What a nail studio price list should say

A nail studio diary goes wrong in a specific way. The day looks fine at 9am, and by 2pm you are forty minutes behind with a client waiting and a set that still needs curing. Almost always, the cause is upstream: the price list told the booking system something that was not quite true about time.

Here is what to fix, in the order that hurts most.

Removals are a service, not a courtesy

This is the single biggest one. A soak-off is fifteen to twenty-five minutes of real work, and if a client arrives with someone else's set on, that time has to come from somewhere. If it is not in the booking, it comes out of your lunch or the next client's slot.

Make it bookable and make it visible: a "Gel removal" or "Removal from another salon" entry the client adds to their appointment. You are not charging for the privilege of fixing things — you are describing what will happen so the diary is honest. Set it up under Services with its own duration.

The same logic applies to repairs and single-nail fixes.

Split anything whose duration is really two services

"Gel manicure" is not one thing. A fresh set on natural nails, a set with tips, and an infill on your own two-week-old work are three different lengths of afternoon.

If they share one entry, you are averaging — which means half your bookings run over and the other half leave you sitting idle. Split them:

• New set
• Infill / rebalance
• Removal
• Nail art, priced by complexity or by nail

A price list with six honest entries beats one with three tidy ones. Clients cope with choice; they do not cope with waiting forty minutes past their slot.

Build the cure and clean-down into the buffer, not the service

Two temptations here, and both cause problems. Padding the service duration hides your real capacity and makes you look more expensive per hour than you are. Ignoring the gap entirely means the system stacks appointments nose-to-tail and you never catch up.

The right home for it is a buffer after the service — the time to wipe down, bin the files, sanitise, and reset the station. Ten minutes is usually honest. Working hours covers where buffers live, and Scheduling explains how duration and buffer combine into the slots a client actually sees.

Long sets earn a deposit; a file-and-polish does not

A three-hour full set with extensions that vanishes is most of an afternoon you cannot refill at short notice, and you have already mixed product. That is exactly the case a deposit is for.

A twenty-minute polish change is not. The deposit costs more in friction than the slot is worth.

Bookify sets this per service, so you can protect the long ones and leave everything else free to book — see Payments for how deposits and pay-at-venue sit side by side, and deposits without scaring clients away for how much to ask and how to word it.

Name things the way clients say them

Your booking page is not a treatment menu for technicians. Someone at 11pm searching for you knows they want "gel infills" or "BIAB" or "acrylic removal" — they do not know your internal shorthand, and a name they do not recognise is a booking they do not make.

If a term is genuinely ambiguous, put the plain version in the name and the detail in the description.

What good looks like

A client picks "Gel infill", adds "Removal from another salon", sees a 90-minute slot that is genuinely 90 minutes, pays a deposit because it is a long one, and gets a reminder the day before. You open the diary in the morning and the day it describes is the day you actually have.

If you are setting up from scratch, moving from DMs and a paper diary covers the order to do it in. There is also a walkthrough with a nail studio's own services and prices on the nail studios page, and the neighbouring beauty and spa setup if you offer more than nails.