Hang it on the one you would actually turn a booking away for. For most multi-service businesses that is people for grooming and space for everything else, and the mistake is not picking wrong so much as picking both.
The question only appears once you run more than one kind of service. A grooming-only business has one answer and never thinks about it. Add daycare and the answer changes per service, because a daycare day needs a yard and does not care much which of your three staff is in it, while a full groom needs a particular pair of hands and can be done at any free table.
Every constraint you add is a slot you may be giving away
Constraints feel free and they are not.
Take a Saturday with three groomers and two tables. If the service requires both a named groomer and a table, availability is the overlap of the two, and an hour where a groomer is free but both tables are in use is an hour the booking form will not sell. With three staff and two tables, that overlap is a real limit and modelling it is right.
Now take the same business with four tables. The tables never bind, so the overlap adds nothing except a second way for availability to fail. Any hour that drops out because a table was misconfigured, blocked for cleaning, or simply never given working hours is an hour of a groomer's time you had and did not sell.
At $95 a groom, two of those a week across the year is $9,880. That is why the answer is not "model everything to be safe". Modelling everything is how a business ends up believing it is full while its staff sit down.
Two constraints, two shapes in Petboost
People and space are set up differently, so getting them straight saves an afternoon later.
Capacity on a person is Pets at a Time on the team member or the session, and it means at the same moment rather than across the day. A groomer set to 1 does one dog at a time and several across a morning.
Capacity on a space is on the resource, and a resource is one of three things: a Location such as a room, a yard or a boarding suite; an Asset such as a van; or a Service Schedule, which is a schedule with working hours and a capacity that is not a person, a place or a piece of equipment at all.
That third type is the one multi-service businesses under-use. A home daycare that runs meet and greets on Tuesday to Thursday afternoons can make Meet and greet a Service Schedule resource, give it those hours, and stop meet and greets eating daycare capacity. Each resource is its own column on the calendar under Group By, so the different kinds of work sit side by side, and you can block one over a holiday while the others keep taking bookings. Getting started with resources covers the three types and the assigned services step.
Choosing per service, then checking you were right
Work through your services one at a time and ask what you would say no for.
A full groom: the groomer. A daycare day: the yard. A boarding night: the suite. A meet and greet: neither, really, which is exactly when a Service Schedule gives it a calendar of its own without borrowing anyone else's.
Then assign only what you answered. A service with no requirement at all is the other failure, because nothing stops the booking form selling it, and that is how a Saturday gets nine dogs booked into a room for six.
Check the working hours on every resource while you are there. A resource with no template is left out of the capacity analysis entirely and reads as No template rather than a percentage, so a space you never gave hours to is a space you cannot measure. And a resource with parallel capacity has its available hours multiplied by that capacity, which means a yard set to the wrong number quietly skews every utilisation figure that follows it.
Assign each service only what it needs
Set the requirement on each service's own Team & Resources tab, one service at a time.
- Open Services, then Manage on the service and Manage Service.
- On Team & Resources, under How should team members work for this service?, choose Required if a particular person is what you would say no for, otherwise Optional or Not used.
- Under How should resources work for this service?, choose Required if the space binds and pick it under Eligible Resources, otherwise Optional or Not used.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
Read the blue summary line on the tab before you publish. It says in one sentence what the booking engine will do with the answers you gave.
Before you act: capacity, staffing ratios and the standards expected of each type of space 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 before you change your numbers.