communicate to your team members. This way, all your stylists will know where they stand when considering taking any leave.

Using a salon software holiday planner could be the answer to your concerns. Here are some reasons why;

• You can access your holiday planner digitally wherever you are,
• Holiday days can be calculated and displayed for you on your software,
• Human error is taken out of the equation,
• Colour codes for leave taken such as holiday, sickness, maternity makes it easier to monitor when and why your staff are away from work,
• You have full control of the salon software holiday planner.

Using a holiday planner

Have you ever started a new spreadsheet or planner and printed it out for your staff to fill in, only for someone to come along and knock their coffee all over it? A masterpiece ruined instantly.

Having your holiday planner on your salon software means you don’t need to keep multiple records. As soon as a team member marks a date as holiday on the planner it automatically blocks out the person in the appointment book as well.

If holiday is given to a staff member on short notice, you may need to contact clients to move their appointment to an alternative day or shift their appointment to a different member of staff to cover. Using salon software to arrage this enables you to see any booking conflicts on the days your staff are on leave. This will ensure you are able to give your clients plenty of notice and find them an alternate appointment to keep them happy.

Cancelling / moving holiday plans

Cancelling or re-schedulling a holiday when using a salon software holiday planner is far more efficient. With one click on the holiday booking and you are able to adjustment the dates, allowing you to input your new holiday time-frame, leaving no trace of the old holiday schedule.

Holiday and salaries in your salon

When using a salon software holiday planner, you can then go one step further and set up your salon software to calculate your team’s wages. If you do not record the holiday dates your staff have taken in your salon software, you will be unable to calculate the salaries correctly.

A basic setup where you inputting your team holiday allowance onto a holiday planner will allow you to calculate the right figure for any date range given.

Other types of leave

Sickness and maternity leave, as well as unpaid leave are also great to keep on top of and record using your salon software.

If sickness is not marked on the planner, you cannot easily monitor how often your staff are away, to calculate salaries and record other useful data.

Having maternity leave on the holiday planner allows you to plan around this time, ensuring you have another person available to cover when the team member is away. This will also ensure that you have followed all of the guidance pertaining to maternity leave.

Filling white space before holiday

When a staff member has an upcoming holiday, this can be a great opportunity to fill the gaps in their schedule.

When someone takes leave, why not send an SMS or email out to your clients letting them know that Hannah is going away on holiday and to make an appointment now before she goes away? This is a great way to fill any white space in the column for that particular team member and using salon software makes this far easier to manage.

Targeted campaigns like these are often very effective and can gain you great results. Your salon software should be able to give you a good insight into how utilised your staff are at certain times of the week or month to ensure your campaign is as effective as possible.

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