Boarding
Manage overnight stays, kennel assignments, daily report cards, and check-out invoicing.
Boarding handles multi-night stays with nightly rates. Daycare handles single-day sessions with daily capacity. If you offer both, they are managed in separate modules with separate rate structures. See Daycare.
Creating a boarding stay
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Go to Boarding → + New stay
Click Boarding in the sidebar, then + New stay. You can also start a stay from the patient's profile.
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Select the patient and dates
Search for the patient. Set the check-in date and expected check-out date. The stay duration is calculated automatically and used to generate the invoice estimate.
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Assign a kennel (optional at booking)
Choose a kennel from the availability grid. If you leave this blank at booking, it can be assigned at check-in. Kennels (and wards) are added and named in Settings → Kennels, runs & wards, a separate settings page shared with the inpatient whiteboard, not nested under Boarding.
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Set the rate
Select the boarding rate (small dog, large dog, cat, exotic, etc.). Rates are configured in Settings → Boarding → Rates and can be overridden per stay.
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Add special instructions
Feeding schedule, medications, behavioral notes, and anything else the boarding staff needs to know. These print on the boarding card for the kennel.
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Save
The stay is booked. It appears on the boarding calendar and in the patient's profile. A notification (email and/or SMS, per the owner's opt-ins) goes out to the owner when you complete check-in.
Check-in and check-out
When the patient arrives, open the stay from the Today tab on the Boarding page and click Check in. Confirm the kennel assignment and any medication instructions, then complete the check-in. A confirmation goes out to the owner by email and/or SMS.
At pick-up, click Check out. This closes the stay and triggers invoice generation based on the actual nights stayed. Review the invoice before presenting it to the client. A saved card is only charged when staff press Charge at checkout.
Requests from online booking
A stay an owner requests from the public booking page or the owner portal doesn't book itself. It lands as a pending request on the Boarding → Online requests tab (the notification bell also links to a standalone Boarding requests page) for staff to confirm or decline. Confirming turns it into a stay with the requested patient and dates; declining sends the owner a reason.
If your clinic requires a deposit for online bookings (Settings → Boarding → Deposit policy), the request is held pending payment until the owner pays through a hosted checkout link. The deposit is credited toward the final invoice at check-out. If the deposit is a percent of the stay and is still unpaid when a kennel move changes the price, the deposit amount is recalculated quietly (no new email or text) and the pay link charges the new amount; a deposit that is already paid, or part paid, is settled on the final invoice instead. If the stay is cancelled, your refund policy decides how much comes back, and by default a staff member approves each refund from Billing → Deposit refunds.
Late checkout fee
Turn on Charge late checkout fee under Settings → Boarding to bill automatically when a pet is picked up after its scheduled checkout time, once a grace period (30 minutes by default) has passed. Choose how it's charged: a flat fee, a fee per interval (e.g. every 15 minutes late), or the full daycare day rate for that org. Nothing charges silently: the fee shows as its own checkout line item, and staff can waive it for a specific pickup before finalizing that stay's bill.
Daily report cards
Boarding report cards let you send owners a quick daily update. How their pet is doing, what they ate, and a photo or video if you take one. To send a report card:
- Open Report Cards for the active stay
- Fill in demeanor tags (happy, anxious, tired, playful, etc.), appetite, and a note (
reportcard.create) - Optionally attach a photo or short video
- Click Publish to portal (
reportcard.publish) to make it visible in the owner portal without notifying anyone, or Send to owner (reportcard.send) to publish and choose whether to notify by email, SMS, or both
| Stay field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Check-in / check-out dates | Required. Actual check-out may differ from expected. The invoice recalculates at check-out |
| Kennel | Can be set at booking or at check-in; shown on the kennel boarding card |
| Rate type | Set per stay; pulls from your boarding rate table in Settings |
| Feeding instructions | Printed on the boarding card; visible to staff in the active stay view |
| Medications | Links to patient's active medications; staff mark each dose as given |
| Behavioral notes | Alerting staff to aggression, anxiety, or special needs |
FAQ
Yes. Create a separate stay for each patient. By default, a cage holds one stay at a time, so each pet gets its own assignment (or an unassigned stay to place at check-in). If your clinic has marked a cage as a shared run (see Pets it fits below), you can assign more than one pet from the same household to that same cage for overlapping dates instead. Either way, all stays for the same household are grouped on the client's record for easy invoicing at check-out.
Edit the stay's check-out date before completing check-out and the invoice reflects the actual nights, with no fee for that. A separate, opt-in late checkout fee can bill a pickup that runs past the scheduled checkout time itself; see below.
Kennels live in Settings → Kennels, runs & wards, not under Boarding. It's the same page the inpatient whiteboard uses, where you add and name each cage, group them by ward, and optionally restrict which species a cage can hold. Each cage also has a Pets it fits field (1 by default, up to 100): leave it at 1 for a standard kennel, or set it to 2 or more to mark the cage as a shared run so pets from the same household can be booked into it together for overlapping dates. Your clinic's total capacity is the sum of every active cage's Pets it fits value, not just the number of cages you've added. Nightly rates are configured on the Settings → Boarding page's Rates section. Define rates by category (e.g. small dog $35/night, large dog $45/night, cat $28/night) and they apply automatically when you select the category at booking.
Yes. Report cards sent during a boarding stay appear in the owner's portal under their pet's stay history, where they can view the notes, demeanor tags, and any photos or videos you attached.
Check-in, ready for pickup and undo
- Check in appears on the Reservations list, Today's board and the stay page while a stay is booked. It reads Verify to check in until vaccines are confirmed and the agreement is fully signed.
- Shared suites: a run can hold as many pets as its size allows. The board lists every pet in it, for example "2 of 2 pets", and each name opens that pet's stay.
- Mark ready (next to Check out on the stay) asks you to confirm, then texts the owner. Undo ready moves the pet back to in house without a second text. Undo check-in is there if a pet was checked in by mistake.
- Nights are counted by calendar day on your business's clock, with a minimum of one. A pet who arrives Friday at any time and goes home Saturday at any time is one night, and a late pickup never adds a night by itself. Estimates, deposits and the checkout bill use the same count.
- Picked up: the checkout review has a Picked up field for boarding. It starts at the current time. If the pet actually left earlier (for example the evening before, and checkout is being done the next morning), enter the real pickup time so the nights, any late checkout fee and the recorded check-out time all use it. A time in the future, or before check-in, is refused.
- Vaccines are re-checked at check-in. Check in tests every vaccine your boarding policy requires against today's date. If one is missing or expired, the stay's Verified badge is cleared and check-in is refused with the list of what to fix.
- Checkout review: choose card on file, take payment now, email a bill, or leave it open. The deposit is always subtracted first.