The Lushera Solo user guide

Signing up

1. Go to the Lushera sign-up page and create your account with your name, email and a strong password.
2. Confirm your email if prompted, then sign in.

Lushera Solo runs in your web browser - nothing to install. It works on your laptop, desk computer or tablet.

Turn on two-factor authentication

For security, go to Settings > Security and switch on two-factor authentication (2FA). From then on, signing in asks for a six-digit code from your authenticator app as well as your password.

Fill in your profile

Go to Settings and complete your business profile: your name or trading name, your address or area, phone, working hours and your logo. Your hours and logo feed your booking page and your price list.

The first time you sign in, Lushera asks a one-time question: how do you work? Choose chair renter - this is Lushera Solo. Lushera sets itself up for one person: your own single diary, your own client book, online booking on, and no staff, rota or wages sections to wade through.

If you later decide you want more of the full salon tools, you can turn individual modules on in Settings > Modules.

Add your services

A service is whatever you offer - a cut, a full head colour, a set of extensions, a sunbed session, a treatment.

1. Go to Services.
2. Add each service with a name, category, price, duration and any buffer minutes (your tidy-up or setting time).
3. Tick requires patch test on colour services - this powers your booking safety guard.
4. Mark a service inactive if you stop offering it, rather than deleting it, so your history stays intact.

Set your working hours

Your availability comes from your working hours in Settings minus your existing bookings, so your booking page never offers a slot you cannot make. Set the days and times you work and Lushera does the rest - there is no rota to manage, because it is just you.

If you pay rent for your chair or space, Lushera Solo keeps it in your numbers for you.

1. Go to Settings and find the chair-rent card.
2. Enter your rent amount and how often you pay it - weekly or monthly.
3. Lushera creates a recurring expense automatically, so your rent lands in your money records on schedule without you re-entering it. It shows up in your expenses and your tax-year summary.

Don't pay chair rent? If you work from home or are fully mobile with no chair rent, tick "I don't pay chair rent" so Lushera doesn't create an empty expense. You can add it later if that changes.

If you change your rent amount later, update it in the same place and Lushera keeps the recurring expense in step.

Open Calendar for your diary. Because it is just you, it shows a single column and opens on the week view by default.

Making a booking

1. Click an empty slot (or New booking).
2. Choose the client (search existing, or quick-add a new one).
3. Add one or more services - a cut and a colour on one appointment sum their prices and durations. Override an item where you need to.
4. Save. The booking runs booked > confirmed > completed, or no-show / cancelled.

Lushera catches a clash before it happens, so you never double-book yourself.

The patch-test guard

If you book a service marked requires patch test for a client with no patch-test date, or one older than your validity setting, Lushera warns you at booking time. It is a prompt to check, not a block - your call.

Walk-ins - two taps

For a quick walk-in, use the walk-ins view: tap the services and you are done - no client details needed, and the takings count instantly. A mistake undoes in one tap. Your daily total rolls up as you go. The same quick cash / card / other chips as the completion dialog are there too, if you want your end-of-day takings split to be exact.

Online requests

If your booking page is set to request-to-book, new online bookings arrive for you to confirm or decline, with a count on your home screen so you don't miss one.

Completing a booking

Mark a booking completed once you have seen the client - this writes the takings straight into Money as your income. Mark no-show or cancelled as appropriate; these feed the client's no-show count and your reports.

As you complete, a compact "How was it paid?" row offers Cash / Card / Other chips and an optional tip box. Both are always skippable - an unrecorded payment never blocks completion; it simply shows honestly as "unrecorded" in your takings-by-payment view (section 7). If the client holds a package, pick it here and the covered services are paid from it (section 8). Recorded something wrong? Open the completed booking and fix the payment or tip whenever you notice.

Open Clients for your client book. Everything about a client sits on one card.

Client records

• Contact details, birthday, free notes and marketing consent.
• Visit history built automatically from their bookings.
• A no-show count.
• Marketing consent and SMS opt-out toggles that govern who your campaigns reach.

Switching from another system

Bring your client book with you in one file:

• Export your clients from your old system (or spreadsheet) as a CSV - most systems have an "export clients" or "download as CSV" option.
• In Lushera, open Clients and press Import CSV. Columns like name, phone, email, notes and birthday are recognised automatically, whatever they are called - up to 5,000 rows per file.
• Anyone already in your client book (matched by phone or email) is skipped, never overwritten or merged - a duplicate in the file can never damage an existing record.
• When the import finishes you get a plain summary: how many came in, how many were skipped as duplicates or unusable, and any warnings (an odd date, an email with a typo) - nothing disappears silently.
• Marketing consent is never imported. Consent has to be given to you by the client, so imported clients start opted out - they can opt in through your booking page.

Colour-formula records

Add dated colour-formula records to a client's card - exactly what you mixed and when - so you never have to remember a client's colour from scratch.

Patch tests

Record a client's patch-test date on their card to feed the booking guard (section 5). Set the validity period in Settings so the guard knows when a test has expired.

Consent forms with e-signature

Capture signed consent and keep it on the client's record.

• Templates: a sensible default patch-test consent is provided, and you can add consultation or custom forms from Settings. Merge fields fill in your business name, the client and the date automatically. Review the template wording with your insurer - the default is an example, not legal advice.
• Sign at the chair: from the client's Consent card, choose the form and hand your tablet or phone over - the client reads it, draws their signature and types their name.
• Or send a signing link: a one-off link (share it by copy, WhatsApp or email) lets the client sign on their own phone before they even come in. It expires after 14 days and stops working the moment it has been used; send a fresh one any time in one tap.
• The wording is frozen at signing. Editing a template later never changes what a client already agreed to - each record keeps the exact text they saw, the timestamp and their drawn signature. That is the point: a clear, timestamped record of what was agreed.
• Patch-test tie-in: signing a patch-test consent form also updates the client's patch-test date, so the booking guard trusts it with no re-typing.
• Consent records are included in a client's GDPR export (with the signature image) and removed by a GDPR delete.

GDPR tools

• Export a client's data on request.
• Delete a client's data - Lushera removes the personal details and leaves anonymised booking stubs, so your money figures stay intact.

See the Data Processing Addendum for how Lushera handles this data.

Open Money for your takings and outgoings, ready for your accountant.

Income

Your income is captured automatically:

• Completed bookings post their takings as your income.
• Walk-ins count instantly.
• Tips recorded at completion post as their own income category (section 5), so your service takings stay clean and your tax-year summary shows tips on their own line.
• Package sales post on the day the client pays (section 8).
• Add manual entries for anything else (off-app work, and so on).

Because you are the whole business, every completed booking is straightforwardly your income - there is no commission split or wage run to think about. A tip is your money too; recording it just keeps it honest and separate from your service prices.

Takings by payment

The "Today's takings by payment" card on Money splits the day's takings into cash / card / other / unrecorded - the cash / card / other chips at completion feed it (section 5). The unrecorded column is honest: it is whatever you didn't tag, not a rounding trick. Tag as much or as little as you like; nothing ever blocks completing a client.

Expenses

Record categorised expenses - chair rent, products, insurance, training, travel, equipment, marketing and more. Your chair rent posts itself from the recurring template you set in section 4. Set up other recurring templates for anything regular.

Reports

• A month-by-month profit-and-loss view and category breakdowns.
• A UK tax-year summary (6 April to 5 April) - your income, your expenses (including chair rent) and your profit, laid out the way your accountant expects.
• CSV export to hand straight to your accountant.
• VAT figures if you are VAT-registered and turn the VAT toggle on in Settings.

A price list in one click

One click turns your live service menu into a branded price-list PDF - your logo, your categories, your prices - ready to print or send. Look for the price list action on the Services page.

Sell ten sessions or two hundred sunbed minutes up front, and let Lushera count them down as the client visits.

Setting up your packages

1. Go to Services and find the Packages card.
2. Add each package with a name, price, and its kind:
   • Sessions - a pack of visits (ten blow-dries, six gel sets). Each covered service on a visit uses one session.
   • Minutes - a bundle of time (200 sunbed minutes), counted down by each covered service's duration.
3. Optionally limit the package to certain services (leave it open for "any service") and give it a validity in months.
4. Once a client holds a package it cannot be deleted - deactivate it instead, so your sold history stays explicable.

Selling and redeeming

Sell from the client's record: pick the package, take the money and tag it cash / card / other. The client's active packages, and what is left on each, show on their record. The income posts on the day the client pays - it appears in that day's takings and gets its own line in your tax-year summary.

When a package holder's booking completes, choose their package in the completion dialog (section 5):

• Covered services are paid from the package; anything it does not cover is charged normally.
• Never double-counted: services paid from a package post no new income - the money was taken at the sale. A tip on a fully-redeemed visit still records normally.
• Reopening a completed booking hands the redeemed sessions or minutes back.
• When a package's validity date passes, it expires automatically - with an honest record of what lapsed unused.

You get a clean public page that is properly yours - clients pick a service and book a real slot straight into your diary.

Set it up

1. Go to Settings > Online booking.
2. Set your page slug (the web address), the services shown, and whether the page is instant-book or request-to-book.
3. Set your booking rules: slot size, lead time and cancellation window.

Because it is just you, the page skips the "choose your stylist" step entirely - clients go straight from picking a service to picking a time. Availability comes from your working hours and existing bookings, so you are never double-booked.

Personalise it

The page carries your logo and accent colour, plus a find-us footer: a map link, tap-to-call phone, and your Instagram, Facebook or website links.

The offers opt-in

The booking form can show an optional, never pre-ticked "hear about offers and news" checkbox, so your marketing list is built with consent.

Share, embed and QR

All self-serve from Settings > Online booking:

• Share the link anywhere - your bio, posts, Google profile.
• Copy-paste an embed snippet into any website builder to put booking on your own site - no developer needed.
• Download a QR code to print for your station, your window or your price list.

The cancellation waitlist

When a client's chosen day is full, your booking page offers to add them to the waitlist instead of turning them away - they leave their name and a phone number or email. You can add someone yourself too, from the Waitlist button on the calendar toolbar (with a date range and the services they want).

When a booking on a wanted day is cancelled:

1. Lushera first re-checks the time is genuinely free - a slot that was instantly rebooked notifies nobody.
2. The longest-waiting matches are messaged - by text where you have texting on and the client can receive one, otherwise by email - with a link to your booking page. Nobody is messaged twice about the same day.
3. First come, first served - the slot is never held. Holding slots would let one person ghost your diary by "reserving" every freed time and booking none of them, so the message says plainly: book now. When a waiting client books, their waitlist entry ticks over automatically, and entries whose dates pass expire on their own.

The whole feature switches on and off in Settings, under Booking rules. These are service messages to people who asked to be told, not marketing.

Confirmations and reminders

Online bookings get an email and text confirmation, then a reminder the day before (section 11).

Deposits (Stripe) - Coming soon

Card deposits are built and ready, and go live once our Stripe go-live is complete. Until then, deposits are not taken on real cards. When it is on:

• You connect your own Stripe account from Settings > Deposits (a standard Stripe account that you own, with its own Stripe dashboard - the setup walks you through creating one if you don't have it). Deposits settle directly to your account and Stripe pays them out to your bank; Lushera never holds your clients' money.
• Set your deposit policy: off, a fixed amount, or a percentage, with optional per-service overrides (a bigger deposit on colour, none on a quick trim).
• Timing is safe by design. For request-to-book, a deposit is an authorisation hold when the request is made; the money only moves when you confirm. Decline and the hold is released - nothing moved, nothing to refund. For instant-book, the deposit is taken at booking.
• A deposit is part-payment of the service, never an extra fee: the booking shows the deposit paid and completion shows the balance due.
• Refunds are real Stripe refunds and take a few days to appear. A retained deposit on a no-show or late cancellation is never auto-refunded - you choose to keep or refund it.
• What it costs. Stripe takes its normal card-processing fee from each deposit it collects - about 1.5% plus 20p for a UK card at the time of writing, see Stripe's pricing - before the money reaches your balance, so a £10 deposit lands as £9.65. Lushera adds nothing, and your plan price never changes with deposits. A hold you release costs nothing at all; a deposit you refund does not get Stripe's fee back.

The manage-my-booking link

Every confirmation and reminder (email and text) carries a secure manage-my-booking link. From it, a client can:

• see their appointment summary and your phone number;
• cancel or reschedule - but only while they are outside your cancellation window. Inside the window, the page asks them to call you (your number is shown).

Rescheduling re-checks your availability and re-arms the reminder. A cancel outside the window frees the slot and lets you know.

Lushera keeps in touch for you, so you don't have to chase.

Automatic reminders

1. Go to Settings > SMS / Reminders.
2. Choose the reminder channel: email, text, or both.
3. Optionally turn on booking confirmations the moment a slot is taken.
4. Edit the text templates here using the merge fields {salon} (your business name), {client}, {service}, {date}, {time} and {link} for the manage link. Email wording lives in its own card, Settings > Email wording and signature - see below.

Reminders go out the day before, on their own, straight from your diary.

Your email wording and signature

Every email Lushera sends to your clients - booking confirmations, request-received notes, reschedule confirmations, the day-before reminder, review requests and waitlist notices - carries your own wording and signature inside Lushera's email layout. Your logo sits at the top, the appointment details sit in the middle, and the fixed footer says the email was sent by Lushera for your business.

1. Go to Settings > Email wording and signature.
2. Pick the email you want to change from the chips at the top. The line under the chips says when that email goes out.
3. Edit the subject and the message. The message is the paragraph above the appointment details; the details themselves (date, time, services, price, deposit and the buttons) are added for you. Use the merge fields - {salon} (your business name), {client}, {service}, {date}, {time}, {stylist} (your public name) and {link} - by clicking a chip; it lands where your cursor is.
4. Put {link} in the message if you want the button there - "Reschedule or cancel this booking" on booking emails, "Leave a review" on review requests. Leave it out and the button sits under the details.
5. Write your signature once and it goes under every client email, campaigns included. Plain text; line breaks are kept and web addresses become links. Your phone number, address and the social links from your booking page are added automatically when they are filled in. Add an image (PNG or JPG) if you like - it is scaled down for you.
6. Press Preview to see the email with a sample client and booking, then Save email wording. Send me a test emails the saved wording to your own login address.

• Plain text only. Lushera refuses < and > so a stray tag can never break the layout or trip a spam filter.
• Leave a field blank to go back to Lushera's standard wording for that email, or press Restore default to reset the whole email. Nothing changes until you press Save.
• Your logo at the top of every email comes from Settings > Your branding. The accent colour follows your online booking page.
• Until you write an email-specific message for review requests, the review email keeps using the message from the Review requests card, exactly as before.
• Confirming, declining or cancelling a booking from your diary does not email the client yet (a text confirmation goes out when confirmations are on).

Texts: two ways to send, side by side

Lushera can text your clients two ways. Automatic texts are set up in Settings > SMS text reminders; you can change the route later.

Buying and using credits

1. In Settings > SMS text reminders choose Lushera text credits - nothing to set up, 6p a text and save. Lushera suggests a sender name made from your business name; you can change it - up to 11 letters and numbers, no spaces.
2. Under Text credits, pick a pack. You are taken to a secure Stripe page to pay by card and brought straight back to Settings with your new balance.
3. Turn on reminders (and confirmations if you want them). Each text uses one credit per 160 characters; a reminder with its short manage link is normally one part, and a long list of services can make it two.
4. Undelivered texts are credited back automatically. Credits don't expire and aren't refundable.
5. When you have fewer than 20 credits left, the app shows a banner so you can top up before reminders stop going out. If the balance runs out, Lushera emails the reminder instead where the client has an email address, and sends the text once you top up.

Campaigns and text credits. Campaign texts go out from a reply number so clients can text STOP. Before sending, the campaign screen tells you how many credits the whole audience needs against your balance, and refuses to send a campaign it can't complete - nothing is ever half-sent. If your server shows "Campaign texts aren't available on this server yet (reply number not set)", reminders and confirmations still work; campaigns by text switch on when the reply number is added.

Bringing your own gateway is still supported: connect your own Twilio account in Settings and texts bill to you there. Texts sent from a number - Twilio or campaign texts - carry an opt-out line, and a client who replies STOP is unsubscribed automatically; you can also toggle a client's opt-out on their record. A console / test mode logs texts instead of sending, so you can try everything with no spend.

Marketing campaigns - consent-first

Open Marketing to send offers, birthday messages and "we miss you" win-backs - only to clients who have opted in.

1. Create a campaign and choose the channel: Email, Text or Both.
2. Pick your audience: everyone opted-in, "not seen in the last N months", or "birthdays this month" - with a live recipient count before you send.
3. Write the subject and body with the merge-field legend, and a 160-character counter for texts.
4. Preview and send a test to yourself.
5. Send now or schedule for later. Sends run in the background and resume safely if interrupted.

Compliance is built in (UK PECR and GDPR):

• Email audience = opted-in clients with an email; text audience = opted-in clients with a phone who have not opted out of texts.
• Unsubscribe is mandatory and one-click - every email carries an unsubscribe link, every text the STOP line. Opting out is permanent and re-checked at send time.
• You see sent, failed and unsubscribed counts per campaign.

Honest limits: no open/click tracking in v1 (counts only), bulk email is most reliable through a proper email service, and per-text cost is borne by your gateway.

Client comms

If you need to move or cancel an appointment (you're off sick, say), the comms tools help you message the affected client quickly with the right details filled in. These are service messages to someone with a booking, separate from marketing.

Open Insights for the numbers behind your diary. Every derived metric carries its honest footnote on the card, and until you have a few weeks of bookings you see a friendly "not enough history yet" rather than made-up numbers.

• Rebooking rate - of your completed visits, the share followed by another booking from the same client within 90 days. Visits too recent to judge fairly are excluded and counted separately.
• Client retention - of the clients you saw six months to a year ago, how many have been back in the last six months - plus new clients per month.
• Average ticket - the service value of a completed visit, overall and month by month. Tips are excluded - they are yours either way, but they are not the ticket.
• How busy you really are - your booked time against your working hours, month by month. It is just you, so this is measured against the hours you set in Settings, not a rota.
• The quiet map - a weekday-by-hour grid of your bookings, so "Tuesday afternoons are dead" stops being a hunch and becomes something you can price or plan around.
• No-show trends by month, and your top clients by value over the last year.
• Campaign takings - what each campaign's recipients went on to spend within 30 days of the send, labelled indicative - those clients may have booked anyway, and the card says so.

If you use the device-lock (section 14), Insights sits behind your PIN alongside Money - it is your commercial data.

Lushera has a device-lock feature so your money, Insights and settings screens can sit behind a quick PIN when you leave your laptop or tablet unattended at your station.

• Set a personal 4 to 6 digit PIN in Settings > Security.
• Enable device-lock and your private screens ask for the PIN; it relocks itself after a set number of minutes, or the moment you tap Lock now or close the tab.
• Forgotten PIN? Your password is the reset: sign in normally and set a new one in Settings.

Lushera keeps showing what it already has if your connection drops, so you can still see your day at a glance. Actions that need the server wait until you're back online (billing actions never queue), and things catch up when the connection returns.

If your subscription ends, the app moves to read-only (see section 16) - a different situation, but the same calm behaviour: you can still see and export everything.

Your plan

Lushera Solo is a lighter single-operator subscription, billed monthly or annually. The prices in force are those shown on our website and at checkout.

Cancelling - your data is never deleted

You can cancel any time to stop future renewals and keep full access to the end of the paid period. When your subscription ends, your account becomes read-only - and your data is not deleted. You can still sign in, view everything and export your diary, clients and money records (CSV). We keep the read-only account for at least 12 months at no charge; you can ask us to delete it sooner, and we complete a deletion within 30 days. Re-subscribing within that window restores full access.

See the EULA (sections 4 and 5) for the full cancellation and retention terms, and the Data Processing Addendum for how your data is handled.

My booking page is empty / has no slots.

Check your working hours in Settings - availability comes from your hours minus your bookings. Also check your booking rules (lead time, slot size). If you have just turned online booking on, make sure your services are marked visible.

My chair rent isn't showing in my expenses (or shows the wrong amount).

Check the chair-rent card in Settings - the amount and frequency there drive the recurring expense. If you don't pay rent, tick "I don't pay chair rent" so no empty expense is created. Update the amount in the same place if your rent changes.

The patch-test warning appeared when I didn't expect it.

The client has no patch-test date, or it's older than your validity setting. Add or update the date on the client card, or proceed if you've checked.

A text reminder didn't send.

Check Settings > SMS: is your Twilio account connected, or is it in console/test mode (which only logs)? If you use text credits, check the balance - when it runs out, Lushera emails the reminder instead where the client has an email address, and sends the text once you top up.

A client asked to be removed / to see their data.

Use the export and delete tools on the client card (section 6). Deleting leaves anonymised booking stubs so your figures stay intact.

I recorded the wrong payment method or tip on a completed booking.

Open the booking and correct it - it is your business, so you can fix it whenever you notice (section 5).

A waitlisted client says the slot was gone when they tapped the link.

That is the design working honestly: the slot is never held - first come, first served. Holding slots would let anyone block your diary with ghost reservations.

Can I sell a package on my booking page?

Not yet - packages are sold in person. Online package sales need live card payments, which arrive with our Stripe go-live. The booking page does show a "Packages available in salon" note.

Can I take a card deposit yet?

Not on real cards until our Stripe go-live - deposits are marked Coming soon. The rest of the booking flow works today.

Does Lushera do my tax return?

No - it's reporting to make your return easier, not an accountant, and it doesn't file with HMRC. Your tax-year summary and CSV are made to hand to your accountant.

I chose "chair renter" but want some of the fuller tools.

Turn individual modules on in Settings > Modules.

How do I get help?

Email support@lushera.co.uk.