For Hairdressers and Barbers: Cash Chair, Card Reader, and the Occasional Invoice

A salon day looks nothing like an accountant’s spreadsheet. Walk-ins pay in cash or tap a card. Regulars rebook on the way out. Maybe ten times a year someone special walks in — a wedding party, a film shoot’s hair stylist, a modeling agency booking three models for a campaign — and they hand you a business card and say “send the invoice to accounts@.”

Suddenly the chair stops being a chair and you’re a B2B supplier. Once a month, maybe twice.

Meet Rūta

Rūta runs a two-chair salon in Šiauliai. She and one colleague handle around 25 clients a day between them, most paying cash or by card on the spot. That side of the business runs on a card terminal and a notebook — no invoice needed.

But there’s the other side. A local photo studio sends her two campaigns a month for hair styling on set, billed at €120 per session. The municipal theatre books her for premiere week — eight actors, one invoice. And every June a wedding agency reserves her chair on Saturdays for bridal parties, billed per bride.

Three or four invoices a month. Not enough to justify a full accounting suite, more than enough to make Excel feel ridiculous.

The Real Billing Reality

The cash-and-card side mostly takes care of itself — the terminal cuts a daily report and that goes to the accountant at month-end. The invoiced side has its own quirks:

• Each B2B client has different requirements. The photo studio wants the campaign name in the invoice line. The theatre wants production code. The wedding agency wants the bride’s name and date. All three want a proper VAT invoice with their company details, sent before the 10th of the next month so their own accountant is happy.
• The supplies pile up. Hair colour, bleach, foils, capes, gloves, the new clippers — these are deductible expenses, but only if the PDF invoice from the supplier actually lands in the right folder, not in a forgotten Gmail thread.
• Rent for the chair is its own line. Whether the salon is rented or you sublet a chair from another owner, that monthly invoice from the landlord needs to be archived and tagged.

The shape of the work is small but recurring: a few outgoing invoices, a steady drip of incoming supplier ones.

How Haiku Fits a Salon’s Books

Three pieces of Haiku carry most of the load:

• One-off invoice in under a minute for the photo studio, theatre, or wedding agency — customer details save once and Haiku reuses them next month. The line items adjust per shoot. How to create an invoice.
• Send from your own Gmail so the accounts inbox at the agency sees “Rūta’s Salon” not a no-reply, and your sent folder is the audit trail when someone three months later asks “did we ever pay for the November shoot?” Set up Gmail for invoice sending.
• Forward supplier PDFs to expenses — when the hair-supply distributor or the landlord emails their monthly PDF, drop it into Haiku and the totals, dates, and VAT are extracted into your expenses log. At year-end the deductibles are already itemised. Track expenses automatically.

Whether the chair is in a high-street salon, a barbershop, or rented inside a larger studio — the workflow is the same: walk-ins stay on the terminal, the handful of B2B invoices each month live in Haiku, supplier PDFs land there automatically.

When It’s Not the Right Fit

If every customer pays at the chair and you’ve never issued a paper invoice in your life, you don’t need this — your card terminal already does enough. The moment a corporate client appears, that changes.

Getting Started in 3 Steps

1. Sign up free at haiku.lt and connect Gmail — 500 invoices in the free plan covers many years for a salon-scale business.
2. Issue your next B2B invoice through Haiku — the wedding agency, the studio, whoever is up next. Save their company details so the second invoice is twenty seconds.
3. Forward this month’s supplier PDFs to the expenses inbox. Hair-colour brand, clippers, rent — the totals show up itemised, ready for the accountant.

From “Where Did I Save That Invoice?” to a Folder That Files Itself

Sign up free at haiku.lt and put one B2B client through it this week.

Questions? Email dalius.dobravolskas@gmail.com.