The Feedback That Was Hard to Hear
The last six months have been the busiest stretch of shipping we have had. Memberships, packages, stay pricing, travel, an AI assistant that answers your customers at midnight. Most of what came back was good, and we are grateful for it.
Then a groomer in Adelaide said something that stuck. She loved the product. She had also stopped opening the service settings page, because every time she did she lost ten minutes deciding whether any of it applied to her.
She was not wrong. We counted. One service had grown to about 110 settings across eleven screens.
None of them are bad settings. Every one of them exists because a real business asked for it. The problem is that we showed all of them to every business, and a one-person mobile grooming van was being asked to have an opinion on things built for a twelve-run boarding kennel.
Two Buckets
So we went through every configuration screen in Petboost and put each field in one of two buckets.
The first bucket is what a business needs to sell the thing. A service needs a name, a price, how long it takes and who does it. That is on screen when you arrive.
The second bucket sits behind a single switch called Advanced options, with a line underneath telling you exactly what is inside so you can decide not to open it.
Duration and Timing used to show twelve fields. It now opens on two.
The Bit That Surprised Us
Here is where our assumption fell apart. We expected the advanced bucket to be the big-business bucket. Multi-site operators, franchises, kennels with sixty runs.
That is not what the data said, and it is not what the examples look like.
Think about a solo dog walker who takes one dog at a time. Not because of a limit in the software, but because one lead in each hand is the honest answer for most dogs. Except for siblings. Two dogs from the same house walk fine together, so she takes two, as long as they live together.
That is an advanced setting. She is a business of one.
Or the grooming salon run by one person. Mornings are fine for anything. By two in the afternoon her shoulders are done, so she does not want a 30kg labrador on the table. The afternoon service simply refuses dogs over 20kg, and those slots never appear to the wrong customer.
Again, one person. Again, advanced.
Or the mobile walker whose van covers five suburbs and who does not take certain breeds on a group walk, for reasons her insurer put in writing.
None of these businesses are big. They are specific. That turned out to be the useful word, and it changed how we made every decision after it.
We Checked Instead of Guessing
Before moving anything we counted what businesses actually configure across every paying account. It corrected us more than once.
Weight limits looked like a niche boarding feature. They are the most-used advanced setting in the product, on half of all standard services, mostly at grooming salons pricing by size.
The address on a resource looked optional. Nearly every location resource has one, so hiding it would have meant a panel that was always open and a switch that did nothing.
We also built the split in four places, looked at the result, and took it back out. A panel that hides a single control which is already a switch is just ceremony. A panel over a preview can never honestly tell you how much is inside it. Those screens are better without it, and saying so was more useful than shipping the pattern everywhere for the sake of consistency.
What We Refused to Hide
A few rules kept us honest.
If you have already set something in the advanced layer, the switch opens by itself. You can never end up with a setting you configured sitting behind a closed door, and the switch shows a count so you know something is in there.
Turning the switch off hides fields. It never changes them. Clearing a value stays a deliberate act on that field.
Anything that affects money stays visible. Your bank details, the rates that apply on a public holiday, a warning about a rule that will stop customers booking. None of that moved.
And where another part of Petboost sends you to a setting, that setting is not allowed to be hidden when you arrive.
Where It Is
The split is live across services, team members, resources, sessions and your business settings. Nothing changed about what Petboost can do. The same fields are in the same places, and your existing configuration is untouched.
If your business is the specific kind, and most good ones are, open the switch once and it stays open for you.
Petboost is Australian pet business software for grooming, boarding, daycare, walking and training. Start a free trial or have a look at the features.