Front-counter checkout & groomer commissions

Let's be direct about what this is, because it matters. Argus does not process card or online payments and takes no cut of your takings. Your customer pays at your counter exactly as they do today — cash, their own card machine, bank transfer, whatever you use. Argus is the part that gets the record right: what was sold, what was discounted, what tax applies, what the tip was, and what every person who touched that dog has earned.

You define your own payment methods, so the list at checkout is your list. Nothing is selected by default — the person at the counter has to say how the customer actually paid, which is the difference between a reconcilable day and a guess.

From an appointment, press Take payment and the sale builds itself: one line per pet with the price agreed when it was booked, plus every shampoo and consumable attached to those services. Nothing to re-enter, nothing forgotten.

For the dog that walks in off the street, Quick sale takes a team member and a service and rings it up on the spot. It deliberately offers exactly the services you keep off your online booking page — the difficult-dog handling, the matted brush-out, the nail trim while they wait — grouped by size so the right price is one tap away.

Give a discount as a percentage or a flat amount, whichever the conversation calls for. If the customer has a standing discount on their file, it is already filled in when the dialog opens — the promise you made in March is kept in November without anybody remembering it.

Behind the scenes the discount is spread across every line in proportion, so each groomer's share reconciles to the penny rather than one line absorbing the whole reduction. Tips are split equally between the people who actually served, with any odd cent handled so the total is exact — and tips never inflate commission.

• Discount as a percentage or a cash amount, never exceeding the subtotal
• A customer's standing discount pre-filled automatically
• Discount allocated across lines pro-rata, so shares always reconcile
• Tips split between the staff who served, and kept out of the commission base
• Tax added on top or extracted from an inclusive price — your choice, salon-wide

Commission is where trust between an owner and a groomer is won or lost, so Argus is precise about it and shows its working.

• Each groomer has their own rate, capped by the service's own maximum where you have set one
• The base is what the customer actually paid for that line — after discount
• Consumables can count toward commission or not, as a salon-wide policy
• An assistant's share divides that commission without changing the total pool
• Every line stores its own basis, so the real effective percentage can always be shown

That last point does more than it looks. Because each sale remembers how it was calculated, a receipt from six months ago is described the way it was actually worked out — “service + consumables, after discount” — even if you have since changed your policy. Nobody's past payslip gets quietly rewritten.

You can also see the outcome before you take the money: a live breakdown on the appointment shows the commission pool, flags it when a service cap applies, and lays out the groomer's and the assistant's shares.

Assisted grooms are normal on big coats and difficult dogs. Set the assistant's share on the appointment with a slider — 20% to 70%, in steps of 5, starting at 30 — and Argus divides the commission accordingly. Only staff rostered at that branch on that day can be picked as an assistant, so the split cannot be assigned to somebody who was not there.

Both people see their own earnings later, each with the effective percentage they really earned rather than a headline rate that ignores caps and discounts.

Your transaction list searches your whole history, not just the page on screen — by customer, team member or payment method — and filters to any date range. Click a team member from your earnings report and you land on exactly their sales, with their commission on each row.

Open any sale to see the itemised lines, who earned what, the payment method and the total. When more than one person earned from an order, each is listed by name with their amount and a reconciling total.

• Search across the full history, server-side, with a date range and staff filter
• Export to Excel with one row per line item — 24 columns including per-line commission
• The export matches the filters on screen exactly, so the file is the report
• Void reverts the appointment to booked so it can be re-rung correctly
• Every checkout and every void is recorded in your activity log

A voided sale is not deleted and not a refund — it stays visible with a badge, drops out of earnings and sales figures, and frees the appointment to be checked out again. Your books keep telling the truth about what happened.