Salon Booking System

The client

The Beauty Room by Nilu is a hair and bridal salon with a medical aesthetic clinic, in Ratnapura. The salon and the clinic share one business but offer very different services, from bridal styling and colour to facials and laser treatments under a doctor’s supervision.

The problem

• Double bookings. Appointments came in by phone and WhatsApp and were written in a book. In the wedding season, the same stylist could be booked twice for the same morning.
• Unknown treatment costs. Products are bought by the litre or the box but used a few millilitres at a time, and import prices change often. Nobody could see what a treatment actually cost to deliver.
• Rescheduling by phone. Moving a client meant calling until someone answered.
• Consent on paper. Clinic treatments need the client’s recorded consent.

What we built

Two parts that share one database: the public site, where clients book, and a management system for the staff.

• The public site has separate salon and clinic sections, each with its own look. Booking takes seven steps: salon or clinic, category, treatment, specialist, a time from the live availability, a phone number confirmed with a one-time SMS code, and a booking reference.
• The management system covers bookings, treatments, specialists, stock, suppliers, purchasing, treatment recipes, costing, analytics and reports.

How it works

• Double bookings are impossible. Each booking is stored as a time range for one specialist, and PostgreSQL refuses any booking that overlaps one already held for the same person, using an exclusion constraint. If two people pick the same slot at the same moment, the second is told it has just gone and is offered other times.
• Real availability. The times offered take account of opening hours, staff rosters, existing bookings and the notice each treatment needs.
• Stock kept as a ledger. Stock levels change only through database functions for purchases, use and stocktakes, and every change is recorded. Each purchase updates the product’s weighted average cost.
• The cost of each treatment. Every treatment has a recipe: the products and quantities it uses, with variants such as short or long hair. The system adds the recipe cost, the specialist’s time and a share of overheads to show the margin on each treatment, and updates it when a purchase changes a product’s cost.
• Rescheduling by link. Staff send the client a single-use link on WhatsApp. The client accepts the new time, asks for another or cancels, and the salon is told on Telegram.
• Messages. Confirmations and reminders go out by SMS through Sri Lankan gateways and by email. Replies of STOP are honoured.
• Consent recorded. For clinic treatments, the client types their name as a signature, and the system stores it with the version of the consent form and the booking it belongs to.
• Staff access protected. The management system needs an approved email address and a code from an authenticator app, and every action checks access again on the server. Booking and SMS codes are rate limited, and codes are stored only as hashes and expire after five minutes.
• The site stays up. Price and treatment changes reach the public site within seconds. If the database cannot be reached, the public pages fall back to a built-in copy of the treatment list.

Where it stands

The site and the management system are live at thebeautyroom.lk.