The thing that keeps a business on software it has outgrown is rarely the software. It is the move.
Years of clients sit in there. Every pet, every breed, every note about which dog cannot go out with the big group. A service menu that took a year to get right, and prices you finally stopped second-guessing. Nobody wants to type all of that in again on a Sunday, and anyone who has done it once will tell you how much of it came out wrong.
So we made that part our job instead of yours.
What actually happens in your first 24 hours
You send us an export from your current system. CSV, Excel, a Google Sheet, whatever your old provider hands over when you ask for it.
Typically within 24 hours, your account has:
- Your clients, with their emails, phone numbers, addresses, emergency contacts and notes
- Their pets, with species, breed, birthdate, weight, microchip, vaccinations, allergies and behavioural notes
- Your service menu, with its pricing
- Add-ons
- Team members and their working hours
- Resources: rooms, baths, grooming stations, kennels
- Account settings
- Packages, and the credits your clients already hold
Package credits are the ones people forget to ask about. They are balances your clients have already paid for, and they come across with everything else, so nobody turns up expecting to redeem a groom that Petboost has never heard of.
Your upcoming appointments come across too. We load the forward calendar from your old system, which is the part most people assume they will be stuck doing themselves at nine o'clock at night.
You log into your own business. Not a demo with three pretend dogs in it.
The one thing we ask you to do
Check it.
That is the whole ask, and it is worth explaining why we ask rather than just doing the lot and telling you it is fine.
We take your old system's records at face value. We do not invent a missing surname, we cannot tell which of two phone numbers is the current one, and we have no way of knowing that Bella's owner moved house last March if the old system never knew it either. Moving data does not make it true.
The calendar is the same, only it matters more. Every business books differently. A wrong time or the wrong groomer against a name is a missed appointment, and that is your morning and your client, not ours. So nothing goes live until you have looked at it.
Put both screens up. Go through the transferred calendar against your old diary, week by week. Browse a sample of client profiles, and look hardest at the people you see every week, because those are the ones where a wrong number costs you something. Anything missing, doubled up or wrong, tell us and we fix it.
You get help with the tedious half. Every account gets a Google Sheet attached to it flagging the records that could not come across cleanly: duplicate clients, an email address that was never an email address, a pet with no name, a date that could be March or could be the third of the month. You see those rather than discovering them in six weeks when somebody rings up.
What does not move
Invoices and payment history stay where they are, because they are tied to your old system's payment processor. Photos stay too, since file storage works differently in every system, and they build back up as pets come in.
Keep the old system open for a few months for anything historical you want to look back at. Most providers hold your data for a while after you cancel, so check their retention policy before you switch it off.
A person, not a portal
Every migration comes with a complimentary setup session with a Pet Business Specialist. A real call, with someone who has done this before and already knows which questions matter for your kind of business.
There is a second one later on. The launch checklist has an account review call in it, a free video call to go through your setup before you switch over. If your business sells packages, the outstanding credits get handled on that call.
Importing is free. For most businesses the migration itself is complimentary too. Where the data genuinely needs cleaning before it can move, that is our Migration Concierge service, and we quote it up front so there are no surprises.
You do not need to be technical for any of this. If you can export a file from your current system and share a link to it, that is the entire skill requirement.
Going live is a checklist, not a leap
Once your data is in, the Launch Wizard walks you through the switch. It adapts to your business, skips steps you have already finished, and any step can be skipped and returned to.
- Pick a go-live date. About 7 days out is the usual window. Choose a quieter day so you have room to answer questions.
- Activate your paid plan when you pick the date. That is what turns on online bookings and SMS reminders.
- Send the pre-written "We're upgrading our booking system" email to your clients. It fills in your business name, your go-live date and your requirements, like vaccination certificates.
- Post the announcement. Clone the Instagram or DL flyer Canva template, reskin it with your logo and colours, post it. There is a printable A4 education flyer with a QR code for the front desk.
- Swap your booking links: your website, your Instagram bio, your Facebook page, your Google Business Profile. A QR card for the front window comes with it.
- Paste in your Google review link, so Petboost prompts clients to leave a review after a good appointment.
- Confirm the calendar. Review the appointments we loaded from your go-live date onwards, tell us about anything that is off, and sign it off when you are happy.
- On the day, stop taking new bookings in the old system, and Petboost is the source of truth from there.
If the calendar work is already moving quickly, 24 to 48 hours of notice is enough. Treat that as the fast path rather than the plan.
There is no switch-over day you have to survive. Keep the old system open beside Petboost until you stop reaching for it, and let appointments that already sit in it finish there.
Where most businesses are at 48 hours
Using it.
Most are up and running within 48 to 72 hours of signing up. The trial runs 14 days, which means the back half of it is not setup at all. It is getting comfortable with the diary, with the team, with email reminders going out on their own.
The trial is Calendar Lite: scheduling, client and pet profiles, team management, resources, email reminders. Online booking, payments, SMS, automations, packages, memberships, intake forms and courses turn on when you upgrade.
Beyond the first day
The first 24 hours are the loud part. The rest is quieter and matters more.
Support answers within 24 hours, and it is answered by people who run a pet business themselves. Petboost started inside one. Our co-founder Annika opened Hound Health in Bondi in 2018, a daycare and hydrotherapy business, and the software it needed did not exist, so we built it. It is still open today.
That is the reason the first 24 hours work this way. Somebody here has already spent the Sunday afternoon typing client records into a new system, and did not enjoy it either.
Your data stays yours the whole time. Yours under our terms, and yours in practice: export your clients and pets to CSV whenever you like, from inside the product, without asking us for permission or waiting on a ticket. Use it for a mail-out, keep a backup, or take it somewhere else.
You do not start from an empty account. And you are never locked into ours.
