Packages solve it. A deposit on a casual daycare day is the wrong tool applied to the wrong number, and it will cost you more in abandoned bookings than it ever recovers in no-shows.
Start with the sum, because it settles the argument on its own. A $65 casual day with a 25% deposit holds $16. If the owner then cancels late, you keep your cancellation-fee percentage of the $16 and refund the rest. Half of $16 is $8. You have asked a customer to enter a card, delayed their booking, and protected eight dollars.
The attendance problem is not a payment problem
Daycare no-shows have a different cause from grooming no-shows. The dog that does not turn up on Thursday is almost never a customer who has changed their mind about you. It is a customer who worked from home, or whose kid was sick, or who simply forgot it was a daycare day because nothing on their calendar said so.
Money up front does not fix forgetting. It also does not fix the thing that actually costs you, which is the gap between how many dogs you planned to staff for and how many walk in. A deposit gives you eight dollars against a day you rostered three people for.
Prepayment does fix it, but only the kind of prepayment that happens before the booking rather than during it. Once a family has ten days sitting in their account, the days get used. The money is already yours, the attendance decision is no longer a spending decision, and an unused credit sits on your balance sheet as something they will come back for.
Sell the pack after the assessment, not at it
The order matters more than the discount. A pack offered to somebody who has never left their dog with you is a big ask at the wrong moment, and it is usually declined. The same pack offered on collection day, after a first day that went well and while the owner is standing there hearing how the dog got on, sells.
Set the tiers so the middle one is the obvious answer, and let the value analysis do the talking. When you enter the number of sessions and the pack price, Petboost's Customer Savings card works out the regular price, the saving as an amount and a percentage, and the saving per session. Put that figure in front of the customer rather than describing it.
Two behaviours are worth knowing before you build them. Editing a pack changes future purchases only, so the balances your existing customers hold stay exactly as sold. And eligible pets on one customer account share the balance at one credit per pet per visit, so a two-dog household gets through a ten-pack in five days rather than ten. Price that in, or use Minimum pets to keep the multi-dog pack for multi-dog homes.
Build the pack and put it on your booking page
Publish the pack for purchasing so it sits in your online booking and they can buy it at 9pm without you.
- Open Packages, select Add New, then New Package.
- On Basic Info, enter the Package Name.
- On Services & Quantity, choose the daycare service and set Number of Sessions.
- On Pricing & Settings, enter the Package Price and read Customer Savings.
- Under Allow Pet Owners to self-service purchase?, choose Yes - publish for purchasing.
- For a pack only multi-dog homes can buy, switch on Minimum pets.
- On Review & Publish, select Create Package.
Choose No - keep this hidden for anything you only want to offer by hand, which is what staff-only packs are for. Getting started with packages covers cloning a five-pack from a ten.
Where the casual rate still earns its place
None of this means dropping casual bookings. The casual rate is what makes the pack look like a decision, and a three-tier display next to it does the price anchoring better than any wording you can write.
Keep it for the trial family, the visitor from out of town, and the dog who comes twice a year when the owner has a wedding. Then watch which families are buying casual days at a rate that has quietly become a routine. A household at three days a week on casual rates is a membership conversation, not a pack one, and that is the point where recurring billing starts doing more for you than credits do.
The number to watch is redemption, not sales. A pack that sells well and redeems slowly is deferred work and deferred revenue arriving at once, usually in the week you are least able to take it.
Before you act: prepaid credits are money you owe until they are used, and expiry terms are subject to Australian consumer law. This is general information rather than legal or financial advice. Check your own terms before you set an expiry or change how a cancelled day is treated.
