A salon owner we know runs a four-chair lash studio in Leeds. She charges £55 for a full set. Her overheads — the lash trays, the under-eye pads, the rent of the chair, the two hours of her time — come to about £24. Her margin on a full set is around £31.
When somebody books and doesn’t show up, she loses all of that. Not just the £31 margin — she’s also paid for the chair-time she could have sold to someone else. Her real cost of a no-show is closer to £55: the slot, the opportunity, the gone-cold consumables she set out for an appointment that didn’t happen.
Now look at our pricing. Covered Beauty’s Solo plan is £9 a month. Her Salon plan would be £19. Either way, one recovered no-show pays for four to six months of software.
“The deposit pays for the software.”
That’s the line we keep returning to. Most salon-software conversations get stuck on “is it worth £19 a month?” and the answer almost always is — because no-shows are everywhere in this industry. Trade-body figures put the UK beauty no-show rate at around 25%. SMS reminders alone drop that to about 10%. Card-on-file fees drop it further.
We built the no-show charge flow to be one click. You mark the appointment as no-show, click Charge card on file, pick a reason, and Stripe takes the fee from the card the client consented to at booking. No phone calls. No awkward emails. No chasing.
We also made the consent piece airtight. The client ticks a box at booking that says they authorise the salon to charge the card on file for no-show fees, late-cancellation fees, or the balance of treatment, in line with the salon’s published terms. Stripe handles the off-session-payment compliance. The salon never sees a card number. The audit trail is written down.
The result: a salon that recovers one no-show a month is up on the software. Most salons recover two or three. Our maths and theirs is the same.