Stop Spending Sunday Nights Calculating Commission by Hand
Commission tracking is the number one feature groomers and salon owners ask for — and it’s the one most software gets wrong. You shouldn’t need a spreadsheet with seventeen tabs to figure out what each groomer earned this pay period.
Payroll Day Shouldn't Be the Worst Day of Your Week
Here's what payroll looks like at most grooming salons: you pull up your appointment records, open a spreadsheet, and start doing math. This groomer is on 50% commission. That one is hourly plus commission above a threshold. Someone did a split appointment with another groomer on Wednesday. Three people have cash tips. One has a paycheck tip. You forgot about the $20 bonus you promised for staying late on Saturday.
Two hours later, you think the numbers are right. You hope they are. But there's a knot in your stomach because last month you underpaid your senior groomer by $47 and didn't catch it until she brought it up, and that conversation was not fun.
Now multiply this by every pay period, forever.
BarkBook Calculates Every Dollar Automatically — So You Don't Have To
BarkBook computes earnings at the moment of checkout, using each employee's active compensation profile. Commission, hourly, hybrid — including both base-plus-full-commission and base-plus-commission-above-threshold models. Service-specific rate overrides apply automatically, so hand-stripping pays differently than a bath-and-brush without you lifting a finger. Tiered commission rates kick in when they should. Tips are classified as cash or paycheck. If you adjust a checkout after the fact, earnings recalculate. If you void an appointment, there's a full audit trail.
When two groomers share a dog, the split calculation happens automatically — flat fee or percentage, both groomers' earnings updated, safeguards in place so splits never exceed the gross total.
Run payroll on your schedule.
Configure your pay frequency — weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly — and BarkBook generates a per-employee breakdown for each period: revenue generated, commissions earned, hourly wages, adjustments, cash tips, paycheck tips, and gross pay. You can see hours worked and the effective hourly rate for every team member. BarkBook even runs a minimum wage compliance check so you never accidentally pay below the floor.
A real approval workflow.
Each payroll period moves through Draft, Approved, and Exported stages. Review the numbers, approve when you're confident, export when you're ready. Need to fix something? Revert support lets you pull a period back to draft. You can look back through 24 pay periods of history whenever you need to.
Export the way your accountant expects.
Generate a CSV with every column and totals. Export a QuickBooks IIF file that imports directly with separate line items per employee — no reformatting, no copy-paste, no re-entry. Or produce a PDF report in landscape format with color-coded approval status and a minimum wage warning banner for any flagged employees. Pick the format. Click export. Done.
Reports that answer your real questions.
BarkBook includes five dedicated payroll reports:
- Commission Summary — broken down by service and by groomer, so you can see who's earning what on which services
- Split Report — every shared appointment laid out clearly, with both groomers' portions calculated
- Hours Report — daily hours by employee, so you can verify time clock entries at a glance
- Tip Summary — cash versus paycheck tips separated, per employee
- Compensation Dashboard — every employee's pay structure, rates, and current-period earnings in one view
Handle the exceptions cleanly.
Real payroll has bonuses, corrections, deductions, tip redistributions, and price adjustments. BarkBook supports manual adjustments across six categories — Bonus, Tip Redistribution, Correction, Deduction, Price Adjustment, and Other — with positive or negative amounts, optional links to specific appointments, and void-instead-of-delete for a clean audit trail. Every adjustment is documented. Nothing disappears.
Your groomers can see their own numbers.
Each team member gets a self-service earnings view showing their current period summary, recent earnings with full appointment details, and their last six pay periods. They get the transparency they want. You get fewer "Hey, can you check my pay?" conversations.
Built for the Way Grooming Salons Actually Pay People
Most small business payroll tools assume everyone is on salary or straight hourly. Grooming doesn't work that way. Your shop might have one groomer on 50% commission, another on hourly plus commission above $200 per day, a bather on straight hourly, and an assistant on a flat rate — and all of them occasionally split dogs. BarkBook was built for exactly this complexity, so you don't have to force your pay structure into a tool that wasn't designed for it.
Start Your 14-Day Free Trial
You’ve spent enough Sunday nights with a calculator and a growing sense of dread. Let BarkBook handle the math. No credit card required.