Online Booking Software for Dog Walkers and Pet Sitters

Most of your week is decided before Monday starts: the Labrador at eleven, the two terriers at one, every Tuesday and Thursday until somebody moves house. Set those as recurring bookings and the slots hold themselves. With the customer's permission, the card on file is charged each time the walk happens, so you're not totting up walks on the last day of the month and hoping your count matches the owner's. When a family goes away and the Tuesday walk needs to move to Wednesday, the booking is rescheduled rather than canceled and rebuilt from scratch.

A group walk has a hard ceiling, and it doesn't move because somebody asked nicely on a Sunday. Put a capacity limit on the walk and the booking page stops taking places once it's full, so you're never at the park owing a spot you don't have. Run it the way a class runs, with a set number of places, and the counting stops being something you carry in your head between the van and the gate. If a second walker takes the eleven o'clock group, they're a staff member with their own shifts and their own calendar, so two groups can go out at once and neither one overfills.

A sitting week isn't one booking. It's a run of visits with keys, feeding times, medication at seven, and a bin that goes out on Thursday. Each visit type is a service with its own length, so a quick drop-in and an overnight stay don't take the same shape on the calendar, and the break you set between bookings is the honest travel time between two houses on opposite sides of the patch. Holiday weeks land on the same calendar as the regular walks, so the house you're covering is visible next to the round you still have to do. What costs extra sits on the service as a paid add-on: a key pickup before the family flies, an extra evening visit, a second cat at the same address. And when a flight moves, the visits move with it.

An owner who uses you three times a week doesn't want to pay you three times a week. Sell a block of ten walks up front as a package, and each booking they make afterward comes off the block instead of starting another payment. Stripe takes the card inside the booking flow, and for the owner who would rather not type their details into a page at all, you can send a payment link and settle it that way.

Admin has to survive being done outdoors, one-handed, in the rain. The kiwilaunch iOS app keeps your calendar, your customers, your bookings and your payments on the phone that's already in your pocket, so you can check which house is next while the dogs are still sniffing the same hedge, or move this afternoon's sitting visit when an owner's plans change. At the door, Tap to Pay on iPhone takes a card from the owner who wants to settle up in person, with no reader to buy.