Two Edges, Two Different Questions
Every booking page has a far edge and a near edge. How far into the future somebody can book, and how close to the appointment they can still book it.
They get set together, usually once, usually by whatever the defaults were, and they are answering completely different questions. The far edge is about how much of your future you are willing to sell today and at what price. The near edge is about how much warning you need to do the job properly.
In Petboost both are per-service settings, Minimum Advance Notice and Maximum Advance Booking, so a nail trim and a two-week boarding stay do not have to share a policy (Petboost help centre).
The Far Edge: What Opening the Book Actually Sells
The mistake people make with the far edge is treating it as a convenience setting. It behaves like a pricing setting.
Consider a boarding kennel with a twelve-month window. In July, somebody books the week between Christmas and New Year. That is your scarcest, most valuable capacity, and you have just sold it at your ordinary nightly rate, five months before you would have set your holiday rate, to somebody who would have paid the holiday rate quite happily because they book that week every year.
You cannot get it back. A booking accepted at a price is an agreement, and re-pricing it afterwards is not simply available to you.
So the rule for the far edge is that you do not open a date until the price for that date is right.
Petboost lets you set a rate uplift on specific days and on public holidays, with a customer-facing label and the option to advertise it on your showcase page. Load those before the window opens rather than after, and the far edge stops being a leak.
The second reason to be careful is confidence. A date twelve months out is a date where you do not know your staffing, your prices, your premises or whether you will still be offering that service. Every booking you accept out there is a promise made by a version of your business you have not met yet.
The far edge, by vertical
Grooming. Eight to twelve weeks, rolling. This is the one place where a generous far edge is straightforwardly good, because it is what makes the standing appointment possible. A client who grooms every six weeks needs to be able to book the next one while they are standing at the counter, and a four-week window makes that impossible.
A recurring series is better than a long window anyway, because it puts the next several appointments in the diary in one action rather than relying on the client to come back and do it. We wrote the whole case in recurring appointments and standing bookings.
Boarding. Deliberately staged. Ordinary dates on a three to six month window, peak dates opened on a date you choose, with the rates already in place. Announcing that Christmas bookings open on 1 September is a marketing event as well as an operational one, and it beats letting them dribble in from March.
Daycare. Short, because attendance is a habit rather than an event. Four weeks is plenty, and packages or memberships are the mechanism for commitment rather than a long window.
Training and puppy school. The intake is the unit, so the window is really the enrolment period for the next course rather than a rolling number.
Walking and sitting. Recurring commitments rather than distant one-offs. The far edge matters much less than whether the weekly slot is locked in.
The Near Edge: What You Need Before the Dog Arrives
Minimum notice exists to buy you preparation. The honest way to set it is to list what actually has to happen between a booking being made and the appointment being deliverable, then measure that.
For a salon that is usually very little. You need to not be double-booked, which the availability engine handles, and you need a vaccination certificate if you require one. Two hours is often genuinely enough, and a two-hour near edge means a cancelled slot can be refilled by the booking page rather than by you texting people.
For mobile it is longer, because the route has to work. A same-day booking forty minutes off the run costs you the two jobs either side.
For daycare and boarding it is longer again, because an unassessed dog cannot simply arrive.
The most common error is a near edge set defensively rather than operationally. Forty-eight hours because it feels safer means your Thursday cancellation cannot be refilled online at all, which is a real cost paid every week to avoid a rare inconvenience.
The near edge and approval mode are the same decision
If your near edge is short, you cannot also be in manual approval, because a booking made at four for tomorrow morning needs an answer tonight. If you want the reassurance of reviewing bookings, the near edge has to be long enough that you will actually get to it.
The better resolution is usually to shorten the near edge and replace approval with rules, which we worked through in instant confirmation or approval.
Leaving Room for Your Regulars
The awkward consequence of a long far edge is that your best clients are not always the fastest to book. The households who have been coming for six years are the ones most likely to assume they can sort it out later.
Three things help.
Open peak dates to existing clients before the public. A text a week early is not a discount, it costs nothing, and it is the single most appreciated thing you can do for a long-standing client.
Convert the regulars to standing bookings so the question never arises. A recurring series holds the slot without anyone having to remember.
And when a household is booking several dates at once, make that easy rather than making them go around the loop four times.
When to Widen and When to Tighten
Widen the far edge when you are turning away regulars for dates you had not opened yet, when your rebooking rate at the counter is low because the slot they want is not visible, or when a competitor opens their peak season before you do.
Tighten it when you are taking bookings you cannot price properly yet, when your staffing beyond a certain point is genuinely unknown, or when a large share of distant bookings end up cancelled.
Shorten the near edge when cancellations sit empty because nobody could book them in time, or when you are manually accepting short-notice work anyway, which means the rule is fiction.
Lengthen it when short-notice bookings arrive unprepared, without certificates, without forms, or in the wrong part of the run.
The number to watch is not bookings. It is empty slots inside 48 hours. If you have those every week and your near edge is 24 or 48 hours, your near edge is the reason.
Sources
- Petboost Help Centre, Booking Settings and Availability: Minimum Advance Notice, Maximum Advance Booking, and how each rule filters availability. Accessed 30 August 2026.
- Petboost, Surviving the silly season.
- Petboost, Recurring appointments and standing bookings.
Diagrams show the real Petboost interface with demonstration data.