Wait Time Rules

Breakdown of Wait Time Rules

Unless the salon turns on this feature, call ahead tickets are not part of the wait time calculation. Once a call ahead ticket has been marked as “Here” or “Late”, then it will. (This is important: There is no difference between selecting “Here” or “Late” as far as wait time calculation is concerned).

The wait time calculation can be further modified based on employee schedules. In the case of schedules, if the wait time is 30 minutes because there no employees to service a customer, if an employee was scheduled to come in 10 minutes from now, it would reduce the wait time by 20 minutes (to 10).

The wait time number can be padded to accommodate your salon. If you notice that your employees have a service time above what the defaults are set to, it’s possible to inflate the end number artificially as opposed to reworking the values for every employee. This is done by using the Wait Time Tuner% option.

On top of being paddable, the wait time number can also be given a “starting value” in the form of the default time. This is usually set as a basic haircut service time when used. The wait time calculation will start from this value (so if it is set for 20min, then instead of seeing 0 when you click on the sales tab with one employee clocked in and zero tickets, 20min will be displayed) if it is higher than 0.

While the wait time number itself is stored as a single value in the database, it is treated dynamically by the code. The value from tickets in waiting is static, while in servicing, this value will slowly move down until it reaches 0 reducing the total wait time for the salon as it does so. This initial value is equal to the service time.

The wait time system is employee wide. This means that it does not take into account requests for specific employees when handling the calculations. That being said, by clicking on the wait time bar on the sales tab, it is possible to bring up a chart that will show a breakdown of the tickets based on who they requested to service them. This visual aid should not be used in place of the actual wait time calculation system. It is there purely as a tool to help facilitate understanding of the system.. It is not a definitive guide to “how it should be”.

Using statements made previously as a reference, the wait time system will always attempt to match the ticket highest in the wait time queue with an available employee (regardless of if that customer requested a different one). This means that employee availability directly affects the total wait time experienced by the salon. If there is an employee available to perform a service, the wait time for the next ticket in the queue will not be calculated as long as there is an employee to possibly take it, but the one after it will be.

If there are no available employees to take the ticket, then all tickets in waiting will have their time calculated. To provide a quick example, if there are two employees clocked in and both of them are performing a 20min service, then the wait time for the system will read as 20. If another ticket is added into waiting, the wait time will still read 20-(Service time). If a fourth ticket is added, then the wait time will become 40-(service time).

There is one notable exception to this. If there is one employee working and one ticket in waiting with none in servicing, the wait time is always calculated for that one ticket. Salons with 0 employees clocked in but a single ticket in waiting do not have this ticket calculate.

Examples by Description and Value

All provided examples assume that call ahead default time is set to 0 and none of the options that grant padding are used or the factor in schedules/appointments option. If these options are enabled on your system, then you will need to adjust the values accordingly based on the explanations above.

All tickets are assumed to be using a haircut service with a 20min wait time). These examples are meant to provide supplemental knowledge on how the system works. For that reason, they may not cover every scenario, but enough of them were chosen to provide an overall picture.