Choose a Commission Model
Flat, per-service, booth rent and hybrid: how each is expressed in Perceny, and which fields to set for each one.
Perceny expresses pay through a small number of fields. Almost every real-world arrangement is a combination of them.
The fields
Percentage (left navigation) — each member's commission rate. This is the default rate applied to their tickets.
Business model and Money holder (on the member, or business-wide) — whether this person operates on commission or rents, and who holds the money when a ticket is paid.
Custom commission on a service (service editor → Pricing and Commission) — a rate that applies to that service regardless of the person's default rate.
Override regular commission — whether the service's custom rate replaces the person's rate or stacks with it.
Supply price and Reduce supply price from commission — take the cost of materials off the top before commission is calculated. See Supply price and what it does to commission.
Flat commission
The simplest arrangement: everyone earns the same percentage of everything they sell.
- Set each person's Percentage.
- Leave custom commissions off the services.
Tiered by person
Different people, different rates: juniors at 40%, seniors at 55%.
- Set each person's Percentage individually.
- Still nothing on the services.
Different by service
"We pay 50% on cuts and 35% on colour, because colour eats product."
- Set the custom commission on the colour services.
- Decide whether it overrides the person's rate or applies alongside it.
- Alternatively, leave the rate alone and use supply price to take the product cost off before commission. This is often the fairer version: it scales with the actual cost rather than guessing a rate.
Booth rent
The stylist rents the chair and keeps their takings.
- Set the member's business model and money holder so the money is theirs rather than the shop's.
- Rent is recorded separately. Exclude Booth Rental Earnings (Summary and Statistics) keeps rent out of the earnings calculations if you think of it as a separate ledger.
Hybrid
Most real shops are hybrids: some people on commission, some on rent, some on commission with a rent floor. Because business model and money holder are set per member, one business can hold all of them at once.
Cash
If your stylists keep the cash they collect, turn on Stylist Keep Cash and read Stylist Keeps Cash, explained first. It changes what "commission payout" means for everyone it applies to.
Tips are separate
Tips are not commission. Transfer Tips to Stylists pays each tip out to whoever earned it rather than holding it in the business balance. Tip Distribution and Terminal Tip Distribution decide how a tip splits across a collaboration.
Are Tips Subject to Fees? decides whether card fees come out of tips: when off, tips are paid first and avoid the fee.
Surcharges
If you pass card processing fees to clients, Stylist Share of Online Surcharge and Stylist Share of In-Person Surcharge decide how much of that surcharge is paid to the stylist as commission. Leaving it at zero means the surcharge is purely the business's.
Checking it before you rely on it
Close a test ticket for one person on each arrangement, then open Earnings and the Period Summary and check the numbers by hand. Commission arrangements are easy to describe and easy to mis-enter, and the first pay period is a bad time to discover a mistake.