Examples of Revenue Accounts for a Beauty Salon
While it’s good to keep your beauty salon full of satisfied clients, it’s also important to track your revenue in the proper revenue accounts. A revenue account is a record in your general ledger used to book income-generating transactions. Because a beauty salon can bring in revenue from different sources -- such as haircuts and cosmetics sales -- it typically uses more than one category of revenue account. Knowing the commonly used accounts can help you keep your books in order.
A beauty salon sometimes offers multiple services to its clients. Examples include hairstyling, nail treatments, skincare, tanning and massages. Your small business can use a separate revenue account for each of these services or record all service revenue in one revenue account. For example, if you generate revenues of $30,000 in hair-related services and $10,000 in nail services during the quarter, you can record the entire $40,000 in one account called “service revenue.”
A product revenue account captures the money earned from selling retail items, such as shampoo and makeup. Depending on how many products your salon offers, you can group all revenue from these sales into one product revenue account or into separate accounts organized by individual product or product category. For example, your beauty salon may have different revenue accounts for hair products, skincare products, nail products, cosmetics and aromatherapy products.
While some salons fill their work stations, or booths, with only stylists who are employees, other salons rent booths to stylists who are independent contractors. These contractors pay the salon a rental fee and keep all the money they earn servicing their clients. The only revenue the salon recognizes from contracted stylists is the booth rental income, which it records in a “booth rental” revenue account.
A beauty salon sometimes earns revenue outside of its normal business activities. This type of income is called “other” or “nonoperating” income. Examples of other income include interest earned from a bank account or money received from an insurance settlement. A salon typically uses a separate revenue account for each of these. For instance, if you earn $200 in interest, you record it in your interest revenue account.
A business uses a contra revenue account to record transactions that reduce revenue and typically uses up to three types. It records refunds in the sales returns account, price reductions in the sales allowances account and discounts in the sales discounts account. For instance, if a client returns a $50 bottle of shampoo, the $50 is recorded in the sales returns contra revenue account, which reduces your revenue by $50.