Bookatu

Salon owners resent commission-based booking platforms and use them anyway, because the alternative is a phone that rings during a colour treatment. Any competitor removing the commission still has to match the thing owners are paying for: a client can book at 9pm without anyone answering.

Booking systems are also unforgiving to build. Availability, staff rosters, service durations, buffer times, multi-service appointments and cancellations all interact, and getting any one wrong produces double bookings, which is the fastest way to lose a salon.

We built the availability engine first and designed around it, rather than designing screens and discovering later that the rules could not support them.

The booking flow assumes a client on a phone who wants an appointment in the next fortnight. Service, then staff member, then time, with availability computed live rather than shown and then rejected at submission. Nothing asks for an account until the booking is confirmed.

On the business side, the interface had to be operable by someone standing at a counter between clients. Large targets, few screens, and the day's schedule as the default view rather than a dashboard of metrics nobody reads.

Bookatu runs as a live platform with the zero-commission model intact, which gives it a position the incumbents cannot match without abandoning their own revenue.

The scheduling logic sits in one place and is tested, so adding a service type or a rostering rule does not risk the bookings already in the system.