Every groomer has had this conversation. The dog is on the table, the owner is halfway to the car, and someone remembers the nails. It gets done, it goes on the invoice or it does not, and either way it was never planned for.
Extras are the easiest money in a pet business and the hardest to ask for consistently. Asking takes a moment nobody has, and the moment it would land best is not when the booking is made. It is later, when the appointment is sitting in a diary and the owner is thinking about the dog.
That is the moment Petboost now uses. Here is what shipped between 4 and 9 August.
1. Customers can add extras after they book
A customer who has already booked can open that appointment in their portal and add a nail trim, a teeth clean or a retail product themselves.
The extras on offer are your real add-on services, filtered to what actually applies to that pet, and the price breakdown updates in place as they choose. Any discount already on the booking is kept.
It applies to pending and confirmed one-off bookings. Courses, stays, bookings already paid with package credits, and the source booking of a recurring series are all excluded, because each of those has its own pricing behaviour that a mid-flight change would disturb.
The practical effect is that the upsell stops depending on somebody remembering to ask. You configure the add-ons once. The customer does the rest, at the moment it suits them.
2. Petboost tells you which pets are overdue
The quietest way to lose money in this business is a regular who simply stops coming. Nobody cancels. There is no gap on the calendar to notice, because the booking that would have filled it was never made.
Petboost learns the normal visit rhythm for each pet and tells you who has slipped past it, in two bands: 7 to 13 days overdue, and 14 days or more.
They appear on the customers screen, can be filtered and exported, and come through as a segment for a bulk message. So the follow-up is a two-minute job rather than a spreadsheet exercise, and a lapsing regular is something you notice rather than something you work out six months later.
3. Required details are collected while they book
Custom fields you have marked as required are gathered during the pet owner booking flow.
Petboost works out what is missing for that specific pet and owner, asks for it as part of booking, and will not let the booking finish until it has it. Vet practice, emergency contact, desexed status: whatever you have decided you need before a pet walks in.
One rule worth knowing, because it catches people out: a field can only be made required if customers are allowed to edit it. A required field that the customer cannot fill in would be a dead end, so Petboost will not let you build one.
4. A check before you charge a booking early
Charging a booking days before it happens asks you to confirm, and tells you exactly how early it is.
The check runs everywhere a charge can start: the appointment itself, Mission Control, the quick menu, and the bulk charge on the attention card. It is a small thing that matters most on the busiest days, when somebody is working through a list quickly and a Friday booking is sitting next to a Tuesday one.
5. Memberships
Five changes, all aimed at the same thing: making a plan easier to run once it is live.
- Terms and conditions regenerate from the plan. Change the benefits or the pricing and rebuild the terms to match in one click, so the document a member agrees to always matches what you are selling.
- Plans group by family. The same offer at different billing frequencies sits together as one card with the options inside it, on your public page, in the enrolment dialog and in the plans list.
- Benefit redemption shows on the calendar. A booking that drew down a membership benefit carries a redemption badge wherever package credits already appear.
- Benefit windows follow the billing period. A monthly benefit resets when the member is billed, so someone who joined on the 20th gets their full month between the 20th and the 19th.
- Filter customers by membership. Find every active member, every lapsed one, or everybody on one plan, and carry that straight into a bulk email.
6. Deposits get their own line
A deposit taken at booking appears as its own line in payment activity, and activity can be filtered by type. Your customers see the same breakdown in their wallet.
If you have not turned deposits on yet, the deposits post covers them end to end.
The through-line
Four of these eleven changes move work from you to the software at the moment the work naturally happens: the customer picks their own extras, Petboost watches the visit rhythm, the booking form asks for what is missing, and a charge that looks early gets questioned.
That is the direction. Not more screens to check, but fewer moments where the right thing depends on somebody remembering.
Everything here is live now. The full list, including the smaller changes, is on the product updates page.
