What to write down after a nail client

A nail tech sees the same hands every three or four weeks and remembers about a third of what happened last time. The third you forget is always the useful part: which base lifted, what she said about the length, and whether the removal took forty minutes or ten.

The set itself

• Date, service, and how long it actually took — not how long it was booked for.
• Products by name: base, builder, colour, top. "The pale pink" is not a record you can repeat in six weeks.
• Length, shape, and whether she asked for a change from last time.
• Nail condition at the start: lifting, breaks, thin free edges, anything you would want a photograph of.
• Removal: soak-off or e-file, and how long it took. This is the number that decides whether her appointment length is right.

The part that protects you

Any reaction, sensitivity or allergy, written the day it happens, with what you did about it. Patch tests where your insurer requires them, with the date. A client's own note that she picks at them, or works with her hands in water, belongs here too — not as a complaint, but as the reason a set that lasted ten days was not a bad set.

Photograph the finished hands every time. Two seconds, and it settles both the "it never looks like that" conversation and the question of what shape she had in April.

What it tells you after three months

1. 1Which clients need a longer slot — visible immediately once removal time is written down.
2. 2Which product combinations lift on which clients, which is not the same as which lift generally.
3. 3Which services are actually profitable, once time and product are beside the price.
4. 4Who is due, and who has quietly stopped coming — the list you use before you post that you have a cancellation.

Keeping it to ninety seconds

Fill it in while she pays, not at the end of the day. Fixed fields you tick beat empty boxes you have to write in, and one page per client with a row per visit beats a page per visit — because the whole point is seeing the last four visits at once when she sits down.