Closing the month in a salon: a 20-minute checklist

On the third of the month you sit down to settle up. You open the notebook with hours, the calendar with appointments and the spreadsheet with commissions. The matching begins: who worked how much, who is owed what, what came out of it all.

An hour later it turns out that one person put down a shift until ten in the evening, and another says she left at eight. The calendar says the last appointment finished at half past seven. Somebody made a mistake and nobody knows who, because nobody approved it at the time.

Then the accountant calls asking about the hours summary. You send the spreadsheet. Two days later she calls again, because something in the spreadsheet has changed since she got it.

Where the mess comes from

Not from laziness and not from the lack of a system. From three things that paper cannot solve.

Hours are written down after the fact. An employee notes on Friday what they remember from Tuesday. They are not lying — they simply do not remember. Without confirmation on the day something happened, every number is just somebody's version.

Nobody approves anything at the moment of entry. Recording and acceptance happen together, at the end of the month, at one table. By then it is too late to establish facts: what is left is a negotiation.

The numbers change after they are sent. You correct one cell because you found an error, and the spreadsheet at the accountant's stops being the same spreadsheet. Nobody knows which version is true — and the settlement with an employee rests on exactly that.

The effect is always the same: the first week of the month goes on an activity that does not earn, and it ends in a conversation where both sides are right.

How it works in Kepili

Instead of counting at the end, you spread it across the whole month.

Through the month: hours settle themselves

The employee reports their hours, and the supervisor approves them or corrects them with a comment — as you go, not on the third of the following month. An argument about Tuesday is settled on Wednesday, while both sides still remember.

The app also watches for something paper loses: overlapping entries are caught immediately, instead of coming out at settlement time.

At the end: fifteen minutes and a close

When the month ends, you already have approved hours. What is left is:

1. Check there are no pending hours. The panel shows the number of entries awaiting approval. If it is zero, the rest is ready.
2. Review the overtime. Counted separately, visible at once.
3. Look at the pay summary. Hourly rates and commissions calculated for each person. Commission is counted as a percentage of revenue from the appointments served, so you retype nothing from the calendar.
4. Close the month. One click.
5. Send the export to the accountant. A CSV file with hours per person and day.

Why closing matters more than it seems

After closing, the settled hours and reports for that period are protected from accidental change. That means the summary you sent your accountant is the same summary a week later. No more asking which version is current.

If you run several salons, there is one more thing: each location closes independently. The salon across town does not wait for the main one to finish its paperwork.

The 20-minute checklist

To print out or to remember:

• Zero hours waiting for approval
• Overtime reviewed and matching what you remember
• Pay summary checked for every person
• Costs for the month entered — rent, energy, materials
• Stock levels match the shelf
• Month closed
• Export sent to the accountant

The first four points are work you do anyway. The difference is that you do them once, in fifteen minutes, instead of spreading them over a week of phone calls and corrections.

What changes after six months

When closed months start lining up one after another, you get something a spreadsheet will not give you: comparison. Revenue month on month, how full the schedule was, results per person, the share of fixed costs in turnover.

That is the moment when settling stops being an obligation and starts being information. You see that November always dips, that one service sells twice as well as you thought, and that material costs are rising faster than revenue.

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Closing the month does not have to take a week. It only has to happen throughout the month, not at the end.

Create an account and use the full Business plan for 30 days — no limits, no complicated contract and no card. Your first close comes after a month of working in the app.