Salon analytics: how to read your reports and act on them

Salon analytics is less about collecting more numbers and more about reading the reports you already have at the right moment, then doing something with what they show. This guide walks through the reports inside Altegio – where each one lives, how it counts, and which decision it supports – and ends with a simple way to turn a number into a 30-day test.

Altegio is built for appointment-based businesses – beauty, wellness, clinics, auto, fitness – so the same reports work well beyond the salon. The examples here use a salon.

Key takeaways

Point	Details
Start with Main Dashboard	Sales, Attendance and Occupancy sit on one screen, each compared with the previous period of the same length.
Know the counting rule	Visit-based reports count Arrived appointments only. The Financial report and Profit & Loss add up income and expenses, so their totals differ.
“Lost” is your definition	The lost-client period is a setting. Set it to match how often your clients normally come back.
Every number has names behind it	Client metric cards open the list of clients behind the figure – the list you call or message today.
Know the gaps	There are no scheduled report emails, no rebooking metric, no UTM report and no COGS line in the P&L. Plan a workaround for each.

Where salon analytics lives in Altegio

Altegio fills its reports from the work the team already does. Appointments, sales and cash operations become report data as the day goes on, with nothing to import or type in at closing time. Most reports sit under Analytics > Analytical Reports, the finance reports live in the Finance section and the stock reports open from Inventory > Analytical Reports. Every report takes a date range, and most add filters down to one team member, one service or one Location.

The catalogue is grouped by the question it answers:

Revenue: Sales by Team, Team Performance Over Time, Sales by Services, Sales by Clients.
Workload: Main Dashboard, Team Occupancy, Client Retention.
Appointments: the Appointments report, plus the Events report for group events.
Finance: Financial report, Profit & Loss, the daily cash desk report.
Inventory: Sales Analysis, Consumable Usage Analysis, Write-off Analysis, Inventory balance, Product Orders.
Team and marketing: HR report, Promotions Effectiveness, Messages (with the notification module connected).
Chain: Summary Report, Breakdown by Locations, Breakdown by Days, Breakdown by Parameters, Revenue Plans and more.

Access is granted per team member. Without the analytics permission, a team member sees neither the reports nor the section that holds them, so the front desk keeps the calendar while revenue figures stay with the owner. The full list, with what each report shows, is on the statistics and analytics page.

Main Dashboard: the five-minute daily read

Open Analytical Reports > Main Dashboard first. It puts three blocks on one screen, and each figure carries an arrow with the percentage change against the previous period of the same length.

Sales: total revenue split into services and products, plus average visit cost, average service cost and average product cost. Prepayments – memberships, gift cards and account top-ups – are not included.
Attendance: unique clients, visits, appointments created, and new, returning and lost clients.
Occupancy: completed appointments (Arrived), incomplete ones (Pending and Confirmed), cancelled ones, and average occupancy – the duration of Arrived appointments divided by the team’s working time.

The client cards carry a View clients link that opens the list of clients behind the number. That is the difference between knowing a dozen clients have lapsed and having a dozen names to contact this afternoon. Filters for period, team member and position let you narrow the whole dashboard to one person before a one-to-one.

A number on the dashboard is a signal, not a diagnosis. Use it to pick the next report:

What you see	Open next	A possible action
Occupancy down on last period	Team Occupancy, per team member	Move breaks, rebalance shifts, call clients from the waiting list.
Cancelled appointments up	Reports > Appointments, filtered by status	Review the confirmation request and reminder, or add a deposit.
Lost clients up	View clients on the Lost card	A repeat-visit invitation or a bulk SMS or push to that list.
Average visit cost down	Team Performance Over Time, Sales by Services	Coach recommendations at the chair, check which services sell.
Products share down	Inventory > Sales Analysis	Check stock of the lines that sell and how they are offered.

Counting rules: why two reports disagree

Every metric has a counting rule. Read them once and most “the numbers don’t match” conversations disappear.

Visit-based reports count Arrived appointments. Main Dashboard, Sales by Team and Sales by Clients read appointments with the Arrived status, not payments received. A visit that happened but was never marked Arrived is missing from them, so marking visits is a daily job rather than admin tidying.
Finance reports count money. The Financial report and Profit & Loss add up income and expenses. They will not match a visit-based total, and neither is wrong: they answer different questions.
Clients need a phone number. Arrived visits without a phone number are not counted as clients in the new, returning and lost metrics.
Returning ignores the lost setting. Returning clients are those on a second or later visit in the period, however long ago the earlier visit was.
Cancelled includes No-show. On Main Dashboard, Cancelled combines manual cancellations and No-show appointments. To separate the two, use Reports > Appointments with the visit status filter.

Worked example: average visit cost. Main Dashboard calculates it as (service revenue + product revenue) ÷ (visits with clients + appointments without clients + product sales). Take a week with €5,400 in services, €600 in products, 100 visits with clients and 10 product-only sales: €6,000 ÷ 110 = €54.55. If those ten counter sales brought €150 of the product revenue, the same week without them would read €5,850 ÷ 100 = €58.50. A dip in average visit cost during a strong retail week is not bad news.

Worked example: occupancy. Three stylists working 40 hours each give 120 working hours. With 78 hours of Arrived appointments, occupancy is 78 ÷ 120 = 65%. If a receptionist with 40 scheduled hours is still in the statistics, the same week reads 78 ÷ 160 = 49%. Untick Statistics > Include team member in occupancy statistics in that team member’s settings and the figure is right again.

Weekly: team and appointment reports

Once a week, before the team meeting, open four team reports:

Team Occupancy – how booked each team member actually was over the period.
Sales by Team – what each team member earned in the period.
Team Performance Over Time – one team member month by month: services and amounts, appointments, average bill, products sold.
Client Retention – whether the clients who saw a team member came back.

Read Sales by Team and Team Occupancy side by side. One tells you who earned more, the other whether the difference is simply hours booked. A team member with a full diary and a low average bill needs a different conversation from one with a strong average bill and gaps in the day. Payroll itself is calculated in the payroll module, not in analytics.

Reports > Appointments lists every appointment, deleted ones included. It filters by creation date, visit date, team member, client, service and appointment category, by status and payment status, and by source – online or offline – with the user who created each appointment. Use it to count no-shows and cancellations instead of guessing, and to see what share of appointments came in online.

Monthly: new, returning and lost clients

Before you read the client numbers, set the lost-client period (Client Churn in the analytics settings). Make it longer than the usual gap between visits for your main services: a barbershop on short cycles and a colour-led salon will choose different periods. Client Retention follows the setting.

Then work the list, not the figure:

Open View clients on the Lost card on Main Dashboard. These are the people to win back.
Switch on the repeat-visit invitation, with the interval set per service, and the invitation after a no-show or cancellation. Both are automatic notifications.
For a one-off campaign, use Clients > All Clients > Bulk actions to send SMS or messenger messages through a provider connected from the Integrations Hub, or push to your branded app or Altegio.me. Bulk messaging is switched on by Support. Altegio has no bulk email, so an email newsletter needs a third-party email service. Opt-outs are set manually in the client card.
Open Sales by Clients for revenue and visits per client in the period. Your biggest spenders are the natural first members of a loyalty program.
Judge promotions with Promotions Effectiveness: it shows how many new clients a promotion brought and how many of them came back. The second visit matters more than the first.

Each client’s card and visit history sit in the client base, so the win-back list and the context for each call are in one place.

Monthly: services, retail and stock

Sales by Services shows which services are in demand and which bring more revenue, with consumables cost, payroll and profit per service. Those figures are only as good as the setup behind them: link consumables to services through bills of materials and enter product cost prices, and the write-off happens automatically with each service. A popular service with a thin profit is a candidate for a price review or a shorter duration.

The stock reports under Inventory > Analytical Reports answer the retail questions:

Sales Analysis – what sold, in what quantity, over the period.
Consumable Usage Analysis – what the work consumed, so a service cost is not a guess.
Write-off Analysis – what left the shelf without being sold.
Inventory balance – what is on the shelf now, per Location.
Product Orders – what is ordered and what is on the way.

Altegio does not reorder automatically or send low-stock alerts. Set critical and optimal stock levels for the lines you sell most, and check the balance before you place an order. More on the stock side is on the inventory control page.

Closing the month: Financial report and Profit & Loss

Three finance reports cover the day, the month and the year:

Daily cash desk report – generated automatically for each day, covering cash encashment and transfers. Reconcile it while the team that worked the shift is still there; the end-of-day reconciliation checklist shows how.
Financial report – all income and expenses for the period you set. This is the report to reconcile a month against.
Profit & Loss – income and expenses month by month across the year, with several months compared.

Two settings make these reports closer to reality. Enter the acquiring fee per payment method or card brand in Payment methods and fees, and card fees are written off automatically as the Acquiring fee expense item. Keep the income and expense items tidy: there are 12 default items and you can add your own, as described in the salon chart of accounts guide.

The P&L has no separate cost-of-goods line; for the cost of what a service consumes, read Sales by Services. There is no cash-flow forecast and no sync with accounting software. Financial transactions export to Excel, which is the file your accountant will ask for. The ledger behind these reports is described on the finances and accounting page.

Several Locations: chain reports

A Chain gets its own report set that compares Locations on the same rules:

Summary Report – consolidated key metrics for the Chain.
Breakdown by Locations – Locations compared on revenue, average bill, occupancy and client activity.
Breakdown by Days – the same metrics date by date, enough to tell a seasonal dip from a bad week.
Breakdown by Parameters – one metric across all Locations, dates as columns.
Revenue Plans – a monthly plan per Location, read against total revenue and the percentage completed.

Read them in sequence: Breakdown by Locations ranks the Locations, then Breakdown by Days on the weakest one shows which days are costing it. Statistics use one currency, set by the main Location of the Chain, and the Chain average bill counts only visits and product sales that carry a phone number.

Turning a report into a 30-day test

Reading a report is not the same as acting on it. Keep each test small: pick one number, change one thing, measure for a full month, then keep the change or drop it.

Days 1–30: no-shows. Take last month’s no-shows from Reports > Appointments as the baseline. Then change one thing. Altegio sends one reminder per appointment, 1–24 hours before, so for two touches pair a confirmation request 24 hours ahead with a reminder 2 hours ahead. Alternatively, ask for a deposit through a payment policy; deposits work with any payment provider connected in your region, while the card guarantee works only with Adyen in EU countries. Altegio’s help centre cites 30–40% fewer no-shows once SMS or push reminders are switched on, but your own before-and-after is the number that counts.

Days 31–60: lost clients. Open the Lost list from View clients and note who is on it. Tune the repeat-visit invitation interval for your main services and send one bulk SMS or push to the list. Next month, compare returning clients and Client Retention with the baseline. If the message carried an offer, Promotions Effectiveness shows how many of those clients came back a second time.

Stylist working a conditioning treatment through a seated client’s wet hair

Days 61–90: average bill. Team Performance Over Time shows the average bill and products sold for each team member. Test one recommendation – a conditioning treatment with a colour appointment, or a home-care product at the desk – and watch average visit cost and the products share on Main Dashboard. Check profit per service in Sales by Services as well, so a discount does not buy revenue at a loss. Cross-selling and upselling in a salon has ideas for what to offer.

Tip: Change one variable at a time. If a new reminder pattern and a deposit start in the same week, you will not know which one moved the number.

Four measurement mistakes to avoid:

Ignoring seasonality. Main Dashboard compares with the previous period of the same length, so December against November is not a fair test. Open the same month last year as a second comparison.
Measuring revenue without margin. A busy week with heavy discounts can look good on the top line and poor in Sales by Services.
Forgetting the counting rule. A week when the team did not mark visits Arrived will look like a drop that never happened.
Calling it after a week. Clients on longer service cycles have not had time to come back yet. Give each test the full month.

What Altegio analytics does not do, and the workaround

Knowing the limits saves you from looking for a report that isn’t there.

You want	In Altegio	Workaround
Reports sent to your inbox on a schedule	No scheduled report emails	Open Main Dashboard yourself, or check the Analytics tab in the mobile app.
A rebooking rate	No rebooking metric	Read Client Retention per team member and returning clients.
The marketing channel behind each appointment	Source split online/offline only, no UTM report	Add Google Analytics and Meta Pixel identifiers in the online booking widget settings.
MRR or ARPU	No native report	Work on exported data or in a BI tool.
A cost-of-goods line in the P&L	Not in the P&L	Consumables cost per service in Sales by Services.
A cash-flow forecast	Not available	Export financial transactions to Excel for your accountant.
Your own dashboards	No built-in BI connector	Power BI via Smart-Metrika in the Integrations Hub, or an integration with API access.

For channel tracking, connecting Google Tag Manager to the booking form is covered in 11 ways to use Google Tag Manager in Altegio online booking.

Smartphone and stacks of blank cards on a marble table beside a vase of flowers

The Altegio Business Management mobile app has an Analytics tab with end-of-day, daily and period reports and tappable charts. Treat it as an operational view: it is not a financial report, does not reflect actual cash flow and may not match the daily report.

Clean data before you trust the numbers

Reports fail most often because the data going in is messy, not because the software is wrong. Two weeks of setup fixes most of it.

Week 1: the inputs

Mark every completed visit Arrived, and every missed one No-show, on the same day.
Make sure client cards carry phone numbers, or those visits will not count as clients.
Merge duplicate client cards. There is no automatic merge, so do it by hand; a client who appears twice inflates new clients and distorts retention.
Tidy the service list. “Colour”, “Colour service” and “Col” are three lines in every report; merge them into one.
Exclude administrators and other team members without services from occupancy statistics.

Week 2: the rules

Set the lost-client period.
Enter acquiring fees per payment method.
Link consumables to services and enter product cost prices.
Grant analytics permissions per team member in Team > Team members list > Access.
Write down this month’s Main Dashboard figures. That is your baseline for the first test.

A sense check helps: if a report shows a figure you know is wrong – retention close to 100%, say – look at the inputs before you celebrate. To see these reports on your own numbers, start a 7-day free trial and run a normal week; the reports fill from the appointments you take.

FAQ

Which report should a salon owner open first each day?

Main Dashboard. It shows sales, attendance and occupancy on one screen, compares each figure with the previous period of the same length, and links the client numbers to the actual client lists.

Why does Main Dashboard revenue differ from the Financial report?

They count different things. Main Dashboard and other visit-based reports count appointments with the Arrived status and leave out prepayments such as memberships and gift cards. The Financial report adds up income and expenses. Pick the report by the question you are asking.

Can Altegio email reports to me automatically?

No, there are no scheduled report emails. Open the reports in the web version, use the Analytics tab in the mobile app for a quick operational view, or export a report to Excel when you need a file.

How do I see which marketing channel brought an appointment?

Inside Altegio, the Appointments report separates online from offline appointments. For channels, add your Google Analytics and Meta Pixel identifiers in the online booking widget settings and read the results there.

What are the four types of analytics?

Descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (why it happened), predictive (what is likely to happen) and prescriptive (what to do about it). Ready-made reports in Altegio cover the first two. Predictive work is something you do on exported data or in a BI tool connected through the Integrations Hub.

Can I hide revenue figures from the front desk?

Yes. Analytics permissions are granted per team member. Without the permission, a team member does not see the reports or the section that holds them.