Managing salons
Updated on 2026-08-22
This chapter is not for a hair salon. It describes the platform panel, where the administrator of HairConnect creates and follows up the salons themselves. If you work in a salon, there is nothing here for you and you will not get in.
Where do I find it?
At /platform, with its own login screen. The panel is grey rather than copper — so you can see at a glance that you are not inside a salon. Top left you will find the same HairConnect logo as in the back office, but in greys and with the word Platform below the wordmark. That word stays visible even when the sidebar is collapsed or on a narrow screen.
Only an account carrying the platform administrator flag gets in. An ordinary salon login sees the login page but does not get past it.
The first account
On a fresh installation no platform administrator exists yet. You create one on the server:
php artisan platform:beheerder --email=you@example.be --naam="Your Name"
The command then asks twice for a password (at least twelve characters). If the email address already exists as an ordinary user, that user becomes a platform administrator and their password stays unchanged.
The salon list
Under Salons each salon appears with its booking address, whether it is active, and three counts: staff, clients and the date of the last appointment. The column menu at the top right also switches on the number of logins and the creation date.
A salon without appointments shows not yet — which is something other than an empty cell.
Creating a salon
Button New salon at the top right. There are only four fields, and that is deliberate: everything a salon sets about itself — opening hours, house style, services, VAT number — belongs in its own back office.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Name | as the salon calls itself |
| Booking page address | the slug, for example diargo → .../en/diargo |
| Salon email address | where platform notifications go |
| Language | sets the language of the booking page and of emails to clients |
The slug is derived from the name automatically on creation. Do not change it later: every booking link and every QR code the salon has already handed out would then lead nowhere.
Do not fill in anything you are not sure of. An invented address or VAT number ends up on a till receipt, and that is a tax document.
After saving you land straight on the edit screen. A new salon is not finished: it still needs an owner.
Putting a salon on hold
Switch Active off. Everything is kept.
There is deliberately no delete button. Deleting a salon drags its appointments, receipts and till journal along through the database — and that journal is fiscal and append-only. Anyone who really wants a salon gone does it deliberately and by hand, not with a button next to Save.
Looking inside a salon
Open this salon takes you into that salon's ordinary back office, with its data.
What happens then:
- You stay logged in as yourself. No member of staff's session is taken over and you do not become someone else. The only thing that shifts is which salon you see.
- At the top of every screen sits a dark bar: You are viewing as a platform administrator, with the salon's name.
- You can do everything the owner can.
- Every action goes into that salon's audit log, under your name with (platform) after it and the role
platform. That keeps it visible afterwards what you did and what the salon did itself.
Stop viewing in that bar takes you back to the platform panel.
Why a separate panel?
Because all the rest of HairConnect rests on one rule: no salon means no data. Every query is filtered on the salon you are in, and that is why two salons' data can never touch.
The platform panel is the only place that deliberately goes against that. Such a screen does not belong in the same panel as screens that must never do it: one mistake in a visibility rule there is a leak straight away.