CHAIR

Everything a hairstylist runs behind the chair, in one place.

The premise

A VAT-registered hairstylist. Deposits come in online, balances come in cash, and invoices go to production studios as well as individuals. Four or five actions per booking across four tools that knew nothing about each other, plus a shoebox for everything they missed.

CHAIR is not a booking system and does not try to be. It is the layer underneath: the day, the money, the chasing, the stock, the records and the VAT, all reconciling against each other.

It never books an appointment.

A booking is made in your booking system, not here.

It never changes a price.

So there is one place a price can be wrong.

It never places an order.

Stock records what you buy. You buy it.

It never files your VAT return.

Your accountant or your bridging software does.

Each one names something that can go wrong in a business and cannot go wrong here. A tool that places stock orders owns the wrong order. A tool that files a VAT return owns the penalty.

The day

Today lists the day’s appointments with client, service, duration, deposit paid, balance owed and how it is arriving. Still to collect leads the screen, VAT-inclusive. Settled appointments collapse to one line.

Four ways to settle: log cash, take card, mark transferred, confirm arrived. A claimed transfer keeps its own state and stays outstanding until it clears.

Logging a cash payment takes two taps. It updates Today, Money, the client record, Tax and the ledger in one change.

Today

Log cash payment

Today, after

All settled

The month

Money leads with net of VAT and fees. Five states behind it: VAT held, cleared to Stripe, cash and transfer each split between in hand and banked, and outstanding. Broken down again by deposits, balances and retail.

Tax holds the quarter. VAT held, return date, a monthly breakdown, an adjustable set-aside rate, a rolling twelve months against the £90,000 threshold, and an export for the accountant.

Stock runs bundles, wigs, glue and aftercare at cost and at retail with margin, low-stock flags, and a reorder basket that recalculates as it fills.

Money

Tax

Stock

Chasing

Owed leads with overdue only, split between trade and individuals. Trade rows carry a contact. Individual rows carry a reason.

Eight chase templates, four on WhatsApp and four by email, the channel following the contact. Drafts survive switching between templates. A bulk chase goes out across mixed channels in one send.

Invoices are full VAT invoices: net, VAT and gross per line, cash accounting noted, PDF, card link and chase history.

Owed

Chase on WhatsApp

Chase by email

Invoice

Receipt

The records

Client records hold visit history, spend, no-shows, notes and a rebook prompt, with WhatsApp one tap away. Every client, every invoice and every payment in one place. The ledger reconciles to Money exactly.

Everything

All clients

A client

What it plugs into

Twenty-three services across six groups.

Your booking system: Acuity, Square Appointments, Fresha, Booksy, Treatwell, Wix Bookings, Calendly. How you take payment: Stripe, Square, SumUp, Zettle, PayPal. Your bookkeeping: Xero, FreeAgent, QuickBooks. How you message clients: WhatsApp Business, Instagram, SMS. Your calendar: Google, Apple, Outlook. Your files: Dropbox, Google Drive.

Three are connected. Connecting another means authorising it in the directory, which then shows what that service reads, what it writes and what it never writes.

The booking system only opens its API on the expensive plans, and the free tier sends almost nothing useful. Every platform does this deliberately. That ruled out a pure wrapper and set the rule the build follows: assume the connection could disappear, and keep working without it.

Connections

What can be linked

On a laptop

The same product at desk width. Needs You lists everything wanting action with the verb on each row. The subtraction behind the money figure is shown rather than summarised.

Today, desktop