Christmas Day is not a Tuesday. Neither is the Saturday before it, or the Monday everyone books because they are off work.
Most pet businesses know this and price for it anyway, in their heads. The Sunday jobs cost more to staff and pay the same. The public holiday you opened for was worth double and billed like a Wednesday. You either eat it, or you keep a note somewhere and try to remember at the counter.
Twenty two things shipped between Saturday 16 and Tuesday 19 August. Three of them are about that gap. Here is the whole lot, starting with the money.
1. Rates by the day
Set a different rate for a public holiday, or for any weekday you choose.
It works the way you would price it on paper. Pick a percentage or a flat amount. Name it in your own words, so "Weekend rate" or "Public holiday" is what everyone sees rather than a code. Choose which services it covers, because a nail trim on a Sunday might not need the same lift as a full groom. Each public holiday can take the policy rate or carry its own, so Christmas Day can sit above the rest without you building a second price list.
The part that matters commercially is what the customer sees. The rate is on your public page before they book. While they are choosing a date, the affected days carry a badge, so the price is attached to the day they are looking at rather than buried in terms. The amount is in the total before they confirm.
Nobody arrives surprised, and you stop absorbing the cost of opening on the days that cost you most.
2. Pricing, time and caps by pet attribute
The other half of pricing is not the day. It is the dog.
A matted coat is a different job to a maintained one. It takes longer, it is harder on your groomer, and if you take three of them in the same afternoon you have quietly booked a bad day for yourself. Most software treats that as a note on the profile and leaves the pricing to you.
Attributes now carry their own booking rules. Give one a surcharge, as a percentage or a fixed amount. Give it a duration change, so the appointment claims the minutes the job actually needs. And give it an attendance cap, so you take at most two of them per groomer, or per resource, in the same window.
The appointment form shows the adjustment as you build the booking. The price and the length are right before you save, rather than something you correct afterwards or write off.
This is the update to look at if your prices have drifted from your effort. It is a pricing primitive, not a field.
3. Collect a cancellation fee your way
A cancellation fee that only works on a card on file is a fee you write off whenever the card is not there.
Charge the card on file, send a payment link, take a bank transfer, or mark it as cash. It works from the appointment, from the calendar and from Mission Control, so you can settle it wherever you happened to be when the cancellation came through.
4. A declined card says why
When a payment fails, the reason from the bank comes back in plain English, on the appointment and in the customer wallet, with what to do about it. Insufficient funds. An expired card. A security code that did not match.
Your client sees the same reason written for them when they go to settle it, which is the difference between a message they can act on and one they ignore.
5. Petboost Wrapped
Every pet has a year in review, built from the visits, notes and photos already on their profile.
Visit counts, the services they had most, their favourite groomer. You scroll it in your own brand colours, and you send the owner a keepsake as a PDF with your colours and logo, every photo from the year, and the notes your team wrote.
It costs you nothing to produce because the data is already there. It is the most shareable thing we have shipped in months, and the reason to send it is not marketing, it is that people like it.
6. The showcase page editor
Edit your public page with the page itself in front of you.
Set your primary and secondary colours, your button colours and a showcase video, and choose which sections appear. The preview updates as you work and everything publishes together. When you go to hide a section that helps customers find you, Petboost says so before you do it, because a page that looks tidier and ranks worse is a bad trade.
7. Redemptions, fees and unused credits on the members view
Memberships are only worth running if you can see what they are doing.
The members view carries what each member has redeemed and the fees they have paid to date, marks a plan that is waiting to activate, and surfaces credits sitting unused. Plans sharing a name carry a badge so you can tell them apart, and each billing cycle is listed once.
The unused credits line is the one to act on. A member with credits they never redeem is a cancellation forming.
8. Customers can move a booked stay
A pet owner can open a boarding stay they have already booked and move it themselves. The form opens on their current check in and check out, and the times they chose hold while they change the dates.
That is one fewer phone call on a Monday morning, and it is the sort of thing owners now expect to do without asking.
9. Session mapping when you move a course attendee
Moving an attendee to another course shows how each session maps across before you commit, and names the dates that clash. Choose the pet first and Petboost pairs the sessions by date.
10. And the rest
Thirteen more landed in the same four days. Business description, badges and announcements on your showcase page. Bulk archive or delete, team members included. Reach our team from inside the chat. Same or different start times across a bulk create. Save a Social Studio post straight to your photos. Member pricing state on the appointment form. Clearer membership benefit and billing language. Chips on the customer list opening the right tab. A progress bar on every page change. What feeds Expected Revenue, itemised. Include archived pets from an empty list. Get help in chat from billing and registration. A font picker with category filters that warns you when a font will be hard to read.
Why twice a week
We ship on Sunday and Wednesday now, and we write it up both times.
The reason is not transparency for its own sake. It is that a feature nobody knows about is worth nothing, and a fortnightly round-up buries the thing you needed three weeks ago. Twice a week means the gap between shipping something and you being able to use it is measured in days.
If you want the short version, the Wednesday Ship Radar runs on Instagram after each one.
Start with the rates
If you only do one thing from this list, open Business Hours and set your weekend and public holiday rates before December booking starts in earnest. It takes about five minutes and it changes what you collect on the days that already cost you the most.
Start your free trial, or book a demo and we will set your rates up with you.