Rostering App for Salons and Clinics: Staff Hours, Time Off and Approvals

Why a salon roster and its booking calendar should be one thing

In an appointment business every stylist, therapist or practitioner works like a small business inside the business. Each has their own clients, their own services and their own takings, and the hours they're rostered are the hours clients can book them. A separate rostering app means typing those hours in twice and keeping two systems in step.

In Gaplessly they're the same data. Change someone's hours on the Team page and their times on your online booking page change with them. If the new hours would leave booked appointments outside their working time, Gaplessly warns you and asks you to confirm before it saves.

Salon roster hours that match how people really work

Each person has their own hours for each day of the week, and the Team page shows who works which days and which services they do. Beyond a plain Monday to Friday:

• Split shifts: a second window in the same day, for a long lunch or a school pick-up in the middle of the day.
• Repeating rosters: a cycle of 2 to 8 weeks, for every other Saturday or a fortnightly pattern. You set week 1 and the rest of the cycle once, and Gaplessly works out which week today is.
• One-off changes: different hours, or a day off, on a single date without touching the regular roster.
• Services per person: each team member is only offered for the services they do, so a client can't book a colour with someone who only cuts.

Time off and schedule changes, with approval where it matters

Leave, holidays and sick days go in as time away: a first day, a last day and an optional reason. Those dates come off the person’s online availability straight away, and if they clash with existing bookings, Gaplessly shows the clash before you save.

Team members can also ask for a change to their own schedule on a given date, either a day off or different hours. How that request is handled depends on two settings:

• Trust level, set per person. Trusted team members edit their own weekly hours directly. Standard team members send date-specific requests instead.
• The approval window, set once for the business: 7 days by default, anything from 1 to 60. A Standard request for a date further out than that applies on its own. A request inside the window waits for an admin to approve or reject it.

Admins get a notification for each new request, and the team member hears back once it’s decided. The owner keeps the final say on short-notice changes without signing off on every change planned weeks ahead.

One gap for now: a team member requests one date at a time. Leave that runs over several days is entered by an admin, or by someone with the Manage team permission.

Who can see and change what

Everyone with a dashboard login has one of four roles, and the owner can do everything:

• Team member: sees and manages their own bookings, and requests changes to their own schedule.
• Manager: the same view of their own bookings, plus whichever permissions you tick for them.
• Front desk: sees every booking and every client and books for anyone, but never the business settings, billing or the team.
• Admin: everything, including invites, trust levels and approving schedule requests.

Team members and managers can each be given three extra permissions: manage services (including prices and durations), manage the team (profiles, services and working hours) and manage business settings. A separate business-wide setting decides how much of each client’s contact details staff can see.

Each person's takings, visits and no-shows

Reports, By team, shows every team member’s takings, visits and no-shows over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, ranked by revenue. Takings are the booked price of appointments that went ahead, so cancellations and no-shows are left out.

Many salons pay stylists partly on commission, and this is the figure that starts from. Gaplessly doesn’t calculate commission or pay yet; it gives you each person’s number to work from.

What is not built yet: hourly pay, timesheets and payroll

On the appointments side, Gaplessly has no hourly pay rates, award interpretation, timesheets, clock-in or clock-out, shift swaps or payroll. That comes from the order the product is being built in.

Appointment businesses came first because their staff side is mostly about bookable hours: who works when, what they do and what they bring in. Hospitality venues have their own roster now, built for shift work rather than copied from the salon one: shifts by station, hourly rates for labour cost against booked covers, shift offers and swaps, and a timesheet export. Award interpretation and payroll still belong to your payroll software.

Where Deputy and Xero fit, today and later

Today, a business whose staff are paid by the hour, clock in and out, or need hours sent to payroll should run a rostering and payroll tool alongside Gaplessly. Three well-known options, from each company’s own pricing page, checked 2 September 2026:

• Deputy, an Australian company: Lite at $6.75 a user a month, Core at $8.75 and Pro at $13, all AUD, with a $30 a month minimum spend per invoice on the monthly plans (deputy.com/au/pricing).
• When I Work: no free plan. Its Essentials tier starts at US$2.50 per user a month (wheniwork.com/pricing).
• Homebase: its Basic plan is free for up to ten staff at one location, and paid plans start from around US$24 to $30 a month per location. Its site states no country restriction, but confirm it accepts an Australian business first (joinhomebase.com/pricing).

The plan is to connect Gaplessly with Deputy and Xero, so the hours rostered in Gaplessly can flow to timesheets and pay without being typed in again, and a salon can eventually run its whole roster from Gaplessly. Neither integration exists yet, and there is no date for it.

Free staff roster template for Excel

If all you need is the weekly roster, a spreadsheet will do. The free template on this page covers one week for up to 15 staff. Type each shift’s start and finish time and the unpaid break, and it adds up hours per person and per day, counts how many people are on each day, and estimates base wages from an hourly rate.

• Times go in as 24-hour times, such as 9:00 or 17:30. A shift that runs past midnight, say 22:00 to 2:00, is counted correctly.
• A day left blank or typed as OFF counts as zero hours, so the totals keep working.
• Type the Monday the week starts and each day heading shows its date. Save a copy for each new week.

The wage column is hours multiplied by the rate you type. It leaves out penalty rates, casual loading, overtime and super, so check the award that covers your staff before you pay from it.