How to set up daycare in PawLoop

The question to ask is simple: should daycare reserve a team member's time, or is the dog simply in your care while your normal walking schedule continues?

If it should reserve their time, use a service. If it should behave like a short stay, use boarding. Most businesses start with a service.

• Service — regular daycare clients, recurring schedules, daycare on the normal calendar, single or group capacity, the person providing it treated as busy.
• Boarding — daycare works like a short stay, drop-off and collection times vary, prices depend on length of stay, and you need to keep scheduling walks throughout.

Go to Settings → Business → Services and find your walk types and services. Select Add to create a new one.

Give it a clear name such as 'Daycare' and set the normal duration of a session. If your standard daycare runs from 9am until 3pm, set the duration to 6 hours.

Add your normal price and choose a colour so daycare bookings are easy to spot on the calendar.

Single means the time is reserved for that booking — another dog can't be booked into the same daycare slot.

Group allows multiple dogs to attend at the same time. Set the maximum group size to control how many dogs can be booked into each session. If you normally look after several daycare dogs together, group is usually the better choice.

This is the important difference with the service method. A daycare booking counts towards the availability of the team member it's assigned to for the full duration of the service.

If daycare runs 9am–3pm and the booking is assigned to Alex, PawLoop considers Alex busy for that whole period and won't allow a conflicting walk or service to be assigned to them.

That makes the service method useful when daycare genuinely represents dedicated working time you want PawLoop to protect.

Once the service exists, book it like any other. Choose the client and dog, select Daycare, pick the start time and assign the appropriate team member.

It appears alongside your other services on the normal PawLoop calendar.

One of the biggest advantages of the service method is that daycare can be made recurring.

If Bailey attends every Tuesday and Thursday, create a recurring schedule instead of adding each booking by hand. PawLoop then builds those sessions into your calendar alongside your recurring walks.

The alternative is to treat daycare as a short boarding stay. This works well when dogs are with you for several hours but you still need to carry out your normal walks during the day.

Go to Settings → Business → Services and find your boarding types. Create a new type called something like 'Daycare'.

Boarding pricing uses time-based bands, which can be flat-rate or per-hour depending on how you charge.

PawLoop uses the drop-off and collection times to work out which pricing applies.

• Up to 4 hours — £20
• 4–8 hours — £30
• 8 hours+ — £40
• Or configure hourly pricing if you charge by the exact length of the stay.

Go to Boarding and select Book a stay. Choose the client and dog, select your Daycare boarding type and enter the drop-off and collection date and time — for example drop-off 9:00am, collection 2:00pm.

PawLoop treats this as a short stay rather than a normal scheduled service, and you get the usual boarding functionality around the booking.

Boarding is managed separately from your normal service booking schedule.

A dog can be in your care for daycare from 9am–5pm without PawLoop treating a team member as unavailable for that whole eight-hour period, so you can continue scheduling normal walks and services during the day.