Booking is the one screen your team touches more than any other. If it's clumsy, every day feels clumsy. The Petboost booking form has always handled every job, from the quick "just put it in the diary" booking to the genuinely complicated one. What we rebuilt is the feel of it: the same power, now in fewer clicks and a lot less scrolling.
The whole exercise was about balance, between ease of use, thoroughness and flexibility. The easy booking should feel instant, the complicated one should still be right there the moment you need it, and neither should get in the other's way.
We ran Hound Health in Bondi before we built Petboost, so the awkward bookings are burned into memory. A walker with a morning and an afternoon visit for the same dog. A groomer redeeming a package credit for one dog while the sibling pays full price. A trainer setting up a weekly session for a year and needing to know it'll actually fit around everything else. Those have always been possible in Petboost. The point of this redesign was to make them quick.
Here's how the form is built, layer by layer.
Two ways to book: Magic Schedule or Quick Create
Every booking starts with one choice, and it's the difference between "find me a time that works" and "put it exactly here".
Magic Availability Check is the find-me-a-time mode. You pick the pet and the service, and Petboost reads your real availability: your team, your resources, your capacity, your notice periods and existing bookings, then shows you the slots that genuinely work. No mental arithmetic, no double-booking the one bath you've got. If a service needs a groomer and a room, Magic Match assigns them for you, or you can pin a specific team member and let it find times just for them.
Quick Create is the put-it-here mode. You already know where it's going, so you skip the availability check and place the booking exactly when and with whom you want. Front desk staff live in this mode when a regular rings up and says "same as always, Thursday at ten". Team members and resources pre-fill with the first eligible option, so a plain booking is basically pick-pet, pick-service, done, and you can still change any of it.
Same form, same buttons, same everything else. The only thing that changes is whether Petboost is finding the time or you are.
One appointment, many services
A single pet often needs more than one thing in a visit. A full groom plus a nail trim. A training consult plus a walk. Each of those can carry its own start time, its own team member and its own resource, all inside one appointment.
That matters because it stays one appointment for the owner: one invoice, one confirmation, one thing on the calendar. Behind the scenes your bather can take the first hour and your stylist the second, but the customer just sees "Bella's groom, Thursday".
The same service, twice in a day
This is the one almost every booking tool gets wrong, and it's the example we always reach for: a dog walker with a morning walk and an afternoon walk for the same dog, same day.
In Petboost that's one appointment with the walk listed twice, at two non-overlapping times. Set the visit count to two, give the first a 9am start and the second a 2pm start, and you're done. It isn't two separate bookings stitched together and it isn't a workaround. The form treats "twice in a day" as a normal thing a pet business does, because it is.
If the two times ever overlap, Petboost stops you before it saves and tells you which one to move. You can't accidentally book the same dog on top of itself.
A whole family in one booking
Households book together. Two dogs from the same home, dropped off at the same time, picked up at the same time.
Add Sibling pulls up only that owner's other pets, so you're choosing from the right family rather than searching the whole database. The sibling inherits the time you've already set, then you give it its own services. Need a pet that isn't in the system yet? Create and Add Pet builds the new pet mid-booking and drops it straight into the appointment.
And because siblings from one home usually share a space, Petboost accounts for that in your capacity. Two dogs from the same family don't each burn a full slot when they're really sharing one.
Add-ons, where they belong
Once a service is on the booking, the relevant add-ons appear beneath it: a blueberry facial on a groom, a nail trim, teeth cleaning. Tap to add, set a quantity if you need more than one. They ride on the same appointment and the same invoice, so an upsell is a tap rather than a second booking.
Recurring, and checking a year actually fits
Some of the best bookings are the repeating ones. The Tuesday walk. The monthly groom. The weekly training block.
Switch the form to Recurring and you set the pattern once: daily, weekly on chosen days, fortnightly, monthly, or a custom interval, ending after a set number of visits or on a date. Petboost generates the whole series from that.
The part we're proudest of is what Magic Schedule does with recurring. When you ask for a weekly slot across a long run, it checks availability for every occurrence, not just the first one, so you find out up front which weeks clash with a public holiday, a day off or an existing booking. Where a week doesn't fit, it offers the nearest alternative so you can move just that one and keep the rest. You're setting up a year of bookings with your eyes open, not discovering the conflicts one no-show at a time.
Managing the series afterwards is just as direct. See the whole run and its progress, skip a single week, or cancel every future occurrence in one action.
Bulk create for the irregular ones
Not every repeat is a tidy pattern. Sometimes it's "these particular dates": a holiday boarding block, or the five daycare days someone picked off a calendar.
Bulk Create lets you choose the exact dates you want and books them in one go. If the customer is paying with a package, the form knows how many credits are left and won't let you book more days than they've bought, so you never oversell a pass by accident.
Packages and credits, redeemed as you book
If a pet is on a package, you see it the moment you pick them, and redeeming a credit is part of booking rather than a separate accounting job. Book the covered service and the line comes through at zero, the credit is drawn down, and the maths is done. Ten-walk passes, grooming bundles, daycare multipacks: they all work at the point you'd naturally use them.
It scales down, and it scales up
The reason all of this sits in one form matters most when you look at who's using it.
A solo groomer or a one-person walking round wants speed. For them the form collapses to almost nothing: pick the pet, pick the service, the staff and room fill themselves in, done in seconds. None of the depth gets in the way.
A multi-location daycare with a dozen staff, shared rooms, vans, packages and memberships wants control. For them the same form opens up: real availability across the whole team, capacity that understands shared spaces, per-service staffing, recurring series checked a year ahead, package credits drawn down automatically.
Nobody has to graduate from a "simple" tool to a "serious" one. The booking form is the same on day one as it is when you've grown to five locations. It just shows you as much as the booking in front of you needs.
Overnight stays are their own thing
One honest boundary: this is the booking form for daytime appointments, the groom, the walk, the daycare day, the training session. Overnight stays and boarding aren't squeezed into it.
Multi-night boarding works far more like a hotel, so it keeps its own check-in and check-out form built for exactly that: arrival and departure dates, the number of nights, the run or room, and per-night pricing. Forcing a hotel-style stay through an appointment form helps nobody, so we didn't. If you board as well as groom or walk, you'll use the day booking form for the day services and the stay form for the overnights, and both sit side by side in the same calendar.
None of the power went anywhere in this redesign. It just takes fewer clicks and less scrolling to reach, which is the whole balance we were after. If you're on Petboost, it's live in your scheduler now.