The scheduling half of running a nail salon: techs with their own books, services that are honest about how long they take, and deposits on the sets that hurt when they ghost. Not a till, not a stock system.
A nail salon has one scheduling problem and it is specific: your services are wildly different lengths and clients do not know that. A gel fill is 45 minutes. A full set with extensions and art is closer to two and a half hours. A soak-off adds time before you even start. If your booking system treats every appointment as “an appointment”, someone will book a full set into a gap that was never big enough, and the person after them waits.
That is why a generic calendar link does not survive contact with a salon. It shares your free time. It has no idea what the client is actually booking.
| Not included | What to do instead |
|---|---|
| Point of sale / till / cash drawer | Bookafy takes payment or a deposit at booking. The counter is a separate system. |
| Retail and product stock | Not tracked. Use a POS or a spreadsheet. |
| Loyalty points and packages | No punch cards, no prepaid blocks of appointments. |
| Commission and payroll for techs | Not calculated. Bookafy manages bookable hours, not pay. |
| Walk-in queue management | Bookafy is for booked appointments. A walk-in queue board is a different tool. |
Plenty of salons buy a full salon suite for all of the above and are happy. If you already have a till you like and your actual pain is the phone ringing during a manicure and a full set that no-showed on Saturday, that is a scheduling problem and this is the cheaper fix.
Yes. Every tech has their own calendar, service list and hours. A client books their person, or takes first-available if they do not mind.
Yes, and this is the main reason to use real scheduling software rather than a link. Each service carries its own duration, so a full set only ever appears in a slot long enough to hold it.
Yes, through Stripe or Authorize.net. Deposits are the standard answer to no-shows on long, expensive sets. Take the deposit at booking and apply it to the ticket.
Yes. Add a buffer to any service and the calendar stops offering the next slot until the buffer has passed.
No. Bookafy books appointments and takes payment at booking. It is not a point-of-sale system and it does not track polish stock.
There is a Free plan at $0, but it is one user only and has no SMS reminders or calendar sync. A salon with more than one tech needs a paid plan.
Bookafy has a free plan and a free trial of the paid plans — no credit card to start. Start your free trial or see pricing.
If you are still working out which tool you need, start with the overview: appointment scheduling software — what it does, what it costs, and when you should buy something else.
Also useful: every Bookafy integration, in three honest lists — what is native, what needs Zapier, and what we simply do not do. And the pricing page, where the feature matrix is the real answer to “is that on the free plan”.
