Every business owner knows a bit about Microsoft Excel. It’s the spreadsheet program most of them use to keep track of the numbers their business generates. But that’s far from all it can be, especially if you’re in the beauty industry.

Here are nine things a salon can do with Excel; some are common to any business, but some are unique and apply directly to the beauty business in exciting ways.

Finance

The most common use of Excel around the world. Record expenses and income, find what you do that generates most of your income and what you pay the most costs. Using Excel to track finances is the start of any effort to improve those numbers and increase your bottom line.

Inventory

Beauty salons go through many different products and tools at different prices. Tracking your inventory through Excel not only allows you to see when something needs to be ordered, but you can also project future orders and thus allow you to budget for larger orders in advance.

trend tracking

When it comes to tracking trends, Excel is only limited by your imagination and how much time you’re willing to spend entering data. At a minimum, you can enter your customers and revenue for a year and get an overview, but you can go much deeper and add details like weather patterns for a specific day, whether or not a relevant event occurred in the city. and who was working that day. The results can tell you a lot about accurately anticipating business.

Planning

You may not use Excel’s advanced math capabilities, but the basic ability to manipulate colored cells that represent 15-minute blocks of time makes Excel an easy and effective way to ensure you have all the employees you need during each session. phase of your day. .

customer records

Keeping records of your customer’s procedures allows you to easily call up a given customer’s favorites when they walk in the door, and doing it in Excel means you can also sort by customer, procedure or product to see which is most popular. in the whole business.

task lists

Every business has things that need to be done in a particular order before they can open their doors and before they can go home for the night. By creating a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists those tasks, you can create a printable chart that can be checked or crossed off at every opening and closing to make sure everything is done perfectly every time.

Tips

Excel can easily track not only how much your hourly workers earn, but also how much tips each worker generates. If you have a policy that involves tip sharing, or just want to know who customers appreciate the most, having that information at your fingertips is extremely helpful.

dating tracking

Similar to using Excel to schedule, using it to keep track of upcoming appointments and (perhaps more importantly) the length of those appointments as they happen can give you an edge over your competition. By seeing not only when a customer came in, but also how long they were there for a particular procedure, you can better estimate in the future how much business you can handle and who might need to work a little faster.

Ingredients

It takes a while to set up, but creating an Excel file that has all of your products and the ingredients in them can allow you to provide a unique and wonderful service to your customers: suggesting products that fit specific needs. For example, if you have a customer who is allergic to oranges, you can Order by orange oil to give your customer an immediate list of products in your store to avoid. That’s the kind of thing that makes an impression strong enough for your client to tell their friends about.

Excel is an amazing tool for the basics like tracking finances and forecasting business trends, but if that’s all you’re using it for, you’re missing out. With a little creativity and a little looking under the hood, Excel can benefit your company in some wonderful and upfront ways.