Your whole year, not just this week.

Why groomers pay for this

What a year of logged weeks actually tells you

The case for keeping a record is easy to state and easy to underrate, so here is what the accumulated data is actually good for, beyond having it.

Your real effective hourly rate. Total pay including tips, divided by hours actually worked, across a long enough stretch to be meaningful. That single number is what you can hold next to any job posting, any offer from another salon, and any published average. Almost nobody knows theirs, and it is the only figure that makes those comparisons work.

How often you actually commission out. The crossover point where commission overtakes your hourly floor is a fixed number for a given week. What varies is how often you clear it. A year of weeks tells you whether that is most weeks, half of them, or only December, and that answer determines whether a higher rate or a higher hourly is the thing worth negotiating for.

Your seasonality. Grooming volume swings hard around holidays and weather. A slow February read on its own looks like a problem. Read against last February it is a pattern, and one you can plan around rather than worry about.

Whether your average price is moving. Price per groom is usually a larger lever on pay than speed, and it changes slowly enough that you cannot feel it happening. Tracked, it is visible.

The tip question at tax time

Worth being direct about, because it is the part groomers most often handle by hoping.

In the United States, tips are taxable income whether they arrive on a card or in cash, and cash tips are the ones with no paper trail. Employees are generally expected to report tips to their employer, and what is not reported through payroll is still the individual's responsibility at filing time.

The practical problem is not usually willingness. It is that nobody remembers a year of cash tips in January. A running monthly total, recorded the day it happened, turns a reconstruction problem into a lookup. That is most of the value of keeping the log at all, and it is worth doing whether or not you ever export it.

This is general information rather than tax advice, and I am not an accountant. If your situation is complicated, a preparer will sort it out in an hour, and they will do it faster and cheaper if you hand them a file instead of a shoebox.

Where your data lives, plainly

Your logged weeks are stored in your own browser, not on a server. That has one clear advantage and one real limitation, and both are worth understanding before you rely on it.

The advantage is that nobody else holds your pay history. It is not sitting in a database that can be breached, sold, or subpoenaed, and it is not visible to us.

The limitation is that browser storage belongs to one browser on one device. Clearing site data removes it, and a phone and a laptop keep separate copies. So export periodically. A CSV saved somewhere you control is the backup, and it is also the file that is useful in a pay conversation or at tax time.

If you cancel a subscription, nothing is deleted, because there was never a copy anywhere for us to delete. You lose the export, the year-to-date totals, and the ad-free view, and the weeks you logged stay exactly where they were.

Is it worth paying for

An honest answer, since we are the ones asking.

If you are paid a flat hourly rate with no commission, probably not. The free calculator answers the question you have, and there is not much to track.

If you are on commission or on hourly versus commission, and especially if you take cash tips, the case is stronger. The recurring situations it addresses are real: a check that looks short and no records to check it against, a January tip reconstruction, and a raise conversation where you can describe the revenue you generated instead of describing how hard you have been working.

Thirty days free with no card on file is enough to find out either way. Log four or five real weeks, look at what the totals tell you, and decide then. If you never add a card, the trial ends on its own and nothing is charged.

Billing questions