What is on the sheet, and what is not
By the door of every daycare there is a laminated sheet. Drop-off 7 to 9, pick-up closes at 6. C5 sighted before the first day. Water bowls topped at 10, 12, and 2. If a dog goes off its food, ring the number on the fridge.
It is laminated because it gets wet, and on the wall because a dozen people need the same answer when the person who knows is not in.
Now notice what is missing. There is no second sheet. AI standard operating procedures would cover the tool half of the business: what may be typed into a chat window, who reads a drafted message before it reaches a client, or which of the four people rostered today may download the client list. Every daycare has one of these sheets, and it always stops exactly where the newest half of the work starts.
The direct answer. AI standard operating procedures for a pet business are four short documents rather than one policy: what the business is, the jobs written down, the rules for people, and the red lines. Each carries a named owner and a date it is next read. The documents are ordinary. The assembly and the governance are the part nobody talks about.
Who this one is for, and who it is not for yet
Every other post in this series is written for a two-chair salon: Steph, the owner-groomer we follow as a worked example through the series, her groomer four days a week, and Deb on Saturdays and the front desk. That business fixes a consistency problem with a conversation, because three of you stand in the same room most days.
This one is written for a different business. Say 10 people: two full-time on the floor, three part-time, four casuals covering a shift or two, and a manager who is not the owner. Shift handovers. People who work one day a week and never meet the people who work the other six.
If you are the two-chair salon, you do not need this yet. Put your prices, your policies, and how you talk into a memory file for your business, then build one skill for a job you keep explaining. At your size, that is the whole manual.
Come back when you hire the fourth person, or the first casual who works a shift you are not there for. This one sits at the top of the ladder in this series, on the rung we call Running on rails.
At 10 people the problem is consistency, not capability
The move from "I use AI" to "we use AI" is not a jump in capability. Everyone on your floor already has a chat window on their phone. The jump is consistency, and consistency gets worse as the tools get better.
Three people doing the same job three ways is worse than one person doing it badly. One person doing it badly is a known quantity: you learn the shape of their mistakes and check for those. Three versions produce output nobody can rank. When the daily update for the same dog reads three ways in a week, the owner cannot tell which is the house standard, and neither can you.
That cost never arrives as a complaint. It arrives as a client who stops quite believing the notes.
Your team will use AI whether or not you have a policy. That is a better argument for writing one than compliance is. The choice is not whether it gets used on your floor this week, but whether the version being used is yours.
The four AI standard operating procedures a daycare runs on
None of the four is new; each has its own post in this series. What changes at 10 people is that they stop being habits and become documents with owners and dates.
One: what the business is. Your hours, prices, policies, and how you want to be spoken to. Teaching it your prices, policies, and voice is the plain-text version and the memory file is where it lives. At 10 people it stops being your file and becomes the business's, so it lives somewhere shared rather than on your laptop.
Two: the jobs. A skill is a job written down; how to build one is post 22 and 12 written out in full is post 25. This is the document your manager should write and you should not, because they do the jobs and you only remember doing them.
Three: the rules for people. A one-page policy you can print is that page, and I am not writing a second version of it here.
Four: the red lines. Not preferences: the things that do not happen even when somebody is rushed and the output looks right. Where AI must never go in pet care is the clinical half and what you must never paste into an AI chat is the client-data half. The lines your team will meet look like this:
Never paste into an AI chat:
And never let it:
Who owns each one, and when it is next read
A document owned by "the team" is owned by nobody, and you find that out around week five.
- What the business is: the owner. Nobody else can answer "what do we actually do about that".
- The jobs: whoever does the job most often. Write it for them and it describes how you would do it rather than how it gets done.
- The rules for people: the owner. A decision, not a description, and decisions belong to whoever carries them.
- The red lines: the owner, with your vet's wording anywhere it touches an animal. These are the lines you will be asked to bend, so they cannot belong to somebody a busy afternoon can overrule.
Put the name in, not the role. A document with a departed name demands a new one; a document that says "management" belongs to nobody for two years.
Then one line at the top of each: the date it was last read and the date it is next read. Not "reviewed annually". A date, in the diary, with the same name against it. Document one goes wrong a fortnight after a price rise. Document four goes wrong after a near miss, which is the one you must not leave to be reviewed calmly six months later.
Twenty minutes a quarter. If it is not in the diary it is not a review, it is an intention.
A casual starts on Saturday and the owner is not in
This is the day the manual works or does not, and the most likely day for a rule to be broken: the person who knows the rule is at a wedding and the manager is on the floor with 30 dogs.
What good looks like is small: one printed page the new person reads before touching anything, and three lines at the top that answer yes or no. Nothing carrying a client's name or address goes into anything on a personal phone. Nothing gets sent that a person has not read. If you are not sure, it waits for the manager, and if the manager is not in, it waits until Monday.
Day one is not the day somebody gets access to the tools. A casual covering two shifts a month needs no login to the booking system, no export permission, and no account in the business's name. Access is a later conversation, on a named day, done by a named person.
The page itself belongs to post 31. Mine is when it changes hands: at the door, by the manager, before the first dog, not emailed at 9pm on Friday. Whoever hands it over is the message, which is the same instinct behind building team culture deliberately.
How you find out a rule is being ignored
Not from an audit. Nobody has ever run the audit they scheduled, and a business at 10 people has less spare attention than one at three. You find out from the output, later than you would like, usually from one of three tells.
- Two versions of the same answer inside a week. Two people answer the same client question differently and both sound fine. That is document one out of date, or unread.
- A number nobody can source. A price, a notice period, or a date turns up in a message and is in none of your files. That is a confidently invented answer that got as far as a client.
- A message that does not sound like anybody who works for you. Three adjectives where you would have used none.
A written rule is advice, true of the laminated sheet by the door as much as of all four documents above. Writing "never send anything unread" does not stop a message being sent; it only makes clear afterwards that it should not have been.
What genuinely stops an action is duller than a document: what the computer may do without asking you first, and who has access to what. Which is why the least AI-shaped control is the most effective one you own.
Find the export permission and check who holds it. In ours it is an admin-level permission: Admin and Owner Admin only, and a Service Performer cannot export data at all. Somebody who cannot download the client list cannot paste it anywhere.
So give yourself a reading habit rather than an audit: 10 minutes on a Friday, one named person, on the week's drafted messages. Reading for drift is the only version of this you will still be doing in March.
A manual nobody reads is worse than no manual
Say that flatly, because it is the common failure. A manual nobody reads is worse than none, because it creates a belief that the thing is handled. No manual leaves you slightly nervous, and slightly nervous is a useful state to run a business in. A manual in a folder leaves you confident and wrong.
What makes one get used is not quality. It is short, because past four pages nobody has read the fourth. It is owned by a name, and it carries the date it is next read.
The test takes a morning. Ask two people who were not in the room what the rule is on drafting a message to a client. If the answers match, you have a manual. If they do not, you have a file, and the file is harming you by making you think otherwise.
Nothing in it may depend on a connection that does not exist
The quickest way to write an operating manual that is wrong on the day it goes up is to describe a link that is not there.
You cannot point an outside AI tool at your booking system. There is no key to hand out and no setting to switch on, and that is true of Petboost today: nothing for a business owner to connect, and no public API behind it. Anyone telling your manager otherwise is describing a future, not a Tuesday.
So every job in document two starts with a file: a CSV you exported, a folder of photos off a phone, or a block of text somebody pasted in. Asking your business a question from an export is that route in full. The export is a step in the job, so it has an owner and a permission attached, exactly like the water bowls at 10, 12, and 2.
Which is why document two names who exports, from where, and where the file lands. In Petboost the complete export is a separate CSV per data type on the Export Your Data screen under Billing, so a job needing appointments and owners means two downloads and somebody who knows which two.
What writing your AI standard operating procedures actually costs
Do not let anyone tell you this is a quick job, or that it can be handed off whole.
Say four hours across two evenings for a first pass, and closer to six if your prices and policies are not already written down in one place. Those are your hours, not the manager's, because documents one, three, and four are decisions about the business and nobody else gets to make them. Document two is the one you hand over.
Write it badly and short this week rather than well and long next quarter, because a rough document on the wall gets corrected by the people reading it and a good one in a drafts folder gets nothing. Anything you would not say to a new starter before lunch on their first morning is decoration, and decoration is what makes page four unread.
What this actually reclaims for you
Four documents, four hours of your own evenings, and 20 minutes a quarter to keep them true.
Here is the other side, as a worked example rather than a promise. Ten people, each stopping you once a week to ask what the wording should be or how a job is meant to run, at five minutes a time, is 50 minutes of your week. Across a working year that is around 40 hours. Take off the four quarterly reviews and call it 38, which is a working week back for writing four pages once.
The hours are the second-best thing this buys. The best is that when a client asks why the note about her dog reads differently this week, there is one answer and you already know it. That is the reason 10 people can sound like one business.
To see all four in motion across a real week, that is a week in the life of an AI back office. And if you would rather walk through how roles, exports, and who-can-see-what get set up before you write a word of your own, Book a demo and we will go through your setup rather than a slide.