Walk into a salon that is running well and you can see it in one square metre. The counter is clear, there is one screen, and everybody knows where the day is written down.
Walk into one that is struggling and there are four devices, two of them personal phones, a diary with crossings-out, and a laptop nobody can reach past the eftpos machine.
The stack for a salon is not about having more technology. It is about having one of each thing in the right place.
The counter
A tablet on a weighted stand. One screen, shared, that swivels. It faces you for the diary and turns to face the customer for a signature, a form or a price. This is the single most useful purchase in the salon and the mistake is buying a light stand: a cheap one gets dragged off the counter by its own charging cable inside a month.
Why a shared tablet and not staff phones: a personal phone means the record lives in someone's hand, notifications from their life interrupt your work, and when they leave you lose the history. One screen everyone uses is a policy, not just a device.
A card terminal that knows the booking. We build ours on Stripe with the WisePOS E, so the amount, the customer and the appointment come off the diary and there is nothing to key in. That removes the mistyped-amount refund and the six o'clock reconciliation. Petboost is our own product so weigh that accordingly; Zeller, Tyro and Square are the standalone alternatives and the front desk post compares them properly.
A label printer. A Brother QL. Take-home bottles, bags of belongings, medication, crates. Cheap, and the thing everyone says they should have bought sooner.
A cordless handset, if you still take a lot of calls. Then work on why you take a lot of calls, because most salon calls are booking, rescheduling or confirming and those should be self-service.
Not on the counter: your personal phone, a cash drawer you never open, and a second screen.
The wall
The run sheet, printed. Yes, printed. A screen does not work with shampoo on your hands, does not survive the wifi dropping, and cannot be read by three people at once. Print the day, put it where everyone can see it, and write on it in pen.
The reason this is not a step backwards is the QR code next to each appointment. Scan it with the phone in your apron and the full record opens: the history, the last groom's photos, the emergency contact, the notes that would not fit. The paper is the shape of the day; the phone is the depth.
A waiting room display. A cheap Google TV on any panel, running your report card photos and your service list. Customers watching other people's dogs come out looking magnificent book the upgrade without being asked. It is the least pushy upsell available.
Out the back
A desktop. The counter runs the day; the back office does rostering, accounts, marketing and thinking. Trying to do both at the counter means neither gets done, and it means a customer is standing there while you are in a spreadsheet.
A scanner, or a three-in-one printer. A vaccination certificate handed over at the counter should be on the pet's record in ten seconds, not in a folder.
The printer. An ink tank machine, not a cartridge one. Full reasoning and the specific models are in the main stack post; the short version is that a cartridge printer costs more in ink in a year than the machine cost.
Infrastructure, which should be invisible
Mesh wifi. One router in the office does not reach a wet room behind a block wall. Two or three nodes does. Your terminal, cameras and tablet all depend on it, so treat it as plumbing.
4G failover. If the internet is down you cannot take a card payment. A failover router turns a catastrophe into a nuisance.
A UPS under the desk. Brownouts mid-transaction happen, and they happen at the worst moment.
Cameras. Two to start: the front door and the back of house. It is a staff safety and incident-record tool before it is a customer feature. Read the cameras post first, because Australian surveillance law treats audio very differently from video and most cameras arrive with the microphone switched on.
A password manager. The shared login on a sticky note under the monitor is how a small business gets breached, and how you fail to remove access from someone who left.
Two things worth doing that nobody does
Put the diary on the waiting room display for ten minutes at close. Not for customers, for you. Seeing tomorrow at a glance while you are still in the building changes what you prepare.
Photograph every finished dog against the same wall. Same spot, same light, one tap. Six months later you have a portfolio that sells the salon better than anything you could write, and a before-and-after record that settles any question about how a coat looked when it arrived.
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Where our interest lies, plainly. We have no affiliate arrangement with any brand named here and we earn nothing if you buy. Petboost is our own product, we make money if you use it, and this post recommends it for the diary, payments and the printed run sheet. Price the alternatives.