Pet Grooming & Boarding POS: Appointments, Kennels, and the Vaccination Clipboard

Full Book, Sharp Blades: that is the whole reality of a grooming salon. A client walks in with a matted doodle, a nail-trim regular, and a boarding reservation for the holiday weekend — and the front desk has to price the dematting add-on, confirm the rabies certificate is current, and hold a kennel run for Friday without double-booking it. A generic register sees only line items, so the groomer keeps the schedule on a paper book, vaccination cards live in a filing drawer, and the no-show Friday slot sits empty because nobody worked the waitlist. Build the flow around the appointment and the animal — timed services, pet records, and kennel occupancy — and the salon stops turning away good bookings while the kennel sits half empty.

Book by breed, coat, and clock — not by generic half-hours

Grooming time is not fungible: a chihuahua bath is thirty minutes and a doodle full groom with dematting is three hours. Price and schedule from a service catalog keyed to size and coat — bath, full groom, deshed, nail trim, teeth brushing — with duration blocks and add-ons (dematting, flea treatment, creative color) that extend the slot automatically. Show the groomer's column with real capacity so the booker cannot stack two giant grooms back to back, and let the schedule carry the intake notes (matting warning, sensitive skin, bite history) straight to the tub. When the book knows how long each animal really takes, the day fills without the 4 p.m. pileup that pushes every pickup late.

Let the vaccination record check itself at check-in

Boarding and daycare cannot run on trust-me paperwork. Keep a pet profile with vaccination expiry dates — rabies, distemper, bordetella — captured at intake from a photo of the certificate, and block a boarding confirmation with a hard stop when a required vaccine has lapsed, not a sticky note the desk forgets. Flag temperament, allergies, feeding instructions, and vet contact on the same profile so any handler sees it at a glance. When the record enforces itself, the holiday-weekend rush checks in without the awkward call telling a family their dog cannot stay.

Run the kennel board like an airline seat map

Boarding inventory is runs, suites, and cat condos — and it sells out. Track occupancy on a calendar board by unit type and size, with check-in and check-out dates that release the run for cleaning turnover before the next guest. Handle the real-world mess: extended stays that push checkout a day, daycare dogs that convert to overnight boarding mid-week, and peak pricing for holidays that applies automatically from the rate calendar. Keep a waitlist per unit type so a cancellation refills the run within the hour instead of sitting empty. When every kennel night is visible on one board, the busiest weekend of the year stops being a spreadsheet panic.

Take deposits on the bookings that hurt when they no-show

A Saturday full groom and a holiday boarding week are revenue that cannot be recovered if the client ghosts. Require card-on-file at booking for high-value slots, take deposits on boarding stays and holiday grooms, and fire confirmation and reminder messages — booking, 48-hour, day-of — with a one-tap confirm or reschedule link. Apply the no-show and late-cancel policy from the same record so the fee posts to the client's next visit instead of living in the groomer's memory. When reminders and deposits do the chasing, the book holds and the waitlist actually converts.

Close the day with tills, tips, and tails reconciled

Salon close is retail plus appointments plus animal care. Count every register against its sales, split groomer tips and commission by provider so payroll starts from the day's record, and balance deposits held against boarding stays still in-house. Then add the care layer: retail add-ons (shampoo, treats, bows) rung against inventory, consumption of back-bar product tracked per groom, and tomorrow's board previewed — arrivals, departures, daycare headcount, and lapsed-vaccine flags — before the lights go out. Export the day's figures to match processor deposits, with deposits, tips, and retail tagged separately. When tills, tips, and tails all come from the same system, the full book turns into full revenue instead of busy-looking chaos.