Products and stock

Inventory is where you keep the things you sell over the counter and the things you use up on clients — shampoo, colour, aftercare, retail bundles. It lives under Inventory → Products, and it’s included from the Growth plan upwards.

Two kinds of product, one list:

Retail — you sell it to clients. It has a price and can be added to a checkout.
Professional use — your backbar. It has no retail price and can never be sold by mistake; you log it as used instead.

A retail product can still be used on clients. The professional-use tick only decides whether it can be sold, so the shampoo you both sell and wash with lives on the list once.

Adding a product

Inventory → Products → Add product. The only thing you must fill in is a name, and a retail price if you’re selling it. Everything else earns its keep later:

Brand and Category help you find things once the list grows.
Supplier is what your reorder list groups by, so fill it in if you buy from more than one place.
Cost price is what you pay. It’s optional and never shown to clients.
Low-stock alert at is the number where JustBook starts telling you to reorder. Leave it empty and that product is never flagged.

Barcodes

Put the barcode from the bottle on the product — Inventory → Products → the product → Barcode — and you can scan instead of search.

The scanner most salons want is the cheap USB or Bluetooth wand that sits by the till. To the computer it’s just a keyboard: click into the barcode box, scan, and the digits appear. Nothing to install, no camera, no permissions. Typing the number by hand works exactly the same, so you can set this up before you own a scanner.

Once codes are on your products, you can scan:

When selling — on a visit or over the counter. Each scan adds one, so scanning the same bottle twice sells two.
When counting stock — see below.

A few things worth knowing:

The same barcode can only be on one of your products. If you scan one that’s already taken, we’ll tell you which product has it — usually a sign you already stock that bottle under another name.
Two different salons can absolutely have the same barcode. It’s the same shampoo.
Scanning something you haven’t set up yet says so rather than failing quietly, so you know to add it.

Correcting one product

Open a product to see how many you have — per branch, if you have more than one, because a bottle is in one room and not the other.

Use Adjust to record what actually happened:

Received stock — a delivery arrived.
Correction (recount) — you counted the shelf and it disagreed with us. Enter the difference, using a negative number if the real count is lower.
Write-off — damaged, expired, or gone missing.

Use Log use to take one off for a client without selling it. You can attribute it to a stylist, which is useful when you’re trying to work out where the colour goes.

Every one of those is kept, with who did it and when, in Stock history on the product. Nothing is ever edited away — a correction is a new line, not a rewrite — so “why does this say 3?” always has an answer.

Selling at checkout

On an appointment, the Products card sits next to Add-ons. Press Sell products, pick what the client is taking, and the cost goes onto the balance — the amount due at the appointment — so it’s collected with everything else. Stock comes off automatically.

A few things worth knowing:

A deposit that’s already been paid doesn’t change. The whole product cost lands on the balance instead.
Discounts stay put. A coupon or loyalty reward the client was given isn’t re-opened because they bought a conditioner.
The product appears as its own line on the invoice, priced as it was on the day. Renaming a product or changing its price later never rewrites a receipt that’s already been issued.
Products don’t change the appointment’s length or time, and the client isn’t sent a booking-change notice. Handing someone a bottle at the desk isn’t a change to their booking.

Made a mistake, or the client changed their mind? The same card offers one button, and which one depends on whether you’ve been paid:

Remove — the visit hasn’t been paid yet. The charge comes off and the stock goes back.
Return — the visit has been paid. The money is refunded and the stock goes back, in one action.

Returning is deliberately its own button rather than something a refund does by itself. A refund doesn’t always mean the item came back — goodwill, or a damaged product the client keeps — so putting it back on the shelf stays your decision.

A returned sale doesn’t disappear. It stays on the visit marked Returned, showing what was refunded, so a return in March never quietly rewrites what February took.

Selling without an appointment

Someone walks in, buys a bottle, and leaves. Press Sell on the Appointments or Calendar page — it’s also on Inventory → Products if you’re already there.

Pick what they’re taking, and choose how they’re paying:

In person — cash or your own card machine. It’s recorded as paid straight away and gets its own numbered invoice.
Payment link — a Stripe link you hand them to pay on their phone. The sale is marked paid the moment the payment lands.

Attaching a client is optional. A walk-in doesn’t need an account to buy shampoo, but adding one puts the purchase on their record.

Counter sales appear in your books as retail revenue, kept separate from service revenue so you can see what the shelf earns on its own.

Counting the shelf

Inventory → Stock counts → Start a count. Pick the branch, then work down the shelf entering what’s actually there — scan a barcode to jump straight to a product, or search by name.

Two things make this safe to do in the middle of a working day:

Nothing changes until you press Finish count. Count in any order, recount anything you got wrong, walk away and come back. You’re writing on a sheet, not changing your stock.
Anything you don’t count is left exactly as it is. Counting just the retail shelf and skipping the backbar cupboard is completely normal — we never assume an uncounted product is zero.

As you go, each product shows the difference between what you counted and what we expected. When you finish, we tell you how many corrections are about to be made, and you confirm that number.

Only one count can be open per branch at a time. Two people counting the same shelves would each be correcting against numbers the other was changing.

Finished counts stay on the list with what they changed and who did it, so “why does this say 12?” always has an answer.

What retail actually earns you

Put a cost price on your products and JustBook works out your margin. It’s on the Bookkeeping page, under Retail margin: what retail brought in, what those goods cost you, and the difference — for the period and for each product.

Cost is recorded at the moment of sale. If your supplier puts their price up next month, last month’s margin doesn’t change.
Products with no cost price are left out of the margin, not counted as free. You’ll see how many sales that covers, so a margin worked out over half your sales never reads as the whole picture.
A product with no cost shows ”—” rather than a number, because ”—” and “0%” mean very different things when you’re deciding what to reorder.

Margin is part of Financials, not Inventory — whoever counts the shelf isn’t automatically whoever should see what the business makes.

Knowing when to reorder

Set Low-stock alert at on the products you care about, and JustBook will tell your team when one drops to that level — once per dip, not once per sale, and again the next time it happens after you restock.

Alerts go out through Team alerts, so each person chooses whether they get them and where. See Team alerts to turn them on.

The Low stock figure at the top of the Products list is also a filter: tap it to see just the products that need attention, grouped by supplier so you can work through one order at a time.

Who can do what

Products and stock are their own permission, Inventory, separate from the menu. That’s on purpose: the person who edits your service list isn’t necessarily the person you want adjusting cost prices and stock counts.

To do this	You need
Add, edit, or delete products; adjust stock; log professional use	Inventory
Run a stock count	Inventory
Sell a product at checkout, or over the counter	Appointments — it’s a front-desk job
Return or remove a sale	Appointments
See product sales in your books, and retail margin	Financials

See Roles and permissions to change who has what.

Deleting a product

If a product has stock history, deleting it would erase the reason your counts are what they are — and orphan lines on invoices you’ve already sent. So JustBook deactivates it instead: it disappears from your list and from checkout, and its history stays intact. A product you added by mistake and never touched deletes outright.

What inventory doesn’t do

Some things we’ve decided against rather than not got to yet, because they’d mean typing in a lot that you’d never keep up to date:

Purchase orders and supplier accounts. You phone your rep and a box turns up; raising a PO first so the software can tick it off is work for our benefit, not yours. The reorder list is a list to work from, not an order we send.
Expiry and batch tracking.
Automatic reorder predictions. At the volumes a salon sells, the low-stock level you set yourself is the better guide.
Moving stock between branches as its own action — record it as a correction at each branch.
Selling products on your public booking page. Salons don’t ship, so there’d be nothing to collect.