Struggling with period fiqh - feeling unsure about when I'm pure

As-salamu alaykum - I keep getting confused about when I'm considered tahir after my menstrual cycle. For background, my usual haidh lasts about eight days, so I normally do ghusl on day 8 or 9 depending on when I stop seeing discharge. Last month it was lighter and shorter, so I did ghusl on day 6. This month has also been lighter. Yesterday was day 6: I woke up and wiped brown discharge. A couple hours later I wiped clear discharge with a tiny dot of yellow, so I assumed I was clean. It wasn't prayer time yet and I was leaving the house, so I planned to do ghusl and pray when I returned home. Since it was only day 6 I put a khuff or similar covering (kusruf) in to be cautious. When I got home and checked it had brown discharge, so I postponed ghusl and didn't pray. Nothing else came out all day, but before bed I wiped pink discharge. I woke up now and there's a small bit of brown again. I'm worried that based on a hadith I know - “We did not regard brownish or yellowish discharge after the period ended as being anything that mattered.” - I may have been supposed to treat the earlier clear discharge as the end of my period and should have done ghusl and prayed, meaning I missed prayers unnecessarily. Does anyone have practical fiqh guidance on how to handle these intermittent discharges and when to count oneself clean? Any simple rules or examples from madhahib that help decide when to make ghusl would really help. JazakAllahu khair.