How to Set Up Your Salon Roster for the Christmas Rush
Part 1 of Spring Sorted: the 8-week series on getting your salon Christmas ready.
It is September. Your December is still mostly empty, and that is exactly why this is the week to sort your salon roster.
Here is the part that catches people out every year. A December booking can only land in an hour somebody has actually said they are working. If the roster says your senior colourist finishes at 4pm on a Thursday, then 4pm on a Thursday is where the bookings stop, no matter how much demand is knocking. The calendar is not being difficult. It is just telling the truth about what you told it.
So the first job of the season is not marketing. It is making sure the hours you are actually going to work are the hours your calendar and your online booking page know about. That is about ten minutes of work in Advanced Rostering, and it is built into Simple Salon and ready to switch on.
Why Christmas is won in spring
Think about how your December actually fills. It does not arrive all at once in a rush at the end of November. It fills in a slow trickle from about now, one client at a time, mostly in the quiet moments when someone remembers they have a work party on the 12th and thinks, I should book that.
Every one of those moments hits your calendar and asks the same question: what have you got? If the answer is a roster you set back in February, the good December slots quietly are not there to be booked. You do not lose those bookings loudly. You just never see them.
Then late November comes, you realise you need the extra trading hours after all, and you spend a week on the phone shuffling people who have already booked. Everyone in the salon has lived that week. It is entirely avoidable, and the thing that avoids it is a roster set in spring.
What Advanced Rostering does for your salon roster
Advanced Rostering is the part of Simple Salon that holds your team's real working hours: who works when, who is away, and what changes for the busy weeks. Two things make it worth the ten minutes.
Patterns, leave and extended trading in one place
Each operator gets a regular weekly pattern, so you set it once rather than week by week. On top of that you add the exceptions: annual leave, rostered days off, and the later finishes or extra days you are opening in December. Because the pattern and the exceptions live together, you can look at one screen in September and see the shape of your whole summer.
Your online booking mirrors real availability automatically
This is the part that saves the December week. Your online booking page does not keep its own separate idea of who is available. It reads the roster. Add Thursday late nights for December and those slots appear online the moment you save. Book somebody's leave and those days stop being offered, so nobody can book a client in with a stylist who is at the beach.
No double handling, no second calendar to remember, and no awkward phone call apologising for a booking that should never have been possible.
Setting up your salon roster, step by step
Three steps. Put the kettle on, it will not take long.
- Set each operator's regular weekly pattern. Start with the normal weeks, the hours each person works when nothing unusual is happening. This is the backbone, and once it is in you never set it again unless somebody's days change.
- Add annual leave, RDOs and December extended trading. Now the exceptions. Get the leave in first, because that is the one that hurts if you forget it. Then add the extra hours: the late nights, the extra Sunday, whatever you are opening for the run to Christmas. Those extra slots have to exist before anyone can book them.
- Check the calendar shows exactly when each operator can be booked. Open your calendar and look at a week in December. The bookable time you see is the bookable time your clients see. If something looks wrong here, it is wrong online too, and it is much easier to fix now than in eight weeks.
The full walkthrough with screenshots is in our help centre: Setting up your Roster with Advanced Rostering.
One thing worth doing before you change anybody's hours: talk to your team about it first. Depending on the award or agreement that covers your salon there are rules about consulting people before you change a regular roster, and the Fair Work Ombudsman sets out what those obligations look like. It is general information rather than advice about your salon, but it is the right place to start. In practice most teams are glad to be asked in September rather than told in December.
The ten minute spring job that saves a week of December shuffling
It is a small job with an unreasonable payoff. Ten minutes in September buys you the week in late November you would otherwise spend ringing clients to move them, and it buys your team the certainty of knowing their December before December arrives.
It also quietly changes what your salon can say yes to. When the hours are real and online, the client who decides at 9pm on a Tuesday that they need a colour before the work party can book it themselves, in the slot you actually have, without anybody picking up the phone. That is the whole point of doing it now.
Roster first. Everything else this season sits on top of it.
Questions salon owners ask about the Christmas roster
How far ahead should a salon set its Christmas roster?
Late September or early October is the sweet spot. It is far enough ahead that the December slots exist before clients start looking for them, and close enough that your team can tell you their real plans. If you are reading this later than that, do it today anyway. A roster set in November still beats a roster set in December.
Can online booking follow my salon roster automatically?
Yes. Online booking reads your roster rather than keeping its own copy, so anything you change in Advanced Rostering shows up online as soon as you save. Add hours and the slots appear. Book leave and they disappear.
How do I handle staff leave over the holidays?
Put it in the roster as soon as you know about it, even if the dates are still rough. Leave that only lives in someone's head is the single most common cause of the December phone call nobody wants to make. Once it is in the roster those days stop being offered online, so the problem cannot happen.
What is Advanced Rostering in Simple Salon?
It is the rostering side of Simple Salon: weekly patterns for each operator, leave and RDOs, and extended or changed trading hours, all feeding the one calendar that your online booking reads from. It is built in and ready to switch on.
The Spring Sorted series
Eight weeks, one simple step at a time, until your salon walks into December completely handled.
- Part 1: How to Set Up Your Salon Roster for the Christmas Rush (you are here)
A new part lands every Monday until 9 November.
Sort your roster this week
Already with Simple Salon? Switch it on today. Open Advanced Rostering, set your patterns, add the leave and the December hours, and let your online booking catch up automatically. The step by step guide is here.
Not with us yet? Rostering, online booking and the calendar are one system rather than three, so you set your hours once and everything else follows. Start your free trial and set your roster on day one. See what it costs, or have a look at what else is built in.