It is the third time this month she has typed out her cancellation policy.
Once into an Instagram DM on the Tuesday, because somebody asked. Once into a chat box on the Sunday, so it could draft a reply to a client who cancelled 40 minutes out. And now a third time, in a fresh conversation, because the new conversation knows nothing about the last one.
The Tuesday version said 24 hours' notice. The Sunday version said "a day's notice, or we charge half". The one she is typing now has the fee in it and no notice period at all.
Three versions of the same policy in one month. All of them hers. None of them the same.
The short answer. Write your business down once, in three plain documents: your current prices, your policies, and an AI brand voice document, which is nothing grander than a written description of how you talk. Paste those three at the top of any new conversation and the output stops sounding like a stranger and stops inventing your numbers. Making them is about an hour of real work, once, and that hour is the price of everything else in this level.
Steph runs a two-groomer salon in Sydney's Inner West. She is a worked example we follow through this series, and her numbers are the sort you would recognise rather than a real client's books.
What retyping actually costs you
The time is the smallest part. Three minutes of setup typing before you get anything useful back, four or five times in a Sunday session. Irritating, not serious.
The drift is serious. Steph now has three descriptions of her cancellation policy in writing, two of them sitting in front of clients, and she proofread neither. Nobody reads a DM back. That is how a salon ends up enforcing a policy that half its book was told differently.
Then there is the blank. A chat can only work with what you have put in front of it, and that is all context means.
Leave your price out and you do not get a gap where the price should be. You get a confident, plausible, wrong number, because filling gaps is what these things do. Why it gets things wrong is its own post; this is where you feel it.
The last cost is the one nobody notices. You quietly stop reaching for it on the awkward jobs, because the jobs most worth handing over are the ones that need the most explaining first. So those stay yours, at 9pm, forever.
The three documents, and why an AI brand voice document is the hardest one
Three files, or three notes, or three headings in one note. It does not matter where they live as long as there is one copy of each.
- Your prices. About 10 minutes. Do this one first, because it is the fact that gets invented most.
- Your policies. About 20 minutes, assuming they already exist somewhere.
- Your voice. About 30 minutes, and it is the one everybody skips. It is also the one that does the most work.
That is the hour. It is genuinely an hour, and it is boring. There is no version of this where you paste a clever prompt and skip it, because the whole point is that the tool does not know anything about you and somebody has to tell it.
One thing goes in none of the three. Your prices, your policies, and the way you write are all facts about your own business, which is exactly why this is the material you can hand over in full. Your clients are not.
Never paste into an AI chat:
The full list, and the law behind it, is eight lines and worth the two minutes before you start.
Document one: the price list, typed out
Plain text. One line per service. Current price. The thing that changes it, if something does.
Say Steph's casual full groom for a medium doodle is $95, a nail trim on its own is $20, and a de-matting surcharge is $30 when a coat needs it. Three lines. That is a price list.
Now, the thing people do instead: they screenshot their own pricing page and paste the image. It feels faster and it is worse, for reasons that have nothing to do with how clever the tool is.
- Your pricing page is marketing, not a price list. It has "from $" on it, a struck-through number, a package you retired in March, and a size chart that needs explaining. You are handing over ambiguity and hoping for facts.
- A picture has to be interpreted before it can be used. Typed text is simply read.
- You cannot edit a screenshot. When you put your prices up, a typed list takes 20 seconds to correct. A screenshot has to be retaken, which means it will not be.
- You cannot see what it saw. If a typed $95 comes back as $110, the $95 is sitting right there in the conversation and you know instantly who was wrong.
- Whether your plan reads images at all varies. It differs by tool and by plan, and OpenAI's own help pages contradict each other about which ChatGPT plans can accept an image. Check what yours does before you rely on it.
Do not type the list from memory either. Pull it from wherever your bookings actually live. In Petboost, the Export Your Data screen gives you a services CSV with your service definitions, pricing, duration, and booking rules in it, which is a better starting point than what you think you charge. Note that only an Admin or Owner Admin can run it.
Worth knowing where this document is not needed: the assistant inside your own booking system already has your prices, because it queries your live data rather than being told. Grazi AI works that way, on every plan, and there is nothing in it for you to configure. This document is for the tools that sit outside your business and know nothing whatsoever about it.
Document two: the policies, in four lines
Four come up over and over in a grooming salon: cancellation, lateness, matted coats, and vaccination. Boarding and daycare will have a different four. Write yours as what happens, not as how you feel about it.
Steph's four, as a worked example:
- Cancellation. 24 hours' notice. Inside that, 50% of the service price.
- Lateness. More than 15 minutes late and the groom becomes whatever fits in the time that is left.
- Matted coats. A de-matting surcharge of $30, and a phone call before any clipping decision.
- Vaccination. Current C5, sighted before the first visit.
Trigger, consequence, and the exception if there is one. That shape is all the tool needs to write a reply that does not soften your policy or invent a fee, and it is the shape that stops three versions of the same rule existing at once.
What you are pasting is a summary of what your policy does. It is not your terms and conditions, and it is not a legal document. Writing the actual policies, in wording clients will accept and a lawyer will not wince at, is a separate job that Write Your Salon Policies With AI, Then Get Them Checked Properly covers in full. If you got to this section and realised you cannot state your own notice period in one sentence, start there instead and come back.
Document three: your voice, described back to you
Here is the part worth the whole hour.
You cannot describe your own writing. Ask a groomer how she writes and you get "normal, I suppose". But you can recognise your voice instantly when you see it, and you can point at three things you have already written.
So make it do the describing. Feed it three samples and ask for a description you keep.
Pick the three samples carefully, because the description can only be as honest as they are.
- A message to a client you were pleased with after you sent it.
- A caption that sounded like you rather than like a caption.
- The paragraph about your salon on your own booking page, if you wrote it yourself.
Nothing copied from another salon's website. Nothing a chatbot wrote for you last month, or you will get a beautiful description of a chatbot. And nothing with a client's name and details still in it.
Then read what comes back and cross out whatever is not true. It will flatter you. It will say "warm and playful" when you are warm and blunt, or find a pattern in one sample and call it a habit.
The crossing out is the actual work. What survives is your AI brand voice document, eight to 10 lines, plus the short list of words you never use.
That last list is the bit that stops output sounding like a stranger. Not the adjectives you chose. The ones you refused.
The block you paste at the top
Put the three together, keep it under a page, and keep exactly one copy of it.
That final line earns its place. Every other line tells it what is true; that one tells it what to do when something is missing, which is the moment a wrong number gets born.
Some tools have somewhere to store standing instructions so you paste it less often. ChatGPT's Projects are on every plan including the free one, and each project carries its own instructions that apply inside it. Worth setting up, though that storage is per project and per tool, so treat the copy in your own note as the original and anything stored inside a tool as a copy of it.
Where an AI brand voice document stops working
You will hit three walls, and they are all the same wall.
A new chat starts empty, so you are still pasting. A stored instruction lives in one project inside one tool, so the day you try something else, you are doing this again. And none of it reaches your actual files, so the moment the job involves a folder of photos or a spreadsheet rather than a conversation, the document is back to being something you paste by hand.
The fix is a file that gets read automatically, every session, without anyone remembering to paste it. That file is called a CLAUDE.md, and Give It a Memory: Your Business's CLAUDE.md, Line by Line is where it belongs. It sits a level above this one, because it assumes Claude Code is on your machine, and that is its own two posts.
The reason to do the hour today anyway: the three documents you wrote are the contents of that file. Nothing gets written twice. You are just moving it from a note into somewhere it gets read for you.
What this actually reclaims for you
Steph's admin evening is two hours, twice a week. Say four things get written in each session, and each one needs three minutes of setup typing first: who she is, what she charges, what her notice period is. That is 12 minutes a session before anything useful happens.
Then say one in four comes back with a price or a policy she has to spot and correct, and call that five minutes. So 17 minutes a session, twice a week, is about 34 minutes a week and roughly 29 hours across a year.
The hour it took to write the three documents is paid back inside the second week. Everything after that is just not explaining yourself again.
Two places to go from here. If you could not write your four policy lines without hesitating, write the policies properly first. If you could, the next rung is stopping the pasting altogether: give it a memory.