AM and PM visits: one booking or two, and how to price the second?

One booking for the day, with the morning and the evening added as two services on it. Price the evening as its own shorter service rather than looking for a second-visit discount, because there is not one.

The question comes up because the booking form looks like it wants one service per appointment. It does not. The Services field is a multi-select, and each service you add keeps its own start time, its own duration and its own team member. That is the shape a two-visit day needs.

What one card buys you and what it costs you

The case for keeping the day together is admin that compounds.

A fortnight of twice-daily visits is 28 visits. As one appointment per day, it is 14 cards on the calendar, 14 invoices, and one conversation per day if something changes. As separate morning and evening appointments, it is 28 of each. The owner gets twice the paperwork for the same fortnight, and so do you.

The visits still behave as two events where it matters. Both appear on the run when they are mobile services with an address, each carries its own arrival time, and each can sit with a different sitter if the evening drop-in is covered by somebody else.

What you give up is independence. One card means one cancellation and one invoice. If the owner drops the evening visit for a week because a neighbour is home, you are editing a service off a booking rather than cancelling one. That is usually easier. It is only awkward when the two visits genuinely belong to different arrangements, and then two appointments is the right call.

Pricing the second visit

There is no second-visit rate to switch on, and that is the useful thing to know before you go looking for one.

Everything that differs about the evening drop-in has to live in a service. So build it as one. A thirty-minute evening visit with its own name, its own duration and its own price sits next to the hour-long morning visit, and the total on the booking is simply the two added together.

Then price it from your own sum rather than by halving. If the morning visit is an hour at $45 and the evening is twenty-five minutes at the same house, the drive is the same, the access is the same, and only the time in the house dropped. Charging $25 for it prices the minutes and gives away the trip. Something closer to $30 to $35 usually reflects what the visit actually costs you, and the owner reads it as a shorter visit rather than a discount they should have got.

Where the second visit is somewhere else, it is not a second visit at all. It is a separate client with its own drive, and it belongs on its own booking.

Build the day as one booking

Put both visits on the pet's one card, each with its own start time.

1. Open Appointments, select New, then Appointment.
2. Beside the date at the top of the form, switch off Magic Availability Check.
3. Choose the pet, then under Services for, which names the pet, add the morning visit and then the evening one.
4. Set Start Time and End Time on each visit.
5. Answer Notify customer?, then select Create Appointment.

Both visits appear as chips and the price and duration update as you go. Using the booking form covers the field and what to do when a service is greyed out.

The check has to be off to give the visits different times. With it on, Petboost is finding you one slot, which is not what a two-visit day is.

For a fortnight of the same pattern, choose Bulk Create under Create before you build the first day, then add the other dates under Select Additional Dates rather than repeating yourself. It keeps the pet, the services, the notes and the payment setup across every date, and the review step shows you which days clash before anything is created. Nothing is written until you confirm, and a date that fails does not take the others with it.

One thing to avoid. If the owner asks for an extra visit on the Thursday, open that booking, select Manage and Edit, and add it under Services for. Adding it as a charge from the invoice with Add Item puts the money on the bill and nothing on the calendar, so the visit has no time, nobody is rostered for it, and it never appears on the run.

Before you act: visit schedules, access arrangements and what constitutes adequate care in an owner's absence can be covered by your state or territory rules and by your insurance. This is general information rather than legal advice. Check your own requirements before you change how often you visit.