Every other setting covered on this blog -- buffer time, booking intervals, payment policy, who can be assigned to what -- sits on top of your services list. Get the services themselves wrong at the start, and every one of those other settings ends up compensating for it instead of working the way it's meant to. Worth getting right first, before layering anything else on top.
Duration: what you'd actually block out, not just the task itself
The number you enter isn't "how long the core task takes" -- it's "how long this client genuinely occupies the slot," which is often longer than the task alone. A 30-minute haircut that realistically needs a few minutes either side for consultation and settling the client in isn't a 30-minute service -- it's closer to 40, and entering 30 just means the next booking starts before the previous one's actually finished in practice.
This is a different thing from buffer time (covered in an earlier post) -- buffer is extra protected time around a correctly-sized service; duration itself should already reflect the real, honest length of the service before any buffer is added on top. Getting duration right first makes buffer time an accurate safety margin instead of a patch covering for an underestimated service.
Pricing: decide the structure before the number
Before typing in a price, it's worth deciding what kind of price it actually is, because that decision affects other settings down the line:
- A fixed-price service (a standard haircut, a set treatment) is the simple case -- one number, done.
- A service where the final price depends on something (hair length, add-ons, consultation outcome) is harder to represent as one number. The common approach is pricing it at a reasonable baseline and handling genuine variation at the point of service, rather than trying to model every combination as a separate bookable service -- a service list with thirty near-identical variants is harder for a client to choose from than it is helpful.
Whichever you pick, this number is also what a deposit is calculated from if you use percentage-based deposits (covered in the payment policy post) -- get the price right first, since fixing it later changes every deposit calculated from it going forward, not just future ones.
One service, or several similar ones?
A genuinely common mistake: treating "the same service but different durations for different situations" as one service with a long duration, when it should be two services. If a first-time client realistically needs a longer appointment than a returning one for the exact same thing, that's not a buffer-time problem -- it's two different services that happen to look similar, each with its own correctly-sized duration (and, if it applies, pricing). Clients booking the shorter, faster-turnaround version shouldn't be stuck seeing only slots sized for the longer one.
Why this is worth getting right before anything else
Every setting downstream of your services list -- buffer time, the booking interval, who's assigned to what, whether a deposit makes sense -- works correctly only when the services underneath them are already accurate. Getting duration and pricing honestly right at the start means the rest of the setup (covered across most of this blog) actually does what it's meant to, instead of each setting separately working around a services list that was never quite right to begin with.
If you're setting up for the first time: start here, get it right, then move on to hours, buffer time, and payment policy -- in that order, not the reverse.