Your colour formulas live in a text box. That is the problem.
Eight years of colour history in a free-text field: unsearchable, undeductible, unshowable. How it got that way, what it costs you, and what becomes possible once it has structure.
In the client records of a salon we measured in August 2026 — 5,989 clients, an eight-year file — the colour history is recorded at every visit. Kept neatly, for years, by people who clearly cared about it. And then you see where it sits.
F: illum 30gr 6 + 10gr 5/35 + 20vol.
One line in a free-text field. To the stylist who typed it, everything is in there. To the software, nothing is. That is not sloppiness on the salon's part — it is the shape the package offers, and everyone fills in what they are given.
What a text box takes away
The most valuable thing you know about a client is at the same time the least usable. Concretely, three things are missing, and all three cost time or money.
- You cannot search it. "Which clients did we do with that shade last year?" is a question you can only answer by opening records one by one. With six thousand clients, you therefore do not.
- You cannot deduct anything from it. Thirty grams of colour leaving the backbar leave nowhere. That is why a stock counter reads −10 after a few years without anyone knowing why.
- You cannot show it. Not to the client asking "what did we use last time?", and not on a screen beside the chair without six menu clicks first.
At that same salon the product list held 1,350 items, from Wella, Sebastian, OPI, Olaplex, GHD and Maria Nila, with some seven hundred deliveries booked in since 2018. Everything that came in was counted. What went out as a colour service was not.
Why it is built that way anyway
A text box is not stupid, it is cautious. Colour notation is a trade language that differs per salon, and sometimes per stylist within the same salon. "6", "5/35", "20vol", a brand abbreviated to three letters, an arrow for "then". Turn that into a rigid form with required fields and within a week you have a team typing half of it into the notes field, because the form cannot handle the way they work.
That risk is real, and it is exactly why most packages stop at a text box. Except that being cautious is not the same as doing nothing.
Both, and in that order
The way out is not choosing between free text and structure, but keeping both — the free text as the original, the structure as the derivative.
- The raw notation stays exactly as it was typed. Always. It is never replaced by an interpretation of itself.
- Alongside it, it is parsed into section, brand, product, grams and developer. If that succeeds, you have structure. If it does not, you still have your text.
- So whatever the parser does not understand neither disappears nor gets quietly "corrected" into something plausible. It simply stays text, and it prints.
That last point is the whole thing. Software that does not understand your notation may not throw it away, and certainly may not guess at it. A wrongly guessed formula is worse than no formula: that one you trust.
What you gain
Once the formula has structure, three screens change at once: the record, the stock and the client portal. Your backbar consumption follows from what you actually did rather than from an estimate. Your client can look at her own colour history without phoning. And the stylist doing her today sees, beside the chair, what went in last time — even if that was a colleague who is off today.
More on how the client record and stock hang together is on the features page. And what happens to your existing formulas if you switch is on the switching page.