The close is the control
Every open day ends with three numbers that have to agree: what the booking system says was sold, what the card terminal batched, and what is in the drawer. When they tie, the month-end is nearly done before it starts. When nobody checks, small gaps compound quietly until year-end arrives with a revenue figure no one can defend and an HST return built on guesswork.
Our End-to-End Accounting engagement, bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof, is built around that close. We set up the close sheet, the deposit habit and the reconciliation rhythm in QuickBooks Online, receipts flow in through Dext, and each month closes against days that already proved themselves.
App payouts arrive net; the ledger needs gross
Booksy, Fresha and Square Appointments run the front of most nail salons now, and all of them pay out in lump sums with booking fees and card processing already deducted. Record only what lands in the bank and three things go wrong at once: revenue is understated, the fee cost disappears instead of being managed, and the HST return is short, because 13% is owed on the full price the client paid, not on the after-fee deposit.
We book service revenue gross, show app and processing charges as their own expense lines, and reconcile every payout back to the appointments inside it. A booking paid in advance sits as a liability until the client is actually in the chair. The fee percentage those apps take becomes a number the statements report every month rather than a leak nobody measures.
Where each payment lands
Five kinds of money move through a nail salon in a single day, and each one reaches the bank by a different road.
| Payment | How it arrives | How the books treat it |
|---|---|---|
| Card on the salon terminal | Next-day batch, net of processing | Gross sale plus a fee expense, never the net |
| Prepaid through the booking app | Payout on the app's cycle, fees deducted | Liability until the service date, then revenue, tied to the payout |
| Cash in the drawer | Only when someone deposits it | Counted daily, deposited intact, matched to the close sheet |
| E-transfer for a mobile appointment | Straight into the account with no label | Tagged to its appointment the day it lands |
| Tip added on the terminal | Inside the card batch | Not salon revenue: a liability owed to the tech |
Cash is not a problem; unrecorded cash is. The drawer gets counted at close, the count goes on the sheet next to the system total, and the deposit goes to the bank intact. Paying the polish distributor or the window cleaner out of the till breaks the tie-out and makes honest sales look incomplete. A salon that deposits what it counts has records that hold up if the CRA ever compares bank deposits to reported revenue.
Supplies burn at the table, retail sits on the shelf
The polish wall clients buy from is inventory, counted and carried until it sells. The gel, monomer, tips and single-use files consumed at the table are supplies, expensed as the seal breaks. Ontario's personal-service-settings rules push salons toward single-use files and buffers, which makes supply burn a genuine per-service cost rather than a rounding error, and blending it into one product account hides both the shelf's margin and the table's cost. We keep the pools apart; what one full set truly costs in minutes, product and fees gets its own treatment on our fractional CFO page.
Payroll, tips and the smallest salons
Techs on payroll get proper T4 treatment on a fixed cycle, card tips pass through the close as money owed to them rather than shop income, and a family member working the desk runs through payroll like any other employee. How tips land on slips, and why the CRA pays attention to them, gets full depth on our tax services page.
Every service dollar and every bottle sold also counts toward the $30,000 small-supplier threshold, which a steady book of appointments crosses sooner than most owners expect; timing that registration well is Tax Planning & Advisory work. A solo tech renting a single table may not need monthly books yet: CPA Quick Support at $99 a month keeps a CPA on call for the questions in between. Everything larger is scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, from our Mississauga office.
