Ask a pet business owner how last week went and you will usually hear "flat out". Ask which service made the most money for the hours it took and the room goes a bit quiet.
Knowing your numbers is the fix, and it matters more than most of us want to admit. We ran Hound Health in Bondi before we built Petboost, so I know what a full diary feels like. It feels like the business is working. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have worked your hardest week of the year and there is less left over than the week before, and the bank balance can't tell you why.
A full diary can hide a thin week
Busy is a measure of how much you did. It says nothing about what that work earned.
Say a full groom is $95 and takes two hours. That is $47.50 an hour. A $40 nail trim that takes 20 minutes is $120 an hour. Fill your Saturday with full grooms and you will feel flat out, and you may have earned less for your time than a day with a few smaller jobs mixed through it. The same sum works for a daycare place against a boarding night, or a solo walk against a pack walk. Those prices are made up for the example. Yours are in your bookings.
One honest limit before we go further. Petboost knows what you charged, what you collected and how long the work took. It doesn't know your rent or what you pay your team, so when I say "numbers" here I mean revenue, time and customers. Profit is still a conversation with your accountant. Revenue per hour is just the closest thing to it you can read off your own diary, and it is usually the number that starts that conversation.
Cut your numbers the way you think about the business
A total is the least useful version of any figure. You don't run "the business". You run a Tuesday, a groomer called Ayla, a pen that sits empty, a suburb you drive too far for.
That is how Reporting and Intelligence lets you slice it:
- By service. The Services tab shows revenue per hour against every service, so the $47.50 and the $120 sit next to each other
- By team member. Use Filter to narrow revenue, volume, trends and rankings to the people and services you pick, or open the Team tab for utilisation and earnings per hour
- By day. See which days run full and which run quiet, and how much an average appointment is worth on each
- By suburb. The Map tab plots revenue, customers and team coverage by suburb
- By customer. Customer Radar sorts people into best, problem and rollercoaster groups from their payment history, declines and no-shows
- By period. Compare & Forecast adds up to three earlier periods of the same length and projects up to three ahead
- By money in the bank. Earned, collected and outstanding are kept apart, so a good month on paper can't hide what you are still owed
Capacity is the cut most businesses have never seen. It takes your team's hours and resources and shows the idle time, plus what that idle time could earn. A table, a pen or a van space with nobody booked is the most expensive thing you own, and it never shows up on a bank statement.
Then it tells you what the number means
A chart still leaves the thinking to you, usually at 9pm. So most tabs carry a row headed Intelligence: insight cards that say what stands out in your figures in a plain sentence, such as "Team utilisation: 55% average. Ayla is at 81%, Jonah is at 29%. You could book 12 more appointments for Jonah without adding hours."
You shouldn't have to take that on faith, so many cards have a question mark in the corner. Tap it and How is this calculated? lays out the figures used, each step of the working and what it means for you. If there isn't enough data to say something useful, no card appears. I would rather show you nothing than a confident guess built on six bookings.
These are intelligent, actionable insights in the plainest sense. Know your numbers, then understand what to do next.
What to do next sits on the same card
A good insight ends with you doing something, ideally before you close the tab.
- Pricing Opportunity spots a wide gap in revenue per hour between services, works out a target price for the underpriced one and estimates the lift
- Demand Imbalance finds your regularly quiet days and offers Create Special Service, a six-step plan called Fill Your Quiet Days
- View No-Shows and View Top Clients open the actual people behind the insight, and a mail icon beside each row opens a personalised draft in your email app, from 11 templates
- Manage Payments takes you to Outstanding Payments, where you can see what is declined or overdue and deal with it
That is the difference between a report and a decision. You started with a total and finished with a price to change, a quiet Tuesday to fill or a list of clients to email.
Four questions to ask once a month
You don't need a finance degree or a free Sunday. Twenty minutes with these will do it. If you want the longer list, we wrote up seven financial KPIs worth tracking.
- Which service earned the most per hour this month, and which earned the least?
- Which day is regularly quiet, and what would fill it?
- Which good customers are overdue, and who is going to contact them?
- How much is still owed to you, and on which bookings?
Write down one thing you will change. Next month, use Compare & Forecast to see whether it moved.
Nobody opens a grooming table, a daycare or a boarding kennel because they love spreadsheets. You got into this because you are very good at looking after animals. The business that pays for it deserves some of the same attention, and it shouldn't cost you your evenings.
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