What to look for in dog grooming software, and what to ignore

Four demos in a fortnight, and by the fourth you can't remember which one had the nice calendar. They all hold a diary. They all take a card, text a reminder the night before, keep a photo on the dog's file and let an owner book at ten at night. That's the floor of this market now, which is why the demos never separate them. The decision isn't the length of the list. It's the two or three things that would make you go through all of this again in three years.

Start with the bill you'll be paying in three years

Grooming software gets priced three ways, and they behave nothing alike once you grow. A flat monthly fee. A fee for every person on the team. Or a percentage of everything you take on a card.

Petboost is the clearest example of the third: $65 a month plus a 1.4% booking fee, and the subscription drops to $0 once you're putting more than $7,500 a month through the card. Read both numbers together before the waiver sounds like a gift. At $7,500 the 1.4% is already $105, so the fee that disappeared was the smaller one. That's still a good deal in a quiet July, when 1.4% of not much is not much. It moves the other way in December.

Pawfinity sits at the other end: flat tiers, $55 to $110 a month depending on the plan and whether you pay yearly. There's a wrinkle if you're buying from here: they price in US dollars, and while AUD billing exists, their own pricing page says non-USD rates "fluctuate with the exchange market and includes a 2% foreign currency exchange fee". The Australian figure moves every month, and two percent of it is the exchange.

Don't ask which one is cheaper this month. Put your best month and your worst month through all three shapes, and pick the one you'd rather be on when the good month finally turns up.

Does the diary know the dog's on a dryer?

Nearly every system books a groom as one block of time with one name on it. Some let you pad either side of it. A few split a service into steps, so the stretch where the dog's on the dryer and nobody's touching him reads as a free pair of hands instead of a busy groomer.

Whether that matters is a question about your floor rather than software. Solo, one dryer, one table, and it changes nothing, because you're the one standing there. It starts paying the day there's a bather, a second dryer, and the day still runs out at four dogs. Make them do it live on the call: book a second dog into the middle of the first one. Most can't, and you want that answer before you've moved your client list.

Who picks up the phone at two on a Thursday?

Every vendor's site says the support is excellent. The published hours are the part you can actually check. Pawfinity's FAQ puts its support channel at 8am to 8pm US Eastern, seven days, with a phone line for emergencies from 9am to 5pm Eastern, which is the middle of the night here. Petboost is built in Sydney, says so on its front page, and answers in your own timezone.

That's a trade rather than a fault, and plenty of Australian salons run happily on American software without ever needing to ring anyone. But the day the booking page stops taking cards will be a Saturday, and it's worth knowing in advance whether Saturday is a working day where your software lives.

Getting your client list in, and getting it back out

Migration is the part everyone underestimates, and one of the few places an older product beats a slicker one. Pawfinity's FAQ says they import client and pet data from most well-formatted CSV files plus some plain text, and that "our import process is free". If you're coming off paper cards or off something nobody's heard of, a person doing that by hand for nothing is worth more than a feature you'd open twice a year.

Ask three things and get the answers in writing: who does the import, what it costs, and what won't come across. Appointment history, coat notes and photos are the usual casualties, and they're the reason the old system stays open in a second tab for a year.

Then ask the same question backwards, because nobody does. Do reports download, or only read on screen? Is there an export, an API, anything? Petboost answers that one on its own site: no public API today, exports in CSV and PDF. A vendor willing to write down what it doesn't do tells you more than the feature grid.

If one thing is why you're shopping, start there

Most groomers arrive at this with one grievance. Vaccination dates you're chasing by hand, a wages spreadsheet that eats a Sunday, drying time you can't sell. Check that one first and check it hard, because a shortlist built the other way round ends up at whichever product has the longest list. Petboost tracks a vaccination through to its expiry and flags it; plenty of systems keep the date as a field on the form and leave the chasing to you.

What to ignore

Some of what's on a software site is there because a slide needed filling.

• The length of the feature list. Two things will decide this and you already know which two.
• Uptime figures and country counts. Nothing outside the vendor can verify either one, and neither says a word about whether the thing suits your floor.
• Anything in closed beta or coming soon. Price the product that exists on the day you sign.
• "Unlimited", until you've checked what's still metered. Sometimes it's real: both Pawfinity and Petboost include unlimited team logins, which saves serious money on a big floor. Sometimes it covers only what costs the vendor nothing. Pawfinity's SMS runs from 5 cents US a message and document storage from $5 US a month, both on top of the plan.
• A demo driven on a seeded diary. Ask them to build your actual Saturday while you watch.

Five things to make them show you live

1. Book the dog you argue about most, the anxious one or the three-hour doodle, and watch what the price and the duration do.
2. Move that booking to next week and see what happens to the deposit or the card.
3. Take a payment, then go and find it again in whatever your accountant uses.
4. Add a bather, give them half the services, and check the booking page offers only what they can do.
5. Export everything. Then open the file.

Keep reading

• Seglo vs Pawfinity. The same shortlist argument, run line by line against their published pages.
• A marketplace, or your own booking page. The choice sitting underneath the software choice.
• Service catalog. What "a groom is more than one block of time" looks like once it's set up.