We get asked for API access a lot, and it's a good question. It usually comes from a marketing agency a business has just hired, who want to do a proper job and need the numbers to do it.
Petboost doesn't have a public API today. We've thought about opening one up and we're open to building it. But every time we sit down with a business to work out what they actually need, we end up back inside Petboost.
The curve at the top of this post is more or less how those conversations go, and we're on it too. We've drawn the big plan ourselves plenty of times. If you've spent years joining systems together, an API is the sensible first thing to reach for. It's only once everyone sits down with the actual list that the plan gets smaller again.
What does a pet business need API access for?
Mostly reporting. "API" tends to be shorthand for "I need the data", which is fair enough, and once you go through it together the list is usually shorter than anyone expected. The agency wants to see which ads turned into bookings, what those bookings were worth, and whether the clients came back.
Most of that is already in Petboost.
| What gets asked for | Where it is in Petboost |
|---|---|
| Booking conversions in Google Ads, Meta or Google Analytics | Conversion tracking. Paste the IDs into Branding and your booking form sends each booking and its value to them |
| Which campaign a booking came from | Campaign links and UTM tags. Where clients come from shows new clients, bookings, revenue and who booked again, by source |
| Figures for a monthly report or dashboard | CSV exports across Reporting and Intelligence, including every appointment with its campaign source |
| A client list for Mailchimp or another email tool | Marketing Ideas exports the customers in a segment as a CSV |
| Card payments in Xero | Xero's own Stripe bank feed. Cash and bank transfers are recorded separately |
Why it's better done inside Petboost
Your calendar, your payments and your client messages already live in the same place. Anything worked out there is worked out against the real booking, at the moment it changes.
An API hands you a copy. The copy is out of date as soon as someone moves a groom, cancels a boarding stay or refunds a deposit, so now you're also running something to keep it fresh. And a copy has lost its meaning along the way. Petboost knows a household with 3 dogs on one booking is one visit, and it knows a daycare day paid with a pack credit isn't new cash. A general reporting tool sees rows, and somebody has to teach it all that again.
Then there's the cost of another tool, which is easy to miss at the start. It's another login and another bill. It's your clients' details sitting in one more system, and a report that quietly goes wrong when a field changes and nobody notices for a month.
We sell Petboost, so of course we'd say this. Mailchimp, Xero and Google's own tools are all good at what they do, and we're happy to send data to them. We just don't want you to have to build plumbing to get there.
If it isn't in Petboost, we'll build it
When a business needs something Petboost doesn't do, the fastest and easiest route is usually for us to build it into the product, where every pet business can use it and nobody has a pipeline to look after.
And we're always open to building new capabilities, API access included. If you're running your own app, or combining a group of sites with other systems in your own data warehouse, that might be the right answer for you. We'd work out the exact data points you need with you, so you're not left to work it out alone.
So far, every one of those conversations has ended back inside Petboost, using capabilities built for pet businesses.
What to do when your agency asks
Work through 3 things with them before anyone builds anything:
- Which report or decision is this for?
- Which exact fields does it need?
- How often does it have to update?
Then bring those answers to us. If you're on Petboost, ask us in chat and we'll work through it closely with you and your agency: whether Petboost covers it now, what we could build, and if neither gets there, the exact data points you'd need.
Not on Petboost yet? Book a demo and bring your agency along.
