Salon commission structures, explained

Flat rate: simple, and expensive at the top

Everyone earns the same percentage regardless of takings. It is easy to explain, easy to calculate, and it is the right answer for a small team where everybody is roughly as busy as everybody else.

Its weakness shows as the team grows apart. A rate generous enough to keep your busiest stylist is expensive applied to your quietest, and one that is affordable across the team is not enough to keep the person carrying it.

Tiers: the common answer, with one thing to decide

Takings below a threshold earn one rate, above it a higher one. This is what most salons land on, and the decision that matters is whether the higher rate applies to everything or only to the portion above the threshold.

The two produce noticeably different pay at the same takings, and a team that has not been told which one you are using will assume the more generous reading. Say it explicitly, in writing, when you set it up.

• Applied to everything: a stylist crossing a threshold gets a jump. Motivating, and expensive at the boundary.
• Applied only above: smoother for the salon, and less visible to the stylist as a reward.
• Either way, put the thresholds where your stylists actually cluster — a threshold nobody reaches is not an incentive.

Sliding scale: no cliffs, harder to explain

The rate rises continuously rather than in steps, so there is no point where one more booking is worth disproportionately more than the last.

The trade is legibility. A stylist who cannot work out what their next appointment earns them does not feel the incentive, and an incentive nobody can feel is just an accounting policy.

The question underneath all three

Does commission come out of the price the client paid, or the price before discount? If a stylist loses commission because the salon granted a loyalty discount, they will quietly stop mentioning the loyalty scheme, and you will have paid for a programme your team is discouraging.

It is a small setting with an outsized effect on whether the rest of your systems get used.

Where Salyntra fits

Flat rates and tiered bands are both supported, per staff member, and commission attaches to the person who performed each service rather than whoever the booking was made under — so a visit split across three stylists pays three people correctly.

There is also a switch for the discount question above: calculate on the gross price, so a salon-granted discount does not come out of the stylist’s pay.