Salon Inventory Management: A Practical Guide for Owners
Most owners ignore stock until a colour shade runs out halfway through an appointment. Someone rushes to the supplier, the gap is filled, and nobody thinks about it again until next month.
Good salon inventory management isn't complicated. It comes down to six habits, done consistently.
1. Split your stock into two kinds
A salon holds two very different types of stock. Treating them the same way causes most of the confusion.
| Retail stock | Backbar (consumable) stock | |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | Take-home shampoo, serums, styling products | Colour, developer, wash shampoo, wax, cotton, foils |
| Leaves the shelf | One whole unit, when sold | A few ml or grams at a time, during services |
| Measured in | Pieces | ml, grams, sheets |
| Question it answers | What did we sell? | What did each service cost us? |
Keep them in separate lists. Your retail count tells you about sales; your backbar count tells you about margin.
2. Set a reorder level for every product
A reorder level is the point at which you buy more, well before you run out. Work it out like this:
Reorder level = what you use per week × weeks the supplier takes to deliver + a small safety buffer.
If you use four tubes of a colour shade a week and the supplier takes a week, a reorder level of six gives you breathing room. Low-stock alerts should fire at that number, not at zero.
3. Record every purchase properly
Every delivery should be recorded with the supplier, bill number, quantity and cost price. This does three things: your stock count goes up correctly, your cost per unit stays current when supplier prices change, and you can see what you still owe each supplier.
4. Track what each service uses
This is the step that separates salons that know their margins from salons that guess. Write down once how much product each service uses (a wash might use 12 ml of shampoo, a root colour 60 g of colour and 90 ml of developer), then deduct it every time the service is billed. We walk through the maths in what your salon actually spends on backbar.
5. Count physically once a month
No system is perfect. Spills, heavy-handed mixing, free samples and occasionally theft all open a gap between the records and the shelf. A monthly count finds that gap while it is still small.
- Pick a quiet hour at the start of the month.
- Count backbar products first; they move fastest.
- Compare with the expected quantity.
- Look at the value of the difference, not only the quantity. A missing tube of colour matters more than a missing box of cotton.
- Correct the records and note the reason.
6. Watch three numbers
- Backbar cost as a % of service revenue. Watch your own trend rather than someone else's benchmark.
- Stock-count variance: the value lost each month.
- Dead stock: retail items that haven't sold in 90 days. Bundle them, discount them, or stop ordering them.
Common inventory mistakes
- Only tracking retail, because it is easier.
- Buying in bulk to get a discount, then watching products expire.
- Letting stylists take stock from the store room without recording it.
- Counting once a year, when the gap is too large to explain.
Doing it without spreadsheets
Salonipy keeps retail and backbar in separate tabs, sends low-stock alerts, records purchases with supplier balances, deducts products automatically using service recipes, and has a stock audit screen that shows the value of any shortage. Every movement is saved with a date in the stock history. See the inventory features.
Related: Backbar cost per service · Hair salon software · Salon accounting