Every pen, run, suite and cattery room you have is a resource: a thing with its own hours and its own capacity, separate from the people who work there. Modelling them is the easy half. The half that goes wrong is linking them to the service, because until you do, none of them is in the calculation at all.
How many dogs sleep in it
Capacity on a resource is how many pets can be in it at once, which for boarding is how many sleep in it.
- Open Resources and select Manage on the pen.
- On Capacity, set Pets at a Time to how many pets sleep in it.
- For dogs from one household sharing, switch on Allow more siblings side-by-side and set the Same-family limit.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
Allow more siblings side-by-side is the boarding rule you actually want. Two dogs from one household will share a suite where two dogs from different owners could not, and the same-family limit is how you say so without raising the pen's capacity for everybody.
Tip
Set the number to what the room holds, not to what you would like to sell. The grid above is the thing to check it against, because the purple squares are the ones only a sibling can take.
Say the stay needs one
- Open Services, then Manage on the stay service and Manage Service.
- On Team & Resources, under How should resources work for this service?, choose Required.
- Pick the pens under Eligible Resources.
- Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
Required is the setting a boarding service wants. The engine then refuses a check-in date when no eligible pen is free, and the blue line spells out what it will do before you save.
| Mode | What the engine does |
|---|---|
| Required | Refuses the dates when no eligible pen is free |
| Optional | Staff can attach a pen; the engine never refuses for want of one |
| Not used | The pen is out of the calculation entirely |
Trap
A suite built for four that keeps taking a fifth dog is almost always a service left on Optional. The pen is configured, the number is right, and nothing is reading it.
Choose which pen fills first
When a booking does not name a pen, Petboost fills your resources in their fill order, so the room you want used first takes the first dog.
- Open Resources.
- Open the settings menu and select Fill order.
- Drag each resource into the order you want it filled. Each resource type has its own list, and a change saves as soon as you drop it.
The same order applies to online bookings, Simulate and staff bookings left on Magic Match. A household booked together still shares a resource when one has room, even if it sits lower in the order. Team Members has its own Fill order in its settings menu for stays and staff bookings that do not name a person.
Read the night off the column heads
Group the calendar by resource and each pen becomes a column with its own count.
- Open Appointments and select Group By in the calendar toolbar.
- Choose Resources.
- Switch on Show how full, and Show pets at a time to see each pen's limit beside it.
The count is bookings, never set against the pen's limit. Show how full measures the pen against it as a percentage badge, and the colour is the threshold rather than the number: under half is green, half is amber, eighty per cent is red, and full or over is slate. A pen reading 100% full is the answer to "can we take a third from the Mitchells" without opening anything.
Check
Only Owner Admins and Admins see these switches, and the line they add appears only on a resource column, on a day, a timeline day or a week grouped by date. A team member column has no capacity of its own, so it counts bookings and stops there.