Count runs multiplied by nights, not dogs per day. Then set the number from what your team can clean, feed and check on, not from how many beds you can physically fit.
Grooming capacity and boarding capacity are different shapes and it catches people out. A groomer's ceiling is a day: so many tables, so many hours, and tomorrow starts empty. A boarding ceiling is an occupancy curve. Twelve runs is not twelve dogs, it is 360 dog-nights a month, and the difference between a good month and a bad one is what percentage of those nights you sold.
Pets at a Time means at the same time
The setting that trips people is capacity on the resource. In Petboost, Pets at a Time is how many pets can use that resource at the same moment. It is not a daily limit.
A grooming room with three tables and a capacity of 3 can serve three dogs at 9am, two at 10:30 and three more at midday: eight dogs that day, not three. A kennel suite is usually 1 or 2 because that is how many dogs sleep in it, and a play yard is often 8 to 15 because that is how many can be safely supervised in it at once. Resource capacity management has the setup and the worked examples.
For boarding, get the two levels right separately. The run is the sleeping constraint, one or two dogs, usually a household sharing. The yard is the daytime constraint, and it is the one that actually caps a full house, because every boarder passes through it.
Set Pets at a Time on each run and yard
Each run and each yard is a resource, and its capacity is how many pets it holds at the same moment.
- Open Resources and select Manage on the run or yard.
- On Capacity, set Pets at a Time: one or two for a run, the number you can supervise at once for a yard.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
The same tab spells out what the number means: at the same time, not across the day.
The number you can staff, not the number you own
Beds are the cheap part. The constraint that decides whether a full house is profitable or grim is time: feeding rounds, medication, cleaning between stays, yard rotations, and the checks you would want done if it were your dog.
Work it backwards. Take the minutes per dog per day that your standard of care actually requires, multiply by the dogs, and see whether it fits the hours you roster. If twenty dogs needs more hours than you have staff for, your capacity is not twenty, whatever the kennel block says. Setting it higher just moves the failure from the booking form to the floor, where it costs you a review.
The other half of the same sum is the assessment. A day of twenty dogs who all know each other is a different day from twenty where three are new. Gate that with a prerequisite service so new dogs are assessed once before they can book regular stays.
Price the last fifth differently from the first
Occupancy is not linear in profit. The first 60% of your runs carries the rent. The last 20% is the part that decides whether the year works, and it is also the part that costs the most to serve, because it is the peak week when everybody wants the same nights and your team is stretched.
So do not price it the same. Peak dates carry a holiday or special-date rate, and a peak Stay service carries its own deposit. That is not gouging, it is charging for the thing that is genuinely scarce. The quiet Tuesday in March is the one to discount, because a run standing empty earns nothing and costs you the same rent.
Find out what you are actually running at
Guessing occupancy is how operators end up building a new kennel block they did not need, or turning away a dog they had room for.
Petboost measures it. Capacity Utilisation is an on-demand panel inside the Team and Financial tabs in Reporting & Intelligence, not a tab of its own. Click Run Capacity Analysis and it pulls your appointments across the selected range plus 90 days of forward bookings, then works out utilisation per team member and per resource. Capacity utilisation covers the panel.
Four numbers come back: average utilisation, hours booked against hours available, idle hours, and an idle revenue opportunity that prices those gaps at your current revenue per hour. Utilisation is booked hours divided by available hours, capped at 100%, with available hours coming from each entity's working hours template.
One piece of the calculation matters specifically for boarding. A resource with parallel capacity has its available hours multiplied by that capacity, so a ten-hour day on a yard with a capacity of 12 gives 120 pet-hours of availability rather than 10. Get the capacity number wrong and every utilisation figure downstream is wrong with it.
Read the colours as a prompt rather than a verdict. Below 50% average is amber and means you have room you are not selling. Above 85% is red, and for a team member that is burnout and for a room it is a bottleneck. The day-of-week breakdown is usually the most useful thing on the page, because the gap between your quietest and busiest day is the cheapest revenue in the building.
Before you act: capacity, staffing ratios and animal welfare requirements are set by your state or territory and often by your council. This is general information rather than regulatory advice. Check your own licence conditions and local requirements before you change your numbers.