The hydrotherapy pool at Hound Health in Bondi holds one dog.
Not one dog per lane. One dog in the water, with a therapist standing in there next to her. So when the nine o'clock session runs twelve minutes over, there is nowhere for the 9:45 dog to go. She waits in reception. Her owner, who has a meeting at ten, waits with her.
We own that business. Hound Health Bondi opened in 2018, it still trades, and it is still ours. Annika founded it and runs it day to day, and she is one of our advisors, which is a polite way of saying she is the person who tells us when something we shipped has made her Tuesday worse.
Every significant Petboost release goes into Hound Health before it reaches anybody else's account.
What most pet businesses are already running
Most of them run a patchwork. A card machine or Square at the counter. A calendar tool for bookings. A spreadsheet for who owes what. Xero at the end of it. And a whiteboard for today, because none of the above knows that Station 2 is out of service or that the little poodle at 11 is nervous around the dryer.
Nothing in that list is a bad product. They simply do not know about each other. So you are the integration layer, and you do that job at half past seven in the morning with a lead in one hand.
The other common setup is a pet-native product built somewhere else. Usually the United States. Usually well made. Usually shaped by a market with different payment rails, different tax, different public holidays and a support desk that answers while you are asleep.
Both are reasonable choices. We built a third one.
The question people forget to ask a software company
Who runs this before I do?
For most vendors in this category the honest answer is nobody. The roadmap comes from support tickets and sales calls. Tickets tell you what broke. Sales calls tell you what a prospect thinks they want on the day they are being sold to. Neither one tells you what happens at ten past seven on a Monday when the whole day arrives at once and one of the dogs is on medication.
We have a business for that.
What "one unified system" actually has to mean
Everyone in this category says all-in-one. The phrase has been worn completely smooth. So here are four questions you can put to any vendor, us included, and check the answers yourself inside a free trial.
Does a payment know which appointment it belongs to? If the answer is "we export to Xero", that is a reconciliation job with extra steps. In a unified system the $85 is attached to Bella's 10am full groom, permanently, and your bookkeeper never has to ask.
Can one household hold three dogs, each with a record of its own? Not three lines in a note field. Three animals, three histories, three sets of vaccination dates, one invoice, one pick-up.
Does the room have a limit that the calendar obeys? A groom needs a station. A stay needs a kennel. A hydro session needs a pool that holds one. If capacity lives on a whiteboard, the calendar will keep selling you into trouble.
When a certificate expires, does the booking stop? Or does a human at the door stop it, on the busiest morning of the week, in front of the owner?
We wrote a whole piece on why human appointment software cannot answer those four, so this one will not repeat it. What follows is what we build against instead.
The eight pillars
We use these internally to decide what gets built and what gets refused. Every feature has to serve one of them. Anything that serves none of them does not get made, no matter how good the demo looks.
1. One system of record
Eight tools means eight logins, eight monthly fees, and eight places for the same customer to exist slightly differently. The one that hurts is the pet. Bella's coat notes are in one system, her vaccination certificate is in an email, her last four visits are in a groomer's head, and the family's card is on file somewhere else entirely.
One record means the booking, the payment, the pet, the household, the notes and the message history sit on the same object. When your groomer opens Bella at 9:55, everything about Bella is there.
2. Time back in your day
The admin is the part nobody signed up for. Booking calls taken mid-groom with wet hands. Invoices chased at ten at night. Sunday spent catching up on a week that never quite closed.
Confirmations send themselves. Reminders fire on their own schedule. Payments collect after service without an awkward conversation. The work does not disappear, it stops needing you personally.
3. Money that arrives without you asking twice
Card on file charges after the service is done. Pre-authorisation holds funds before an appointment, so a no-show costs the person who did not show up rather than you. SMS payment links let someone pay from the car park.
Craig at The Grooming Salon in Brisbane put the counter version of this better than we would:
"Reception takes payment on the card reader at the counter against the booking, so nothing gets written down twice."
4. Customers who book themselves
You are mid-groom and the phone rings. Answer with wet hands, or let it go and hope they do not ring the salon down the road. That should not be a decision you have to make forty times a week.
Self-service booking puts your real availability in front of a customer at eleven at night, filtered so they only see the services and times that actually apply to their dog. Most of the booking that happens on Petboost now happens without anyone picking up a phone, and a large share of it happens outside trading hours. For the customers who genuinely need a conversation, you have more room to give them one.
5. A schedule that respects capacity
This is the pillar that generic software cannot fake, because a human appointment tool books a person's time and a pet business consumes physical space.
Petboost tracks capacity per resource. Grooming stations. Kennel zones. Play areas. Vehicles. Hound Health's daycare space stops at fifteen dogs, its boarding rooms stop at four stays, and the hydro clinic stops at one. When a resource is full it stops accepting bookings. Nobody has to remember.
6. Records your accountant can reconcile
Month end should not involve the sentence "which appointment was that $85 for". Every payment is linked to its appointment, invoices go out branded and automatically, and Stripe feeds into Xero so your bookkeeper is matching rather than reconstructing.
7. Every preference remembered
"What blade does she take again?" is a small question that costs you something every time you ask it. The client hears it as being forgotten.
Every pet carries its history, its preferences, its vaccinations and its care notes. A groomer sees the blade and the hot spot. A trainer sees the behavioural notes. A boarding facility sees the diet and the medication schedule. When the groomer who normally does Bella is off sick, the person covering still knows about the dryer.
8. The freedom to step back
Can you take a Thursday off without the business wobbling? For a lot of owners the honest answer is no, because the business runs on them rather than on anything written down.
Bookings confirm themselves, payments collect themselves, reminders send themselves. This is a people business and it stays one. Automation just means the hours you are actually there get spent on the animals and the customers instead of on the backlog.
What Hound Health tests that a roadmap cannot
Hound Health is not a demo account. It has paying customers, a physical site at Bennett Street in Bondi, and an unusually wide service list for its size. That width is exactly why it is a useful place to break things first.
It runs a daycare, which they call the Day Retreat, on a premise with a hard capacity limit. It runs boarding, including puppy boarding and boarding for dogs on medication, in rooms that hold a fixed number of stays, with a public holiday rate because Christmas costs more to staff. It runs hydrotherapy, physical therapy and remedial massage in a clinic that holds one dog. And it runs mobile services that never touch the building at all: a Hound Taxi, vet chaperone trips, a Medication Buddy, and a visit where somebody goes to your house and puts your dog's dinner out.
It sells hydrotherapy in packs of five and ten. It runs memberships, currently a Hydro Club with a silver tier and a gold tier.
Put that against a feature list and you can see what gets exercised in a normal week. Premise capacity and travel time in the same diary. Prepaid credit that has to draw down in the right order. A subscription that has to know how many sessions are left this month. Holiday pricing. Medication schedules. A pool with a capacity of one.
The memberships are the honest part of that story. There are three retired plans sitting behind the two that are live now. We designed each of them, ran them at Hound Health, watched what they did to the diary, and killed them. A plan that includes a set number of visits a month quietly turns into a capacity question on the days everyone actually wants, and you only find that out by selling the plan and then living with the diary it produces. Petboost has a frequency cap and a member ceiling because that problem is real.
That is also true of packages. Prepaid credit looks simple until somebody buys a ten-pack, uses four, brings a second dog, and asks whether the balance covers her too.
What our customers say about the people part
Hound Health is one business. The rest of the product was shaped by spending time inside more than a hundred Australian pet businesses: grooming salons, daycare facilities, training practices, walking businesses, boarding kennels and puppy schools.
Craig bought The Grooming Salon in Brisbane at the start of the year, having run businesses for thirty five years and never a grooming salon. His G2 review is the clearest description of that part of the job we have had from a customer:
"What stands out is that Petboost is built by people who actually understand this industry. I asked them once how to handle a price rise & instead of just answering me they went & wrote a proper guide on it for the industry. When I showed them the whiteboard my team writes out & rubs off every day, they'd already seen the same board taped up in salons interstate."
And on how it compares to everything else he has used:
"I've used a lot of software over 35 years. This is the best in its field in Australia."
Conor at Dogs of Melbourne described the setup:
"Initial setup was incredibly easy since Frazer came to our business and set it up with me."
Melissa at McKinnons moved a genuinely difficult business across:
"Moving our entire business - 15 staff, 2 salons, 5 trailers, plus grooming, daycare, boarding, and behavioural training - was no small task. The level of support, training, and one-on-one guidance we received made all the difference. It allowed us to get up and running quickly and seamlessly, while continuing to operate the business throughout the transition."
And Sacha at My Dogs Daycare, who had spent six years on an American system, put the comparison in her own words:
"I was using an American company for 6 years, which was ok but expensive, not a great system and to get any support took days... they focus on what animal businesses actually need and listen to their clients."
What we do not do
A page like this is worth less if it only contains the good parts, so here are the limits.
We do not migrate your existing future appointments. We move your customers, pets, photos and history, usually inside about a day. Your forward calendar you build yourself, and that typically takes two to four hours. Every business sets its schedule up differently, and a diary imported wrong is worse than no diary at all.
Our support is not instant. It is founder-led and it is genuinely good, and there are days when a reply takes longer than we would like. What we will stand behind is the quality of the answer you get. We are not going to quote you a response time we cannot hold on our worst week.
If you need one thing, buy one thing. A solo walker with one service, no premise and no packages does not need a system with capacity rules and a membership engine. Something simpler will do that job and cost less. We would rather say that now than have you find it out in month three.
The boring question
When you are comparing us against anyone, ask the unglamorous one as well. Is it up at 7:30 on a Monday, when the whole day arrives at once?
That is the one that costs you if you get it wrong, and it costs you the same whichever plan you are on.
If you want to see the rest of it, the eight pillars have their own page with the detail, and the pricing is public.
