The words on your bill, explained

43 terms from salon operations and Indian GST, each defined in one go — no cross-referencing required.

GST & billing

CGST: Central Goods and Services Tax — the central government's half of the tax on a sale made within one state. It is always exactly half the applicable rate, with the state taking the other half as SGST.See also: SGST, IGST, Intra-state supply
Composition scheme: A simplified GST route for smaller businesses: tax is paid at a flat rate on turnover with lighter filing, but the business cannot charge GST separately on its bills and cannot claim input tax credit.See also: Input tax credit
E-invoicing and IRN: A process where invoices are reported to a government portal, which returns an Invoice Reference Number validating them. It applies to businesses above a turnover threshold that has changed several times — check the current one before assuming it applies to you.
GSTIN: The fifteen-character registration number that identifies a business under GST. It encodes the state and the business's PAN, and it must appear on every tax invoice the business issues.See also: Tax invoice
HSN code: Harmonised System of Nomenclature — the international classification code identifying a physical good for tax purposes. A salon retailing shampoo is selling something with an HSN code.See also: SAC code
IGST: Integrated Goods and Services Tax — charged at the full rate, in one amount, on a supply that crosses a state border. Unlike an intra-state sale it is not split into two halves.See also: CGST, SGST, Inter-state supply
Input tax credit: The mechanism that lets a registered business offset tax it paid on purchases against tax it collected on sales, so tax is ultimately borne on the value added rather than on the full price at every step.
Inter-state supply: A sale where the supplier and the place of supply are in different states. It carries IGST at the full rate instead of a CGST and SGST split.See also: IGST
Intra-state supply: A sale where the supplier and the place of supply are in the same state. It is the ordinary case for a salon serving local customers, and it is the case that splits tax into CGST and SGST.See also: CGST, SGST
Invoice series: The running sequence of invoice numbers a business issues. It must be continuous, which is why a multi-branch business gives each branch its own series rather than sharing one that would show gaps everywhere.See also: Tax invoice, Branch
Round-off: The small adjustment that brings a bill to a whole rupee. It should be applied once to the grand total rather than line by line, because rounding each line separately accumulates an error that grows with the number of lines.
SAC code: Services Accounting Code — the equivalent of an HSN code for services rather than goods. A haircut, a facial and a massage each fall under a service code rather than a goods code.See also: HSN code
SGST: State Goods and Services Tax — the state government's half of the tax on a sale made within that state. An 18% rate becomes 9% CGST plus 9% SGST, and the two halves must add back to the exact tax charged.See also: CGST, IGST
Tax invoice: The document a registered business issues for a taxable sale, carrying its GSTIN, a serial number unique and continuous within its series, the taxable value, and the tax charged shown separately.See also: GSTIN, Invoice series
Tax-exclusive pricing: A price that tax is added on top of, so the customer pays more than the listed figure. Common for retail products, and the reason a bill can surprise someone who read the shelf label as the final amount.See also: Tax-inclusive pricing
Tax-inclusive pricing: A price that already contains the tax, so the customer pays exactly what the menu says. The taxable value is worked backwards by dividing the price by one plus the rate, and the tax comes out of the business's margin.See also: Tax-exclusive pricing, Taxable value
Taxable value: The amount tax is calculated on, after any discount and before the tax itself. Getting this figure right is the whole of correct billing: discounts reduce it, and tax computed on the pre-discount figure overcharges the customer.See also: Tax-inclusive pricing, Tax-exclusive pricing

Money & measurement

Average bill value: Total billed divided by the number of bills over the same period. It moves when prices change, when the mix of services changes, or when staff start adding treatments and retail — and telling those three apart is what makes it useful.See also: Retail attachment
Chair-hour: One hour of one chair, station or treatment room — the unit a salon actually sells. Dividing fixed monthly costs by the chair-hours you can realistically sell gives the price floor below which a service loses money.See also: Utilisation
Rebooking rate: The share of clients who leave with their next appointment already booked. It moves weeks before repeat rate does, and it largely measures whether anyone asked — which makes it the most directly controllable number a salon has.See also: Repeat rate
Repeat rate: The share of clients in a period who had visited before. It is the closest thing a salon has to a verdict on its own service, and it compounds — a salon holding more of its clients needs fewer new ones to grow.See also: Rebooking rate, Lapsed client
Retail attachment: The share of service bills that also carry a product. Worth tracking separately because retail margin consumes no chair time, so it adds revenue without using the resource a salon is usually short of.See also: Average bill value
Tip: Money a customer adds for the person who served them. It is not the salon's revenue, so keeping it out of revenue reports and out of commission bases is what stops both figures overstating what the business actually earned.See also: Commission
Utilisation: Booked hours as a share of bookable hours. It is the figure that makes two differently sized branches comparable, because raw revenue mostly reflects how many chairs a branch has rather than how well it is run.See also: Chair-hour

Clients & booking

Branch: One location of a business that operates several. Anything a tax authority sees is kept per branch — its own invoice series, its own tax settings, its own filing summary — while comparison and customer records are more useful consolidated.See also: Invoice series
Follow-up: A message timed to when a client's next visit is due, based on what they last had done. Rules-based rather than manual, because tracking who is due across a client list is not work a person can do reliably.See also: Win-back, Lapsed client
Lapsed client: Someone who has not returned within the interval normal for what they last had done. The interval is what makes the term meaningful: six weeks is lapsed for a colour client and unremarkable for a bridal one.See also: Win-back, Repeat rate
Loyalty points: Value earned on spending and redeemable against future visits. Points are a discount deferred, so they reduce the taxable value of the bill they are redeemed against rather than the one that earned them.See also: Membership, Taxable value
Membership: A plan a client pays for up front in exchange for services, discounts or both over a period. It brings cash forward and buys a commitment to return, which is what distinguishes it from a plain discount.See also: Loyalty points, Package
No-show: A booked appointment where the client neither arrives nor cancels. It costs more than a cancellation because the slot cannot be resold — you find out at the moment it was due to start.See also: Rebooking rate, Waitlist
Package: A fixed set of services sold together for one price, usually cheaper than buying them separately. Unlike a membership it is a one-off purchase rather than an ongoing relationship with a renewal date.See also: Membership
Waitlist: A record of clients who want a slot that is currently full. In most systems, including Salvoro, it is a list rather than an automation — nothing promotes a waitlisted client into a cancellation on its own.See also: No-show
Walk-in: A customer served without a prior appointment. Walk-ins fill gaps that would otherwise earn nothing, but a salon that relies on them cannot plan staffing, which is the trade-off behind encouraging bookings.
Win-back: A message sent to a client who has stopped coming, aimed at recovering the relationship rather than selling a specific service. Distinct from a follow-up, which goes to someone whose visit is simply due.See also: Lapsed client, Follow-up

Team & stock

Attendance: The record of who worked, when. It underpins payroll and utilisation both, which is why a status like 'late' is worth capturing separately from 'present' — the two have different consequences.See also: Utilisation, Roster
Commission: A share of billed value paid to the person who performed the work. Almost every dispute about it is about which figure the percentage was applied to rather than the percentage itself — it should be the line value after discount and before tax.See also: Taxable value, Tip
Cycle count: Counting a small slice of stock frequently rather than everything at once. It spreads the work and catches a discrepancy while somebody can still remember the reason, which a quarterly full stocktake cannot.See also: Professional stock, Stocktake
Professional stock: Product used on clients during treatments, as opposed to product sold to them. Keeping it separate from retail stock is the single change that closes most inventory discrepancies, because shared shelves make every treatment silently consume retail.See also: Retail stock, Cycle count
Purchase order: A record of what was ordered from a supplier, at what price, before it arrives. Checking the delivery against it at the door prevents more inventory discrepancy than any amount of counting afterwards.See also: Stock transfer
Retail stock: Product held to be sold to clients rather than used on them. Counted and valued separately from professional stock, so that a discrepancy in the retail count is a real question rather than untracked treatment use.See also: Professional stock, Retail attachment
Roster: The planned shift pattern saying who is scheduled to work when. Distinct from attendance, which records what actually happened, and from availability, which is what a booking system offers a client.See also: Attendance
Stock transfer: Moving product between branches of the same business. Recorded as one movement rather than as a write-off at one end and an addition at the other, so the total held by the company never changes on paper when nothing left the company.See also: Purchase order, Branch
Stocktake: A full physical count of everything held, reconciled against what the system says should be there. Thorough, but infrequent enough that discrepancies are usually too old to explain by the time they are found.See also: Cycle count

Worth knowing

These are plain-language definitions, not tax advice. Rates, thresholds and treatment change — confirm anything that affects your filing with your accountant.
Deliberately no figures or turnover thresholds. A definition carrying a number is wrong the year that number moves, and nobody notices.