The rebook list: the Pawdiary feature I care about most

Before adding features to Pawdiary I went through what other grooming apps offer. Online booking, reminders, deposits, report cards, waitlists: most of them have the same list, and Pawdiary needed it too. But the feature I care most about came from watching how a real salon loses money, and it’s not on most of those lists.

Regulars rarely leave a groomer. They just forget. A dog due every six weeks becomes eight, then ten, and by then the owner has booked somewhere closer. Nobody decided to leave, and nobody noticed.

Who’s due, and what they’re worth

Every pet in Pawdiary has a rebook interval. The Rebook page lists every pet that’s due or overdue with nothing booked, how late they are, and what they usually spend, with a running total at the top of the money waiting to be booked. One tap opens a message in the groomer’s own WhatsApp, text or email, and the app logs it. When a booking follows a rebook message, it counts as won back, and the page adds up what those bookings were worth, so the groomer can see the nudges paying off.

Filling the gaps

The same idea runs the other way. “Fill a gap” finds the free time in the next two weeks and suggests who to offer it to: pets that are due and usually come in on that day, plus anyone on the waitlist whose preferred days and times match. The code that finds gaps has to respect business hours, blocked-out time, each groomer’s own hours and bookings with no groomer set, so it has its own unit tests. Getting it wrong means offering a client a slot that isn’t free, which is worse than not offering one at all.

The rest of the list

The expected features went in too: a public booking page with breed and size pricing, deposits and no-show fees through Stripe Connect, automatic reminders, report cards, a client portal, two-way texts, campaigns, packages, staff diaries, tips and commission. Each one is scoped to its business and has database tests like everything else.

They’re what groomers look for when they compare apps. The rebook list is what I hope makes them stay.