The app

This is your day-to-day app. Add it to your phone’s home screen for an app-like, offline-capable experience.

Pulling down to refresh keeps you where you are — refresh the Clients screen and you get the Clients screen back. Closing the app and opening it again starts you on Today, which is where a morning starts.

If you run more than one service, choose it from the pills at the top; tap a slot to add a booking, and tap a booking to open its details. A pill with a padlock is a service that isn’t in your plan yet — tap it to add it. See Service pills for how the switcher decides what to show.

Example

A groomer installs the app on their phone, works through the day’s list in a garden with no signal, and everything syncs the moment they’re back on Wi-Fi.

FAQ

My team keep having to sign in to the staff app again.
WordPress signs somebody out after two days unless they tick “Remember me” on the login form, and almost nobody does. That is a fair default for a website and the wrong one entirely for something installed on a home screen and opened every morning — being asked for a password standing in a field is the worst moment this software could pick. From 2.624.0 there is a Stay signed in for setting beside the passkey option, set to 30 days out of the box, and it applies whether or not the box was ticked. Shorten it if phones are shared or handed round; two days is still on the list.

The staff app asks me to log in again after an update.
2.621.0 removed one way this could happen — a lapsed sign-in answers the app’s address with the WordPress login screen, and the app was storing that as though it were the app. It refuses to keep a login page now. It has been reported again since, so that was not the whole of it, and the honest position is that the cause is not yet known: nothing in Pet Central touches a sign-in, a session cookie or a security key when it updates. Rather than guess, 2.737.0 makes the app write down what it saw at the door — whether a sign-in cookie arrived at all, and what was decided. The reading is on Help → Support. Next time it happens, look there: it will say either that the browser sent no sign-in at all (nothing on the website refused it) or that one was sent and refused (a session, a password or a security key). Those are two different faults with two different fixes, and knowing which one it is saves chasing the wrong one. In the meantime, Settings → Stay signed in for and a passkey both shorten the recovery.

Pulling down to refresh sends me back to Today.
Fixed in 2.737.0. Pulling down reloads the whole app, and the app always opened on Today — so a refresh on the Clients screen, or in the middle of the diary, threw away where you were. It now comes back to the screen you were on. Closing the app and opening it again still starts on Today, on purpose: that is a new day’s work, not the same one. A link from an email still opens what the link is about, wherever you were.

Refreshing flashes up Today for a moment before my screen comes back.
Fixed in 2.741.0. 2.737.0 put you back on the right screen, but it did it once the app had started — by which time the phone had already drawn Today. The app works out which screen it is before it draws anything now, so a refresh on Clients draws Clients, with the right tab lit underneath. Nothing about where you end up changed; it just stops showing you somewhere else on the way.

I lose the offline copy of my day whenever the plugin updates.
Fixed in 2.621.0. The store holding the offline diary was named after the release, so every update quietly abandoned it and the first thing anybody did after updating was lose their day until they were back in signal. Only the app itself is named after the release now — because the app is the plugin — while the diary carries over.

A customer says the app tells them a vaccination is overdue and gives them no way to fix it.
Fixed in 2.622.0. The badge on the pet and the reminder on the Home screen both said so, and there was nowhere in the app to say when the booster had been done — the only way out was to ring you. There is now a Vaccination expires date at the top of a pet’s Care details panel. They set it, the reminder clears, and the date is marked on your side as given by the owner — not yet confirmed until you have seen the certificate. You get an email when one changes.

How do I confirm a vaccination date a customer has entered?
Open the pet. Under Vaccination expiry there is an amber note saying it came from the owner, when they entered it and what the date was before, with a Confirm this date button. Pressing it accepts the date as yours. Typing a different date into the field does the same thing — your own answer is confirmed by the act of giving it — so a correction never sits underneath a warning about itself.

Does an unconfirmed date still count for bookings?
Yes. It takes effect the moment the customer enters it, which is deliberate: a date the app accepts and then carries on calling expired is the same dead end in a different coat. That does mean a booking your compliance rules were blocking can become allowed on the owner’s word, which is exactly why you are emailed and why the record says plainly that nobody has checked it. If you would rather it did not count until you confirm, say so and it can work that way instead.

I don’t track vaccinations — how do I turn the reminders off?
Set Compliance checks to Off in settings. From 2.622.0 the customer app honours that: no badge on the pet, no reminder on Home, and no vaccination field in the care details. Before 2.622.0 the app ignored the setting entirely and carried on reminding your customers about something you had told it not to track.

Do I need an app store?
No. Use “Add to home screen” in the app’s settings (or your browser menu) to install it like an app, with no store fees. On iPhone, tap the Share icon in Safari, then “Add to Home Screen”.

Does it work offline?
Mostly. The day’s schedule is cached, and walks, notes, checklists and photos are kept on the phone and sync when you reconnect. Making or changing a booking is the exception — it needs signal, because the slot has to be checked against the diary first. With no signal you get a No signal popup and nothing you have typed is lost. See Booking with no signal.

Lots of pets — how do I find one fast?
When you tap + New and choose the pet, type in the filter box to narrow the list instantly by pet name or owner name. Each pet shows the owner in brackets so you can tell two “Bellas” apart.

What does the coloured dot mean?
It shows the booking’s status — orange = pending, green = confirmed, indigo = completed, grey = cancelled. If the booking is assigned to a team member, it uses that person’s colour instead. A small key runs along the bottom of any screen that shows the dots, and the same colours are used everywhere (Today, upcoming, day view and agenda).

Only one service — where are the pills?
If you run a single service and there’s nothing to add, there’s nothing to switch between, so the pills are hidden and your logo sits large in the middle instead.

Why is one of the service pills locked?
A padlock means that service (Groomer, Walker, Sitter or Trainer) isn’t in your current plan. Your own services stay as normal pills; the locked one is there so you can add it in a tap. Tap it and — if you’re the account owner — you’ll be taken to Licensing to add it. See the Service pills topic for the full picture.

All my pills are locked — what happened?
That means the subscription has lapsed, so every service is paused. You can still see your data, but you can’t make changes until you renew. Tap any pill and choose Renew, or open Licensing.

Rearrange a booking screen?
Open a booking and tap “Edit widgets” at the bottom, then use the ↑ ↓ buttons to reorder the panels or Hide/Show the ones you don’t need. Your layout is remembered on this device. Tap “Done editing” when finished.

Why does the wizard ask who is doing it before the time?
Because it decides which times are actually free. Pick the team member on the Service & team step and the slot page then only offers times that person can do. On the slot page you can switch to Anyone to widen it again.

How do I cancel a booking?
Open it and use Cancel booking at the top. You are asked to confirm, and offered a tick to email the owner — already ticked when they have an address on file, and greyed out when they do not. The visit is marked cancelled and the time goes straight back in the diary, so somebody else can have it. Nothing is charged.

It says Cancelling… and nothing happens.
It is waiting on the email to the owner, which is sent while you wait. Where a mail server cannot be reached that wait is what the request spends its time on — and the booking is cancelled the whole time. Since 2.570.0 that attempt is capped at a few seconds, and if the answer still goes missing the app re-reads the booking: where it really is cancelled it says so and closes. If the cancellation is refused you get the server’s own words, naming the state the visit is in and what to do instead.

Cancel booking is not there any more.
The visit has been invoiced, paid, covered by a package, marked free or already finished — and a line in its place says which. Those are credited, refunded or written off rather than cancelled, because each leaves a different trail in your figures. Since 2.571.0 the app asks the server whether a booking can be cancelled rather than working it out from what it was told when the screen opened, so a booking invoiced after you opened it no longer offers a button that will be refused.

Why is there no Cancel button on some bookings?
Because the visit has already happened or been billed — done, to invoice, invoiced, paid, prepaid, on a package, or free. Those are not cancelled, they are credited or refunded, and each leaves a different trail in your figures. Open the invoice and refund or credit it instead. The same rule is enforced on the server, so it cannot be got round by an out-of-date screen. A walk that is under way is refused too: finish it first, then decide what to charge.

A customer says the portal hung when they booked, but the email arrived.
Their booking was made — the email is sent after it exists, so if that arrived the booking is in your diary. What used to happen next is that the page went on waiting for a deposit payment link, and if the payment provider was slow the customer sat there until the page gave up. From 2.550.0 the booking, the email and the customer’s confirmation are settled first and the payment link is given eight seconds; if it cannot be had in that time they are told to pay the deposit from their Bookings page instead, which they always could. If a link ever does take a long time, how long is recorded on the booking so it can be looked at rather than guessed at.

If they pressed submit twice while it hung, you may have two identical bookings. From 2.550.0 the second one is recognised as the same request and does not create anything.

A pending booking is showing before & after photos.
Fixed in 2.550.0 — and it was showing the wrong photos, not early ones. The booking page took the newest set of pictures for that animal whatever visit they came from, so a customer opening a booking they had just made was shown a finished groom from a previous visit. Every set of photos has always recorded which booking it belongs to; the page simply never asked. It now shows the set taken at that visit, and nothing at all if there is not one.

A customer wants to get rid of the “We could not take this booking” messages.
They can, from 2.549.0: each one has a Clear this message button on it. They stack up otherwise — somebody who has asked four times and been turned down four times has four red panels sitting above the visits that are happening, with nothing to do about any of them.

Clearing only hides it from that customer. Your record of the request is untouched: the booking, the reason you declined it and any note you added all stay exactly as they were, and the customer cannot delete or change any of it. It is their screen they are tidying, not your books.

A customer says their account shows two different totals.
It did, and it was a fault, fixed in 2.548.0. The customer portal’s invoices page had a running account balance at the top and a Still to pay figure above the invoice list, worked out two different ways, and two things were wrong with the first. A refund is stored as a negative amount — that is how the ledger works out what has actually been received — and the statement put it straight into its charges column, so the refund printed as a blank cell and took the balance down instead of up, moving the account by twice the refund in the wrong direction. And draft invoices were being charged to the customer, which is a bill for money nobody has decided to ask for yet. Both are fixed, the two figures are now one figure worked out in one place, and it appears once on the page.

What does “Last 3 visits” tell me?
The three times before this one you had this animal in, most recent first — and for each of them: every treatment that was done (not only the one it was booked under), the start and finish times with how long it actually ran, who had her, how it ended (completed, invoiced, cancelled and so on), and anything written on the report card at the time. That is what tells you how long to allow today and who should take her. A cancelled visit is still listed — a dog that has been called off twice running is worth knowing about — and shows the time it would have been.

Holding a booking in the list used to open a little panel — where has it gone?
Removed, deliberately. It showed the date, the client, the pet, the treatment and the price — all of which the booking itself now shows the moment you tap it, and more of them. So it was a second, smaller answer to a question already answered, reached by a gesture nothing on the screen mentioned, which mostly fired by accident while scrolling a list with a thumb. Tap a booking to open it, and swipe a row for the quick actions you have set up under Settings.

How do I change or move a booking?
Open it and tap Manage booking at the top. It walks you through three short steps. Treatments — tick anything else being done, untick anything that is not, including the one it was booked for; the length and the price are worked out again as you go, and the line underneath shows what it was before. Time — the day laid out as a grid with a column for each of your team. The booking itself sits on it in solid colour: drag it to a free time, or tap one. Use the arrows either side of the date to look at another day. Confirm — the new day and time, the finish and how long it runs, every treatment and the price, with a tick to email the owner. Nothing is changed until you tap Save changes.

Can I remove the treatment it was booked for?
Yes — untick it like any other. Whatever is left decides the rest: the longest of the treatments still ticked becomes the main one (a tie goes to the dearer), and it is the main one that carries this animal’s own allowance for coat and size, and that decides which of your team can do it. So unticking a full groom and leaving the nail trim turns a two-hour visit into a twenty-minute one, and the price follows. You never nominate a main treatment separately; tick what is being done and it follows.

What if I untick everything?
Then it is not a booking any more, and Next stays greyed out. A visit with nothing on it is a cancellation, which is a different thing with different consequences — it needs a confirmation, it may need the owner told, and it is refused outright once the visit has been billed. Close the wizard and use Cancel booking instead.

Can I drag a booking to a new time?
Yes. In the Time step the booking sits on the grid in solid colour with its own times on it. Press it and drag: the slot under your finger lights up where the whole visit fits, and stays grey where it does not. Let go on a lit one and it moves there — including into somebody else’s column, which is how you hand a visit to a colleague. Let go anywhere else and it stays put and says why. A dashed outline is left where it used to be, so you can see at a glance that it really has moved. Tapping a free time does exactly the same thing if that is easier.

How do I move a booking to a different day?
The row of days above the grid is the week, and each one says how many times it has free for this visit — so you can see where there is room without going and looking. Tap a day to open it, then tap a free time.

You can drag it there as well. Drag the booking onto the day in that row and it opens that day with the booking still in your hand: a bar appears saying Holding …, and the next free time you tap is where it lands. It has to work that way round — the day you are moving to is not on the screen while your finger is still down, so the drag ends on the day and the tap finishes the job. Put it back on that bar cancels it, and nothing has changed until you save. Tapping the booking itself picks it up in the same way.

What do “Was here” and “Moving here” mean?
They mark where the booking is coming from and where it is going, both on the week of days and on the grid itself. Before you move anything it just says Booked here. Once you have moved it, the day and the time it came from are shown as a dashed outline marked Was here, and the new place is solid and marked Moving here. Nothing is actually changed until you reach the last step and tap Save changes.

Why can I see other people’s bookings in the Time step?
Because “when is there a gap” is a question about the whole day, not about one person. The grid shows a column per team member with their bookings drawn in, the times they can take this visit as green buttons, and their non-working hours shaded. The booking you are moving is left out of its own column — otherwise the obvious answer, shift it half an hour, would be the one time the grid refused to offer you. With more than two or three of you the grid scrolls sideways rather than squeezing the columns down to nothing.

Does the customer get told when I move a booking?
If you leave the tick on, yes — and it is on by default. They get the new day, time, finish, treatments and price in full, and the old time named as well, so somebody who has written it on a calendar knows which entry to cross out. Untick it for a change they already agreed on the phone. The tick is greyed out when there is no email address on file.

Why is there no Manage button on some bookings?
The same rule as cancelling: once a visit has happened or been billed — done, to invoice, invoiced, paid, prepaid, on a package or free — it is not rearranged. Moving a visit that has already been invoiced would leave the bill describing something that did not happen. Credit or refund the invoice and make a new booking instead. The server enforces it too, so an out-of-date screen cannot get round it.

Can I book more than one treatment?
Yes. The Details step lists your treatments with a tick box each — tick as many as the visit covers. The longest one is the main treatment: it is what the visit is, it decides which of your team can do it and it carries the animal’s own allowance for coat and size. The rest are added on top, each with its own length and price, and the free times offered are gaps the whole visit fits into. The line underneath says which is the main one and what the visit comes to.

How is the main treatment decided?
By length — the longest of the ones you tick. If two are the same length, the dearer one wins, so the answer never depends on the order you ticked them in. You do not choose it separately; tick the treatments and it follows.

Why is this booking longer than the treatment?
Because the animal changes how long the work takes. A double coat takes longer to dry, a big dog takes longer to do, and one that needs careful handling needs settling first — so a sixty-minute groom can be eighty minutes for a particular dog. The Time and Review steps both say the real length and where the extra came from, the free times offered are gaps the whole visit fits into, and the booking is stored at that length so the next dog is not offered time this one is still using. Shortening it deliberately is fine — open the booking and change the end.

The price on the review is higher than the price list.
The same coat and size that lengthen the visit put the price up. The review shows the total and then itemises it — the treatment at its list price, a line for each allowance (“Double coat +£20.00”), and a line for every other treatment ticked — and the lines add up to the total exactly. It is the price the booking will be created at, so there is no surprise once it exists. A price you type on the booking afterwards always wins.

The review says “Set on the booking” instead of a price.
Nothing in the visit has a price on it — usually a treatment added without one. The booking is still made; put the figure on it afterwards. If it says “Working it out…” the quote has not come back yet, which needs signal; give it a moment. Neither ever shows a made-up number: a figure that is not the price is worse than no figure.

Where do I see the details for a pet?
Open Clients, tap the client, then tap the pet. Their record opens with breed, age, weight, vaccination date, temperament notes, medical notes, preferred team member and whether they walk alone. An out-of-date or nearly-due vaccination is flagged in red.

Can I add a new client & pet from the app?
If your admin has turned it on (Settings → Bookings → “Add clients from the app”), an “Add client” button appears in the app’s Quick actions. It runs a short wizard: first the owner’s details and their meet & greet status (Not yet / Completed / Not required), then one or more pets — tap “Add another pet” to add several before finishing. Everything is saved to your client list straight away.

What are the numbers and charts on the home screen?
The “Business at a glance” panel shows your bookings and revenue for today, this week and this month; how many bookings are awaiting confirmation; your total outstanding (unpaid) invoices; new clients added this month; and this year’s bookings and revenue compared with the same point last year (with an up/down change). Below are two bar charts — bookings and revenue for each month of the year; tap any bar for its figure. Revenue totals your booking prices and excludes cancelled bookings. Move or hide the panel with “Edit widgets”.

The panel reflects the service you have selected (the Groomer / Walker / Sitter / Trainer pill by the logo) — the active service is shown as a small tag next to the title, and every figure, chart and drill-down is just that service. Switch pills to see another service; the numbers update instantly. Outstanding is limited to invoices tagged to that service, and new clients to those who have booked it.

Can I see the detail behind a KPI?
Yes — tap any KPI (or a “this year vs last year” row) and a popup lists the records behind it: the bookings, the outstanding invoices, or the new clients, depending on which one you tapped. From there you can Print the list or Export CSV to open it in a spreadsheet.