Payroll and Commission

JustBook already knows what everyone earned — services, products, tips and rostered hours. Payroll turns that into a pay run: set each person’s commission and hourly rate once, pick a period, and get every figure you need to pay your team. Payroll is part of the Pro plan, and it’s on Money → Payroll.

What Payroll does and doesn’t do

JustBook works out what each person earned. It doesn’t pay them. There’s no button here that moves money. You take the finished figures — or the exported file — to your payroll provider, your accountant, or your bank, and pay from there.

That’s deliberate. Money from your bookings goes straight into your own Stripe account, never through JustBook, so wages are yours to send. It also means Payroll works the same way wherever you are: there’s no tax filing, no withholding, and no assumptions about your country’s payroll rules.

If you use a payroll provider like Gusto or QuickBooks, the export is built to drop into their import step.

Set up how each person is paid

Open Payroll → Pay structures and choose Edit next to someone.

Paid by is one of three:

Commission — a percentage of what they bring in.
Hourly — a rate for the hours they work.
Hourly + commission — both, added together.

Then fill in what applies:

Hourly rate — per hour, in your currency.
Commission on services (%) — their share of service revenue.
Commission on products (%) — their share of retail. It’s separate because most salons pay a smaller share on products than on services.

If one flat percentage isn’t your arrangement, two extras sit under the commission fields:

A higher rate above a total — a sliding scale, like “45% over $3,000”. The higher rate applies only to the part above that amount; everything below stays on the main rate. (So on $4,000 of billing at “40%, then 45% over $3,000”, they earn 40% of the first $3,000 and 45% of the last $1,000 — not 45% of everything.)
A different rate for one service — overrides the main rate for that service only. Useful where a treatment carries a product cost the person didn’t pay for. That service’s takings don’t count towards the sliding scale.

Switching someone between structures doesn’t erase the other figures, so you can move a person to hourly for a season and switch back without retyping their percentage.

Giving someone a raise

Use New rate rather than editing their current one. A new rate starts on a date you choose, and work paid for before that date keeps the old rate — so if you re-run an earlier pay period later, it still shows what you actually paid at the time.

Edit is for fixing a mistake in the rate that’s already running. It changes the figures everywhere, including in periods you’ve already exported, because a typo was never the right number.

Anyone without a structure shows as Not set up and no pay is calculated for them — they’ll still appear in the pay run so you can see they’re missing, and any card tips they’re owed are still included.

Run pay for a period

Open Payroll → Pay run and pick a period. It defaults to last month, because you normally run pay for a period that has finished.

Each person’s row shows what they brought in, what they earned, and their gross pay for the period. Select a row to see exactly how the figure was reached, down to the individual appointments and product sales behind it.

What commission is calculated on

Services, excluding tax, after any discount, and not counting anything refunded. Tax was never yours to share, and a refunded service wasn’t earned.
Products, at their own rate, excluding tax and net of returns.

Commission is not paid on no-show fees (nobody performed a service), or on gift card and package sales (that money isn’t earned until it’s spent on a service — the commission comes then, through the normal appointment).

Which period a sale counts in

Pay follows the money, not the diary. An appointment counts in the period it was paid for, not the period it happened in. So a service in late January that’s settled in February appears in February’s pay run.

This matches your Bookkeeping page exactly, which is the point — your payroll figures and your takings always agree, and both reconcile against your bank.

Tips

Card tips are passed on in full. They’re part of gross pay because you’re holding that money and owe it to the person who earned it. There’s no setting to take a share — that’s not something JustBook will help you do.

Cash tips are shown for your records but never added to gross pay. They already went straight into your team member’s pocket; paying them again would pay them twice.

Tip pooling is off unless you turn it on, under Pay structures → Tip pooling. When it’s on, the card tips taken by the people you name go into one pot and are shared between them — equally, by hours worked, or by what each brought in. Anyone not on the list keeps exactly what they took.

Two things to be careful about:

Cash tips are never pooled. They never reached your account, so there’s nothing for us to share out; if you pool cash at the desk, that’s yours to handle.

The share-out always adds up to exactly what was collected, and the detail export shows both what each person took and what they’re owed, so a payslip can show its working.

Hours

Hours come from one of three places, and the pay run tells you which:

Your edit, if you typed one. You’re the only person who knows someone left early — type the real number into the Hours column and the pay recalculates as you go.
The time clock, if anyone clocked in during the period. See below.
The schedule, minus any booked time off. This is an estimate: a schedule says when someone was available to be booked, not when they were in the building.

The clock beats the schedule per person, so if half your team punches in and half doesn’t, everyone still gets a sensible number.

The time clock

Payroll → Time clock shows who’s on the clock right now, with a button to clock them out, and a dropdown to clock someone in. You can also add or correct a shift by hand.

A few things worth knowing:

A shift counts on the day it started. A 10pm–2am shift is one night’s work, not two days’.
A shift nobody clocked out of pays nothing until you close it. The pay run flags it as unfinished so you can fix it rather than quietly losing the hours.
Correcting a shift marks it “Entered by hand”, so you can always tell what was recorded at the time from what someone remembered afterwards.
Clocking people in and out only needs the Team permission — your front desk can do it without seeing anyone’s pay.

Your edits apply to the run you’re looking at and to the file you export from it. They aren’t saved, because next period’s hours are a different question.

Products with nobody attached

If some product sales aren’t linked to a person, Payroll tells you how much retail that was and doesn’t pay commission on it. To fix it for next time, choose who sold the product when you ring it up at checkout — a missing commission is the kind of thing your team notices before you do.

Export the pay run

Choose one of three files at the bottom of the pay run:

Gusto — regular hours, commission, and tips, laid out for Gusto’s payroll import.
QuickBooks — hours, rate, commission and tips for QuickBooks Payroll.
Full detail — everything in the run plus all the workings, for your own records or your accountant.

Every file identifies people by email address, because that’s what payroll systems match on. Both Gusto and QuickBooks ask you to match up columns when you upload a file — the column names are written to make that step obvious.

Every export is recorded in your activity log, since it contains what your team earns.

Common questions

Someone’s pay looks too low. Check whether they have a pay structure at all (Pay structures → they’d show as Not set up), then check the period — an appointment paid for after the period ends counts in the next one.

The hours look wrong. They come from the schedule, not a clock. Edit them in the pay run before exporting.

Can JustBook pay my team directly, or file my payroll taxes? No. JustBook calculates; you pay. If you need tax filing, use a payroll provider and feed it the export.