Which salon software has built-in tipping?

There are three places a client can be asked for a tip, and most platforms only do one or two of them. A prompt on the payment device catches the client while they are still with you. A prompt after the appointment reaches the client who paid in cash, or who left in a hurry. A prompt during online booking collects the tip before the work has happened, which some owners like and some find awkward.

Every competitor row was read from that vendor's own help centre or feature page on 2 September 2026, and the Bella Booking rows from the code that runs the feature. "Not verified" means the pages we opened that day did not say, which is a different thing from the platform not doing it. Help centres get rewritten often, so open the vendor's current page before you decide anything on the strength of a table.

The second question is where the money lands. On a two-person appointment, a tip that is split by a fixed rule and a tip the client hands to one named person are very different for morale, and only one of them survives a conversation about who did the blow-dry.

Timely is worth reading twice. Its help centre is direct about the limit: without a TimelyPay or Tap to Pay terminal "there is not a purpose-built solution for managing client tips", and the documented workaround is to create a product called Tip and add it to the invoice. That is a fair answer for a salon that already has the hardware and a poor one for a salon that does not.

Bella Booking does the post-appointment kind. Once an appointment has been checked out, a "Leave a review & tip" button appears on that appointment in the client's online booking account. The page lists the team members who worked on the appointment, each with $5, $10 and $20 presets and a custom field, and the tip is paid on its own secure checkout page. The client does not need a saved card, and nothing about how you took payment for the service itself changes.

1. 1Connect your payment account, then switch Tipping on at Settings > Payments
2. 2Tipping travels with client reviews, a Professional-plan feature, because the tip prompt lives inside the review-and-tip flow
3. 3Switch Accept tips off on any team member's profile if tipping is not right for their role, and they are not offered in the prompt

Each tip is recorded against the appointment, the client and one team member, so a colourist and a stylist on the same appointment are tipped separately and see their own amounts. A client can tip a given team member once per appointment, and a custom amount is capped at 500 in your business's currency. Tips appear on the appointment in the scheduler, in the client's payment history, and in the Tips summary report, which groups by team member or by day and compares against an earlier period; the by-day view exports to CSV, and you can filter it to one team member first.

Your payment provider's standard processing rate applies to a tip like any other card payment. If you pass processing fees on to clients, the fee is added on top of the tip charge and the team member receives the full amount; otherwise it comes out of the tip. When a tip is paid, the business gets an entry in the notification centre, plus an email and SMS if those are switched on, and the message template carries the tip amount and the team member's name. TipReceived is also one of the notification types each team member can turn on for themselves.