Yes, on every dog, with no exception for the friendly ones. The value of an assessment is not that it finds the aggressive dog. It is that it gives you a controlled first hour with a dog you know nothing about, in a yard where you can still fix what you find.
The argument against is always the same and it is always about capacity. An assessment takes a staff member out of the yard for an hour and brings in less than a day rate. On a Monday that already has twenty-eight dogs booked, the temptation to say yes to a new one on the owner's word is real.
What one bad morning costs
Do the sum once and you will stop having the argument. Take your average day rate, multiply by the dogs in the yard, and that is what is at risk in the twenty minutes an unassessed dog takes to show you why it should not have been there. At $65 a day and twenty-eight dogs, a morning you have to end early is $1,820 of service you refund or redo, and you still pay the staff who worked it.
It is not only that day. A fight sends one dog to a vet, sends the rest home early, and puts a review on your listing that the next six months of good days will not outrank. Set against that, an hour of one staff member's time is the cheapest insurance you will buy this year.
There is a second return that nobody costs. The assessment is where you find out the dog resource guards a water bowl, that it cannot settle without a crate at lunch, and that the owner's "he's great with everyone" means great with the two dogs he sees at the park. All of that goes on the pet record before the dog spends a day with you.
It also changes what you can charge. An operator who assesses every dog can say so on the booking page, and the families who care about that are the ones who book five days a week rather than one.
The reason to build it as a gate rather than a policy
A written policy is a thing you enforce. A prerequisite is a thing that enforces itself, which matters because the failure mode is not somebody deciding to break your rule. It is a self-service booking on a Sunday night that nobody looked at.
Build the assessment as its own bookable service and make full daycare depend on it. That way the new owner who finds you at 10pm books the assessment, because the daycare service is not on their list yet. Nobody had to say no.
Cancelled bookings behave the way you want here. A cancelled or declined appointment does not count, so a family that books the assessment, cancels it, and tries to book a full day still meets the gate rather than sliding past it.
Set the gate on the service
The rule sits on the daycare service's Who Can Book tab, behind Advanced options.
- Open Services, then Manage on the daycare service and Manage Service.
- On Who Can Book, switch on Advanced options.
- Under Service Prerequisite, switch on Require Prerequisite Service and choose your assessment.
- Under What counts as met, choose Completed.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
Completed means the dog has actually sat the assessment rather than merely having it in the diary. Service prerequisites covers the other options and when a booked-but-not-yet-attended assessment is the right bar.
Two settings are worth knowing before the first exception lands on you.
Per-pet overrides live on the pet, under Settings & Overrides. Use Satisfied for the dog that came across from another daycare with a history you trust, and for the ones you assessed before you built the gate. Use Not satisfied for a dog you have decided is not coming back yet.
Skip Service Prerequisites is different and lives on the customer, not the pet. It turns the gate off for every pet on that account, which is right for a staff member's own dogs and wrong for almost everything else. If only one dog in a household needs an exception, use the per-pet override.
Lesson 106, the temperament test as the gate, shows the setting on the real screen.
One trap on the combination. If you also set required badges on the same service, the dog has to pass both, and a dog blocked by a badge simply does not see that service on the owner's booking form. Pick one gate unless you genuinely mean to stack them.
Before you act: assessment requirements, group sizes and supervision ratios 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 how new dogs are admitted.
