Walk-in system for your hair salon: first work out how many walk-ins you can handle

A walk-in system is first a capacity question

Whether you handle walk-ins with a chalkboard, a list at the front desk or a screen, the question underneath is always the same. Can the team help the clients who walk in without booked clients having to wait? That is a question about arrivals and capacity, and there is a whole field for it: queueing theory describes how arrivals, service time and capacity together determine waiting time.

Be honest about what software does here, too. Salonnare has a calendar with online booking, client records and a point of sale, but no digital queue, check-in screen or queue board. You organise the order of turns yourself. How to set that up in practice, with a fixed walk-in chair, fixed walk-in hours or a queue list, is covered in the article on walk-ins and appointments in a barbershop; those set-ups work just as well in a hair salon. This article is about the step before that: how much time you actually need to keep free.

Step 1: count your walk-ins per part of the day for two weeks

Without numbers you plan on gut feeling, and gut feeling mainly remembers the busiest Saturday. So for two ordinary weeks, record every walk-in client on a simple form at the front desk. For each client, note four things.

The time they arrived. Count per one-hour block or per part of the day. You are looking for patterns: lots of walk-ins on Saturday morning, around lunchtime or after work.

The treatment they asked for. A cut, a fringe trim, a blow-dry, or something that really should have been an appointment.

Whether you could help them. Also count the clients you had to turn away or who left because it took too long. That is demand you are missing today.

How long they waited. An estimate in minutes is enough.

After two weeks you have an average number of walk-ins per part of the day and a picture of what they ask for. A school holiday or bank holiday distorts the picture; leave those weeks out or note them separately.

Step 2: work out the stylist time you need, and leave a margin

For each part of the day, multiply the average number of walk-ins by the average treatment time. An example: on Saturday between 10:00 and 13:00 an average of six clients walk in for a 30-minute cut. That is 180 minutes of work in a 180-minute block. On paper, one stylist can handle exactly that.

In practice they cannot, and that is the key lesson from queueing theory. Clients do not arrive neatly every half hour: sometimes three at once, then nobody for an hour. The closer utilisation gets to 100%, the harder waiting time climbs, and it does not rise gradually but faster and faster. At full utilisation, a group that arrives together has no moment to be worked off.

So plan with a margin. A practical rule of thumb is to plan walk-in capacity so that expected utilisation sits around 70 to 80%. In the example, that means 180 minutes of work divided by 0.75, so roughly 240 minutes of stylist time: one stylist for the whole block and a second for an extra hour, for example from 10:30 to 11:30 when most clients arrive. That hour is not waste. It is the room that stops a client waiting forty-five minutes or a booked appointment running late.

If your count shows you turned clients away, add them to demand. Otherwise you plan exactly the capacity you are already short of.

Step 3: decide which treatments belong to walk-ins

The sum only works if treatment time is predictable. In a hair salon that varies a lot per treatment. A cut, a fringe trim, a clipper cut and a blow-dry are short and easy to estimate. Colour, highlights, balayage and perms are long, vary per client and often need a consultation first. They do not fit in a walk-in block: one colour treatment can eat an hour or more of your walk-in capacity.

Make that line clear, to the team and to clients: short treatments only for walk-ins, an appointment for everything else. Someone who walks in for colour can be given an appointment straight away instead of a no.

In Salonnare you set a fixed duration per treatment, so the calendar works with real times. Per treatment you can also choose whether it can be booked online (off means: can still be scheduled internally, but is not shown on the booking page) and on which days and time windows it can be booked online. That way you can, for example, stop long colour treatments being booked online on the Saturday morning you want to keep for walk-ins. More about the calendar and the booking page in bookings management.

Step 4: lock the result into your calendar

A calculation that only lives in your head disappears in the first busy week. So put the walk-in capacity in the calendar, so online bookers do not fill it. In Salonnare you do that with a task: a block with a title such as "Walk-ins", a start and end time and the stylist or stylists it applies to. By default a task blocks online booking for those hours; if you do want a block to stay bookable online, switch on "Still bookable via online calendar".

Agree two rules as well. One: the calendar leads, so a booked client goes first as soon as their time comes. Two: only give a walk-in client a waiting time once you have checked in the calendar which stylist is coming free.

For recording walk-ins you have two routes. A regular client is recorded as an appointment in the stylist's chair; a name is enough, an email address is not required, and the client record keeps what was done. A passer-by can also be checked out directly at the point of sale, without an appointment and without a client record. Note: in the free plan, walk-ins you record as appointments count towards the limit of 50 appointments per month.

Step 5: measure again after a month

A walk-in block is an estimate, so test it. After a month, count another week and compare it with your first count. If clients still wait a long time in the same block, utilisation is too high and you need more stylist time there. If a stylist is mostly idle in a block, move that time to a busier part of the day, or give the hour back to the online calendar.

The reporting shows revenue per team member and the daily report; it is included from the Starter plan. In the free plan you have the calendar and the point of sale and keep the count yourself.

Salonnare has three plans at a fixed monthly price. Free (€0) is for one team member and up to 50 appointments per month, with calendar, online booking page, point of sale for cash and card, client records and email reminders. Starter (€29) is for up to three team members with unlimited appointments, reporting, stock and loyalty. Pro (€59) has unlimited team members and deposits for online bookings. There is no marketplace commission on new clients; a transaction fee of 0.5% (minimum €0.30) does apply to every online or card payment, and the money goes to your own account via iDEAL/Mollie or Stripe.

Read more about Salonnare for hairdressers on the hair salon software page. Want to try your own walk-in block? Start free with Salonnare, add a "Walk-ins" task to the calendar and check that the booking page skips those hours.

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