Salon software with payroll calculates each stylist's commission as the appointment closes — tiered rates, different splits for service and retail, and tips routed to the right person — so that payday is a report you read rather than a spreadsheet you build.
If you currently reconcile commission by exporting sales, pasting them into a spreadsheet, applying each stylist's rate by hand, and then arguing with someone about retail on the 16th, this article is about removing that entire ritual.
Before software, get clear on which one you're actually running, because most salons run a mix and describe it as one thing.
Booth rent. The stylist pays you a fixed amount for the chair and keeps their revenue. Simple to calculate, harder to grow — you have limited say over pricing, hours, or client experience.
Commission. The stylist takes a percentage of what they bill. You control pricing and standards, and you carry more of the risk.
Hybrid. A base plus commission, or booth rent plus a retail percentage, or commission that steps up once someone clears a revenue threshold.
Hybrid is the most common and the least well-supported by software. If you're running one, be specific about it when you're evaluating platforms, because "we support commission" usually means one flat percentage.
Tiered structures are the standard way to reward productivity, and the standard reason payroll takes three hours.
Say a stylist earns 40% up to $3,000 in monthly service revenue, 45% from $3,000 to $5,000, and 50% above $5,000. They bill $6,200 this month.
Now check what your current software does with that. Many platforms apply a single rate to the whole total — $6,200 at 50% would be $3,100, and you've overpaid by $400 on one stylist in one month. Others apply the lowest rate throughout and underpay, which you'll hear about.
Whether the tiers are calculated marginally or as a flat lookup is the single most important question to ask, and almost nobody asks it during a demo.
Retail is usually a different percentage — often much lower — and it's the most common source of payroll disputes, because the sale happens in the same transaction as the service.
Your software needs to split a single ticket into its service and retail components, apply different rates to each, and show the stylist the breakdown. If a stylist can't see why their number is what it is, you will spend your Mondays explaining it.
Tips need to route to the right person, appear in their earnings record, and be reportable.
That last part is not optional. Tips are taxable income and employers have specific reporting obligations — the IRS guidance on tip income sets out employee reporting and employer withholding responsibilities, and it's worth an actual read rather than an assumption. Software that tracks tips but produces nothing you can hand to a payroll provider has solved the easy half.
Also decide, before you configure anything, whether tips are pooled or individual. Changing it later is a conversation, not a setting.
Here is the distinction most vendors blur, and we're not going to.
Commission tracking means calculating what each person earned: rates, tiers, splits, tips, adjustments. That is what Mako does, and it does it continuously — every closed appointment updates the number, so on payday you open a report rather than build one.
Payroll processing means filing and paying taxes, handling withholding, producing W-2s or the local equivalent, and staying current with employment law in your jurisdiction. That is a regulated function and Mako does not do it. You still need a payroll provider.
What you should expect from software is that the handoff is clean: accurate per-person earnings, exportable in a format your payroll provider accepts, without manual re-entry.
Any platform claiming to be an all-in-one that replaces your payroll provider entirely is either a licensed payroll processor — in which case they'll say so, prominently, because it's expensive to become one — or they're describing commission tracking and hoping you don't notice the difference.
If you found this looking for commission tracking generally rather than salon software specifically, the same requirements apply and the same failure modes exist. Marginal versus flat tier calculation, split rates across product categories, and a clean export to whoever runs your payroll.
Mako's commission management works for any business paying people a percentage of what they bill — it's used across salons, spas, wellness practices and field service. It isn't salon-specific software with commission bolted on.
Commission rules are set per person: flat, tiered, or split by service and retail category. Every closed appointment applies them immediately. Staff see their own earnings in real time, which removes most of the questions before they get asked.
Because commission is calculated against actual revenue rather than a monthly export, it also flows into profitability — you can see what a stylist earned and what the chair contributed after their pay, which is a different and more useful number than either one alone.
Details on the commission management feature, and pricing starts at $39/month with no contract.
