Documentation

The calendar is the centre of the product. A booking is a client, one or more services, a staff member per service, and a time — and Avita only offers times that satisfy all four at once, so double-bookings are prevented rather than reported.

• Multi-service visits — several services in one appointment, each with its own stylist and duration, stacked into a single visit.
• Availability — working hours per staff member per location, with time off and breaks removed from bookable time.
• Booking rules — minimum lead time, how far ahead clients may book, whether they can cancel themselves and until when, and a cancellation policy window with an optional fee.
• Waitlist — clients who want a slot that isn’t there yet, including flexible-date requests you can fill when someone cancels.
• Resources — rooms, chairs, or equipment a service needs, so two colour services don’t claim the same bowl.

Your salon gets its own Stripe account and remains the merchant of record — money moves from the client straight to your own bank account. Card payments carry processing costs, as they do on any platform; the salon software itself is free.

• In the salon — a Stripe Terminal card reader paired to the front-desk iPad handles tap, chip, and contactless wallets.
• Online — deposits at booking, card-on-file for no-show protection, and client-portal payments.
• Tips — presets you configure, chosen by the client before the card is presented, and attributed to the right stylist for payroll.
• Refunds and disputes — full or partial refunds from the order, with stock, commissions, loyalty points, and gift-card balances all reversed in step.
• Cash — a cash drawer with open and close counts for salons that take it.

Three different ways to take money before the service happens, each suited to a different habit.

• Memberships — recurring billing on a schedule you set, with included benefits, an optional setup fee, minimum commitment, and pausing. Clients manage their own membership from the portal.
• Packages — a block of prepaid visits, optionally restricted to certain services or certain days and times, with an expiry.
• Gift cards — sold at the register or online, redeemable against any sale, with the remaining balance tracked per card.

One record per person: contact details, every past and upcoming visit, payment history, notes, photos, intake forms, allergies and accommodations, preferred stylists, and their loyalty standing.

Clients can have their own login for the booking site, where they see their upcoming appointments, memberships, packages, gift-card balances, and forms waiting to be filled in. Anything they change there is the same record your staff sees.

Campaigns go to audiences you define — clients who haven’t visited in ninety days, everyone who booked a colour service this year, members only. Behavioural triggers fire automatically on events like a first visit, a birthday, or a lapse, so the routine messages send themselves.

Email sends are authenticated from your salon’s name; text messages go only to clients who explicitly opted in, with STOP honoured automatically. Loyalty and referral programmes are managed from the same area.

Daily takings, service and retail mix, staff performance, membership and package liability, and the year-end figures your accountant asks for. Commission structures are configured per stylist — flat percentage, tiered by revenue, or different rates for service and retail — and pay periods calculate from the sales already recorded.

Avita imports from Boulevard, Mindbody, Vagaro, Square, and plain CSV files. The order below is the one that causes the fewest surprises.

1. 1

   Export from your current system

   Every major salon platform can produce a client export; most can also export appointment history and your service menu. Take everything they'll give you — it's easier to ignore a column than to go back for it after you've cancelled.

2. 2

   Import clients first

   Names, contact details, and visit history come across before anything else. Duplicate detection runs on email and phone so a client who appears twice in the old system lands once in the new one.

3. 3

   Rebuild the menu, then check the prices

   Service menus import, but this is the moment most salons discover prices they meant to raise two years ago. Review before going live rather than after.

4. 4

   Run both for a week

   Keep the old calendar readable while you book new appointments in Avita. A week of overlap costs almost nothing and turns cutover day into an ordinary day.

5. 5

   Move the booking link last

   Point your website, Instagram, and Google listing at the new booking page only once the menu and staff hours are right — that link is where your clients live.

Staff are invited by email and given a role. Roles carry a permission set — the front desk can ring up a sale without seeing payroll, a stylist can see their own numbers without seeing the salon’s, and a manager can be given a location without being given the business. Every meaningful action is written to an audit log with who did it and when.

Multi-location salons can scope a staff member to one branch or several, and reporting rolls up or splits by location.

Try the training guides for step-by-step walkthroughs, the developer reference if you’re integrating something, or email support@avita.salon.