Software for UK independent pet-service operators

Thirty dogs on the round. Half pay GoCardless DD, a third pay BACS, four still pay cash on the doorstep. Friday afternoon I’ve sent six hundred photos. Sunday afternoon I’m reconciling. Monday morning the daycare client whose Lepto vac lapsed in March is back on the wait-list. Inspector’s due any time.

You’re the dog walker running a thirty-dog pack out of your own van across Suffolk; or the salon groomer with two stylists and a fortnightly-recall diary; or the mobile groomer working an Aldeburgh-Saxmundham-Snape Suffolk route from a converted Sprinter; or the daycare owner with a converted barn, sixty dogs through the gate a week, and a wait-list forty-seven deep; or the cattery owner whose phone hasn’t stopped ringing since school broke up; or the behaviourist booked out six months ahead while puppies you’d help if you had a slot are going to non-accredited trainers with prong collars instead. The software stack is fragmented - Time to Pet is decent if you ignore that it was built for the US tax shape; Gingr is powerful if you ignore the UK localisation gaps and the zero awareness of the Animal Welfare licensing scheme that the inspector grades you on; MoeGo’s modern but doesn’t think about GoCardless DD; ProPet works but the install base is small and the UX is starting to feel late-2010s; RevelationPets and Kennel Booker keep the cattery / boarding side ticking but the photo-update obligation and the round-reconciliation live elsewhere. Or you’re on no system at all - bookings WhatsApp the phone, vaccination evidence is a folder of screenshots, the photo-update obligation is your thumbs all day Tuesday. The weekly DD round half-runs itself, the other half is a Sunday-night Xero spreadsheet. The customer whose dog you’ve walked for eighteen months cancelled the DD on Friday while Bertie was at the groomer’s; the awkward conversation happens at drop-off. The daycare client whose Lepto vac lapsed in March is back in the wait-list queue - the council inspector who turns up unannounced will spot it if it’s not been fixed.

We make custom software for UK independent pet-service operators - scoped per business, sized to the bit between the round you run on a Monday and the round that books itself, the recurring revenue that converts the four cash-payers to GoCardless DD without a single awkward conversation, the photos that post themselves to Bertie’s mum’s WhatsApp, the wait-list that fills the cancelled slot in eleven minutes, the licence rating that holds at five even on the Tuesday the council walks in. Not a Time to Pet / ProPet / Pet Sitter Plus / Gingr / MoeGo / Petcology / RevelationPets / Kennel Booker rip-and-replace - the booking grid works for what it’s for. Not a GoCardless / Xero / Stripe replacement - the payment rails sit where they sit. The bit between - the cash-to-DD conversion ladder that’s the single biggest retention lever in the trade, the vaccination calendar that blocks a booking before the inspector spots the lapse, the photo-on-Bertie’s-mum’s-phone-before-she’s-asked flow that costs you three taps not three minutes per walk, the wait-list-as-a-priority-queue with an offer cascade, the council star-rating audit pack that assembles itself - that’s the bit we build. Tell us what your week looks like and we’ll come back with a sketch.

What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to

• Thirty dogs on the weekly round. Half pay GoCardless DD, a third pay BACS, four still pay cash on the doorstep - and the four cash-payers are the single biggest retention risk in the business because every one of them is a Monday-morning “I’ll get the cash to you Friday” conversation away from churn. Sunday afternoon reconciling against Xero, four customers outstanding, one of those is the cancelled-DD-on-Friday surprise.
• Photo-update expectation - every walk, every dog, every owner. Thirty walks today, thirty photos to thirty WhatsApp threads. By the end of the week you’ve sent six hundred photos and answered two hundred messages. The owner who didn’t get a Wednesday photo because the dog was fine and you were busy is now slightly upset.
• A daycare client whose Lepto vac lapsed back in March. She’s been in eight times since. Council inspector turns up Tuesday morning unannounced, spots it on the vaccination register, the star rating on the council website drops from five to three, customers read the rating before they enquire and the new-customer pipeline goes quiet for nine months while the rating recovers.
• Christmas week kennel - fully booked, two staff on holiday, the panicked parent rings on Christmas Eve wanting overnight Boxing Day. You’re closed Boxing Day. Awkward conversation at four-thirty pm on Christmas Eve.
• New puppy enquiry on Facebook DM Thursday - “can you take Tucker for daycare from May?” The wait-list’s at forty-seven. By the time a space opens she’s eighteen months old and trained - no longer needs daycare. Lost revenue you never knew you almost had.
• Walked Bertie + Mabel + Tucker together for six months. Friday morning Bertie and Tucker go for each other. £400 vet bill for Mabel’s bite, PI insurance covers it, owner of Mabel is furious, two-star Trustpilot review by Saturday, the waiver she signed in October is somewhere in your email.
• Mobile groomer Suffolk route - Aldeburgh morning, Saxmundham lunch, Snape afternoon. Sixty miles, eighty pounds of diesel, five grooms at forty-five quid. The Norfolk customer you took on as a favour costs you eight pounds a groom in fuel.
• Wait-list at forty-seven dogs. Half won’t pay the fifty-pound deposit to hold a position, the other half want it back if they wait too long. A slot opens at eleven am Tuesday - the next-in-line owner doesn’t see the SMS until six pm, by which time you’ve already offered it to the one after.
• The council interprets the Animal Welfare Regs 2018 slightly differently per area - Suffolk wants paper records, Cambridgeshire wants digital, Essex wants both. Three sets of evidence, three audit-prep panics, three Tuesday-mornings-when-the-inspector-might-show-up.
• A behaviourist booked out six months ahead. New puppy bites Monday, owner rings, fully booked til October, she goes to a non-accredited trainer with a prong collar - the dog gets worse, the family is unhappy, and the customer comes back to you in March for the same problem now more entrenched.

These aren’t problems Time to Pet’s next release is going to solve. They’re the layer between the round you actually run and the round that bills itself, the photos that post themselves, the vaccination calendar that blocks the booking before the inspector spots the lapse, the wait-list that monetises the cancellation in eleven minutes, the licence rating that holds at five even on the Tuesday the council walks in. That’s the layer we build.

Example problems we could solve

Five things we hear most often from UK pet-service operators - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Three are universal across the trade (the cash-to-DD conversion + round reconciliation, the vaccination calendar that gates bookings, the photo-update concierge); two are sub-segment-specific where the wait-list engine or the council star-rating audit pack genuinely earns its place. Every build is scoped per business: a solo dog-walker probably needs the first two; a daycare / kennel / cattery operator carrying a council licence will want all five. None of it means binning Time to Pet / ProPet / Pet Sitter Plus / Gingr / MoeGo / Petcology / RevelationPets / Kennel Booker on day one - the booking grid stays where it works; we sit on top.

1. The cash-payer who’s on GoCardless DD by next month - the round that bills itself and reconciles itself on Friday morning, not Sunday night

The four-cash-payers moment: thirty dogs on the round. Half pay GoCardless DD, a third pay BACS, four still pay cash on the doorstep. The four cash-payers are the single biggest churn risk you have - every one of them is a Monday-morning “I’ll get the cash to you Friday” conversation away from quietly going elsewhere. Plus one DD cancelled on Friday while Bertie was at the groomer; awkward conversation at drop-off. The pet-services-distinct weight is that the cash-to-DD conversion is the biggest single retention lever in the trade - every cash-payer converted to GoCardless DD is roughly an 18-month lifetime-value increase and a Sunday afternoon back; the DD-failure signal has to fire the moment it lands so the “Sarah, noticed the DD’s come off - everything OK?” WhatsApp arrives before the doorstep stand-off does.

The full build: Recurring Service Recall - per-pet-and-service recurring object + mixed-payments-reality reconciliation + DD-failure-fires-instantly recovery flow + the cash-to-DD conversion ladder as a first-class objective. Referenced across twenty-two verticals; the pet-services version’s vertical-distinct features are the multi-pet-multi-service per-household structure (one Bertie + Mabel + Tucker household, three pets, two services per pet, one weekly DD), the cash-to-DD conversion cadence (the friendly “we’re moving everyone to GoCardless to make the Friday cash stop being a Friday cash thing - same price, same service, here’s the one-tap mandate link” sequence run quarterly across your cash payers), and the early-warning DD-cancellation alert tuned to the doorstep-conversation timing.

2. The vaccination calendar that blocks a booking before the inspector spots the lapse

The Lepto-lapsed-in-March moment: daycare client. Lepto vac lapsed back in March. She’s been in eight times since. Inspector turns up Tuesday, spots it on the vaccination register, the council star-rating drops from five to three. Customers read the rating on the council website before they enquire - eighteen months of new-customer pipeline goes quiet while the rating recovers. The pet-services-distinct weight is that vaccination is the single most-checked thing on an Animal Welfare audit and the single most-likely-to-slip thing on a busy customer base. The build is shaped around making the lapse impossible to miss - the inspector who walks in finds every pet on the books current, because the booking system refused to take a non-current pet two weeks ago.

Solved looks like: every pet on the books carries a structured vaccination record - Lepto / Leptospirosis L4, DHP (Distemper / Hepatitis / Parvovirus), Kennel Cough / bordetella, rabies if travelling - with the vet-confirmed expiry date for each. The system runs a recall cadence per pet - sixty / thirty / seven days out from any expiry the owner gets an SMS or WhatsApp in your voice “Hi Sarah - Bertie’s Lepto cover expires on 14 April. Please book the booster with your vet and send us the updated cert - we won’t be able to take him in daycare after that date until it’s done. Need a hand finding a vet who can fit him in this week?”. If the expiry passes without an update, the booking system blocks new bookings against that pet with a clear flag - the service advisor sees “Bertie cannot be booked: Lepto expired 14 April; awaiting cert”; the owner sees the same when she tries to book online. Where the customer’s vet’s on a partner integration (Provet Cloud, ezyVet, RoboVet), the cert auto-updates without owner involvement; where it doesn’t, the owner uploads from her phone. The same calendar engine drives the council star-rating audit pack - the inspector who walks in finds every pet current, the evidence assembled, the “how many lapses across the customer base on the date of audit” a one-screen answer.

3. The photo on Bertie’s mum’s phone before she’s asked - without your thumbs

The six-hundred-photos-by-Friday moment: thirty dogs on the round, thirty walks today, thirty photos owed by tonight. By Friday you’ve sent six hundred photos and replied to two hundred WhatsApps. The pet-services-distinct weight is that the photo-update obligation is what differentiates a recurring pet-service from a transactional one - parent-side retention runs on the photo cadence specifically, the owner who didn’t get a Wednesday photo because the dog was fine and you were busy is measurably less likely to renew next quarter, and the build has to cost three taps not three minutes per walk.

The full build: Booking & Review Loop - the day-of cascade extended to the photo-update concierge. Referenced across fourteen verticals; the pet-services version’s vertical-distinct features are the post-walk one-tap photo-per-pet flow (snap, dog selected from the day’s pre-loaded round, caption from a small library of trained phrases in your voice - “Bertie chased a squirrel and won”, “Mabel had a brilliant zoomie in the meadow” - posted to the per-pet WhatsApp thread the owner already knows), the “would you like a longer caption today” one-tap upgrade for owners who pay the photo-rich tier, and the consolidated reply inbox so the two hundred replies don’t scatter across thirty WhatsApp threads.

4. The wait-list that fills the cancelled slot in eleven minutes, not three days

The forty-seven-deep moment: wait-list at forty-seven dogs. Tuesday eleven am - Bertie’s owner cancels his daycare slot for next Wednesday. By the time you’ve messaged the next person on the list and they’ve replied, it’s Friday afternoon and the slot’s been empty for two days. Forty quid gone. The pet-services-distinct weight is that pet-service capacity is genuinely constrained (a daycare can take what its floor space + staff ratio allows, no more), demand is post-pandemic-boom-shaped, and the build is shaped around extracting the maximum revenue from a slot that’s already paid for once - not finding out three days later that Bertie’s mum cancelled and the slot went empty.

Solved looks like: the wait-list as a structured priority queue with an automated offer-up flow. Owner joins the wait-list, pays a £50 holding deposit (refundable on space-offer-accepted or position-released), sees her position publicly. The moment a slot opens (cancelled booking, schedule change, capacity expansion), the system runs an automatic offer-up cascade - SMS / WhatsApp to position #1 “Hi Hannah - a space has opened for Tucker on Wednesday 14 May. Reply YES in 24h to claim, or it’ll pass to the next person on the list”; if no reply in 24h, auto-revoke and offer to #2; same for #3, #4, until claimed. The owner’s view shows the offer cascade in progress so you know which slots are mid-claim. For peak-season (school holidays + Christmas), the same engine runs a “would you like to pre-book the August week now” offer to the regular customer base, six weeks ahead, with the same hold-deposit pattern. The dashboard shows wait-list health (depth, time-to-fill, drop-off rate at deposit) so the capacity decision (taking on a new pen, hiring another walker, expanding the barn) has a number behind it. The same engine handles the cattery / kennel peak-week pre-book offer, the daycare rolling slot-open, and the behaviourist course-cohort start-date - same cascade logic, different cadence configuration per business.

5. The council star-rating that holds at five - because the records were already in one place

The inspector-turns-up-Tuesday moment: inspector turns up Tuesday; facility’s fine, dogs are fine - but the staff DBS records are on Sarah’s phone, vaccination evidence on yours, the incident log on a Google Doc nobody’s edited since January. Score drops to three; customers see the rating online before they enquire; eighteen months to recover. The pet-services-distinct weight is that the council star-rating is the single most customer-facing thing about a licensed pet business - the audit is the one moment where the rating moves, and the audit pack has to be a single-screen fifteen-minute walk-through, with per-council format exports (Suffolk’s paper preference, Cambridgeshire’s digital-only, Essex’s both, Norfolk’s hybrid).

Solved looks like: the licensed-premises evidence pack as a structured live record - DBS expiry per staff member, vaccination feed across the customer base, incident log with timestamped reports, facility policies (fire / COSHH / dog-fight protocol / heat-emergency / hydrotherapy water-quality if you run it), staff training records (animal-first-aid certificates, behaviourist accreditations, hydrotherapist qualifications), the daily welfare check log, the boarding-licence supporting docs (planning consent, water-supply, insurance evidence). The pack assembles itself as you operate - every new booking writes to the welfare log, every vaccination upload writes to the cert register, every incident logs from the tablet at the gate. When the inspector walks in, the audit pack is a one-screen fifteen-minute walk-through, exported in the format your specific council reads - Suffolk gets a printed pack with signed pages, Cambridgeshire gets a digital export with hashed evidence URLs, Essex gets both, Norfolk gets the hybrid. The PIF-affiliated members get the same evidence pack rendered into the PIF code-of-practice format for federation-side audits.

The full build: Compliance Evidence Record - licensed-premises evidence pack as a structured live record. Referenced across twenty-seven verticals; the pet-services version’s vertical-distinct feature is the per-council format export driving the parent-facing customer-website rating, with the PIF format alongside for the federation-affiliated members.

The closest things we’ve already built

• repairminderour SaaS workshop-management software (dogfooded for years on the founder’s own service business). The booking-and-customer-and-asset-and-job-history shape is the same engine as a pet-business operational system: customer (owner) + asset (pet) + service (walk / groom / daycare / overnight) + photo evidence + status + invoice. The pet-side build is the same pattern, with the pet vaccination calendar and the round-of-thirty schedule layered on. See Repairminder.
• mendbuddyour multi-channel AI agent platform behind the Facebook DM / web form / missed-call enquiry triage that lands on your phone while you’re walking the round, the photo-update WhatsApp routing in problem 3, the wait-list offer-up cascade in problem 4, and the “awkward DD-cancelled conversation drafted before you knock on the door” nudge in problem 1. Voice + WhatsApp + SMS + web chat + Facebook DM. See Mendbuddy.
• mendmyiour founder’s service-business storefront with structured customer intake + waiver + first-payment flow. The new-customer-to-first-walk loop (intake → waiver e-sign → vaccination upload → first GoCardless DD → first walk booked) is shape-wise the same as the device-repair intake-to-first-fix loop - the reference for any pet-service business running its enquiry-to-first-paid-service pipeline without picking up the phone. See Mendmyi.
• pharmaceutical-analytics.comanalytics dashboard built for an analytics consultancy. The owner’s KPI surface in problems 1 + 4 + 5 (round revenue by week, wait-list depth and time-to-fill, vaccination-on-schedule rate across the pet base, council star-rating audit-prep state) sits on the same pattern: operational data captured at every touchpoint, decision dashboard for the owner who’s still on the round most days. See Pharmaceutical Analytics.

If your week’s narrower than the whole of the above

Most of the pet-business operator-modes we work with - dog walker, dog groomer (salon and mobile), pet sitter / in-home boarder, dog daycare, cattery / boarding kennel, pet behaviourist / trainer / puppy-class instructor, hydrotherapist, cat-only specialist - share most of the hub above. The bits that genuinely differ scope in discovery: a salon groomer needs the fortnightly-rebook nudge and the breed-specific groom-time estimator where the daily round normally lives; a mobile groomer needs the route-optimisation across an Aldeburgh-Saxmundham-Snape day and the on-doorstep card-terminal flow where the salon flow normally lives; a daycare operator needs the wait-list engine and the council-licence audit pack at first-class scope; a cattery / kennel operator needs the peak-week pre-book cascade and the per-pen capacity register; a behaviourist needs the course-cohort enrolment and the puppy-bite-Monday-they-go-elsewhere routing into an emergency-slot offer. None of these warrant their own page yet - they’re a discovery conversation, not a separate buyer.

Adjacent verticals

• Clinics (vet sub-page)for the vaccination-evidence side of problem 2; vets are where the cert is generated and many pet-service businesses share customer base.
• Independent garagesclosest operational shape (booking + asset + customer-comms + recurring-recall) ported to a different asset class.
• Wedding supplierspeak-season + deposit-ladder + booking-windows pattern shares a lot with cattery / kennel peak-period dynamics.
• Holiday letsthe photo-comms-with-customer / cleaning-rota cadence overlaps the daycare end-of-day photo expectation, and many dog-friendly cottage hosts share customer base with the local dog walker.

FAQ

Tell us what your week looks like

Send an enquiry - what kind of pet business you run (dog walker / groomer / mobile groomer / daycare / kennel / cattery / behaviourist / hydrotherapist / cat specialist), how big (solo + van; salon + two stylists; 60-dog daycare; 30-pen kennel; cattery), your council and licence rating where applicable, your current platform (Time to Pet / ProPet / Pet Sitter Plus / Gingr / MoeGo / Petcology / Kennel Booker / RevelationPets / paper diary / WhatsApp / nothing), where the operational pain lives (the four cash-payers on the round, the Sunday-night DD reconcile, the photo-update-day, the vaccination lapse you found out about late, the wait-list slot that went empty for three days, the Tuesday-inspector who dropped you a star). We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.