Lesson 110

Bookings and the calendar

AM and PM visits, and the in-home overnight

Twice a day is two services on one card and one recurring pattern. An overnight in the client's house is a stay, on a different form, and mixing the two is the usual mistake.

3 min read · Walker, driver or sitter · Running day to day
Open in Petboost

A fortnight away means either two visits a day or somebody sleeping there, and the two are booked on different forms. Building an overnight out of visits is the thing that makes an invoice unreadable.

Morning and evening on one card

  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, pick the morning visit and the evening visit.
  4. Set Start Time and End Time on each visit.
  5. Answer Notify customer?, then select Create Appointment.

Both visits go on the pet's card, the same way two services on one dog always do. That keeps them as one booking with one invoice, so the client gets one number rather than a receipt for every doorstep.

Add Sibling is for the cat in the same house, not for the second visit. Pressing it here gives you two cards for one animal.

Tip

Name the visit services for their length rather than their hour. A 30 minute visit booked at seven or at nine is the same service, and a menu of AM and PM per duration stays short.

The pattern is the fortnight

One rule creates the whole run, so a fourteen-day trip is one thing to build and one thing to change.

  1. Open Appointments, select New, then Appointment.
  2. Under Create, choose Recurring, then choose the pet and both visits.
  3. Under How often, choose Daily, or Weekly and tick the days under Which days?.
  4. Under End, choose End Date and set the last day of the trip under End on.
  5. Set the time of each visit.
  6. Answer Notify customer?, then select Create Recurring Series.

Daily with the weekdays picked and Weekly on two chosen days are different rules even when the visits land on the same dates, and the card says which one you are on. The white dot is the day the first visit falls on.

Check

An end date is what makes a trip a trip. Leave the pattern running with no end and you have signed the client up to a permanent standing order, and the first they hear of it is the invoice after they got home.

An overnight is a stay, not a long visit

If you are sleeping in the house, book it on the stay form instead.

  1. Open Appointments, select New, then Stay, which appears once you have a stay service.
  2. On Pets & Services, choose the pet and pick the overnight under Service for, then select Continue.
  3. On Timing, set Check-in Date and Check-in Time, then Check-out Date and Check-out Time, and select Continue.
  4. On Review, answer Notify customer?, then select Book Stay for, which names the pets.

A check-in date and time, a check-out date and time, and everything between the two is the booking. Fourteen nights is one line rather than fourteen, the nights are priced as nights, and the whole thing cancels or moves as one.

Trap

An overnight built as fourteen daily visits looks the same on the calendar and behaves nothing like it. Each visit prices and cancels separately, so a client who comes home two days early has two refunds to argue about instead of a shortened stay.