Boarding and daycare are the only two pet verticals where technology has crossed from back-office into the product itself. A customer choosing between two kennels will ask whether they can see their dog. Nobody asks a groomer that.
That changes how you should think about this spend. A camera system is not overhead. It is part of what you are selling, and it is also the thing that protects you when someone claims their dog was mistreated.
Cameras, done properly
Power over Ethernet, not wifi. This is the decision that separates a system that works from one that drops out on the day you need the footage. A facility is steel mesh, concrete and water, which is close to a worst case for wireless. One cable carries both power and data, and it does not care about any of that.
Yes, it means running cable. Do it once, during the build, and it is the cheapest part of the job. Retrofitting is what costs.
Coverage planning. Think in zones rather than counting cameras. Every play yard, every kennel block, the entrance, the office, and any transition point where dogs move between areas. Transitions are where incidents happen and they are where facilities under-cover.
Low light matters more than resolution. The interesting hours are early, late and overnight. Infrared or a genuinely good low-light sensor, not a floodlight, because a bright white light on a sleeping kennel block at two in the morning is a welfare problem.
Record locally, back up to cloud. An on-site recorder with cloud backup, not cloud only. An internet outage should not be a recording outage.
Weatherproofing and mounting. Proper ingress rating outdoors. High enough that a dog cannot reach it and out of the hose path indoors.
The law, which almost everyone gets wrong
Video in a working area of your own premises, with notice, is generally manageable.
Audio is not. Under the state Surveillance Devices Acts it is generally an offence to record a private conversation without the consent of all parties, and your staff talking to each other in a kennel block is a private conversation. Most cameras ship with the microphone enabled.
Turn it off, and check that turning it off in the app actually stops recording rather than just muting playback.
If you have employees you are also conducting workplace surveillance, which carries its own duties: tell staff it is happening, where the cameras are and why. New South Wales is the most prescriptive and requires prior written notice and visible signage.
The full detail is in the cameras post. Read it before you buy, not after.
Live viewing as a product
If you offer customers a feed, decide three things first.
What else is in shot. A camera covering the entrance shows every other customer.
What happens at three in the morning. Someone will watch, see a dog that looks unsettled, and ring. Sometimes they will be right and it will be the reason you catch something early. Sometimes they are watching a dog dream. Set the expectation up front and have a policy for how fast someone checks.
Whether you can actually deliver it. A feed that buffers is worse than no feed, because it looks like you are hiding something.
Environmental monitoring
The unglamorous one that pays for itself.
Temperature and humidity sensors in each block, alerting to a phone. An Australian summer and a kennel roof are a bad combination, and the failure mode is not gradual. A sensor that texts you at 38 degrees is cheaper than the alternative by an amount that does not need explaining.
Water flow or level, if you run automatic waterers. They stick, and they stick silently.
Power monitoring, so you know the block lost power before the dogs tell you.
None of this is expensive. All of it is the sort of thing you install after the first bad night, and everyone would rather have installed it before.
Kennel-side screens
A rugged wall-mounted tablet in each block. Feeding, medication, notes, incident logging, done where the dog is rather than remembered and typed up at five.
The alternative, and it is a legitimate one, is the printed kennel card and run sheet with a QR code on each. Scan it and the full record opens. That is often better in a wet block: paper does not care about hoses, gloves or a flat battery, and three people can read the same sheet at once.
Most well-run facilities we walk into use both. The card is on the run, the tablet is at the end of the block, and the system underneath is the same one.
Public address, even a simple Bluetooth speaker per block. Calm music at a low level genuinely reduces barking, and being able to speak to a yard from the office is useful.
The office side
Everything from the salon stack applies: counter tablet, booking-integrated payments, label printer, mesh wifi, failover, UPS.
Two additions specific to boarding:
Labels matter more here. Every dog's belongings, every medication, every feed. A label printer at check-in is the difference between a smooth handover and a bag of someone else's toys going home.
Occupancy needs to be visible. Whatever runs your bookings has to show you the house tonight, not just a list of arrivals. If it does not, you will overbook a run eventually, and it will be on a long weekend.
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Where our interest lies, plainly. We have no affiliate arrangement with any brand named here and we earn nothing if you buy. Petboost is our own product, we make money if you use it, and this post recommends it for occupancy, kennel cards and run sheets. Price the alternatives.
This is general information, not legal advice. Surveillance law is state based. Check the Surveillance Devices Act and workplace surveillance rules for your own state before installing anything.