Best Practices For Mobile Grooming Companies

If you are the owner of a mobile grooming business or offer additional grooming options to your walking or drop-in services, we have several features you can utilize to make booking appointments, optimizing routes, and receiving payments easier for yourself, your staff, and your clients.

Setting Up Services

Time To Pet allows you to create an unlimited number of Services that can be tailored to the specific needs of your business. Whether you offer different rates for bath and grooming services based on a pet’s size or weight, or you only offer add-on services like nail trimming or de-shedding, you can create a service for each and every one of them. 

To help keep your services and add-ons organized, you can assign colors to each of your services and sort them into different service groups. 

You can also determine whether clients can select a service when submitting requests through their Client App/Portal. If there are services you prefer to schedule yourself as an Administrator, you can uncheck that option, and they will not appear in the list of available services to your clients. 

You can also determine the days and times clients are able to select for each service when they book appointments through their Client App/Portal. For example, if you don’t offer services on the weekends or if you only offer certain services in the morning or afternoon, you can set up Schedule Blocks for those specific timeframes in the Settings > Client Settings > Schedule Blocks section of your account and select which ones are available for that service from its “Scheduling” tab using the “Limited To Specific Blocks” option.

It’s also possible to configure the additional fees you would like to automatically charge for each service in the “Auto Fees” tab of the service you are editing. Whether you charge for After Hour Fees, Extra Pet Rates, Holiday Fees, or Weekend Fees, you can set them up to your liking on a service-by-service basis. In addition, you can determine whether or not you would like them to stack one on top of the other if more than one fee would apply to a service and can decide how much staff are paid for them, as well. 

These options give you complete control over the price of each service, the default rates paid to staff, the duration of each service, and more. If you offer other services in addition to mobile grooming, such as dog walking, and give discounts to clients with regular schedules, you can even set up Frequency Discounts for each service and give it different levels depending on the frequency of the visits. 

Client Portal Tag & New Client Form Link On Website

Time To Pet aims to provide a seamless experience for both existing and prospective clients looking to book services with their favorite pet care providers. By adding a Client Portal Tag to your website, existing clients can easily access their Time To Pet accounts, where they can request visits, communicate with you and your team, and submit payments.

The Client Portal Tag can be left blank, or you can choose a custom URL for your clients to use. Most customers choose to use the name of their business for the URL and set up their company logo and display colors to match their website in the Settings > Company Settings > Theme section of their account so that everything matches and meets a client’s expectations.

In addition to the Client Portal Tag, you can use the Allow Clients To Create New Accounts feature to build and add a link to a New Client Form on your website for prospective clients to fill out. This feature can save you and your team a lot of administrative time by allowing clients to create their own profiles and go through the Pet Parent Onboarding process for your company on their own time. 

You can also choose whether new client accounts need to be approved by you or another Admin team member or if you would like them to be automatically approved. Many of our customers choose to have them require approval so that they have an opportunity to review the inquiry and give them a call to arrange a Meet & Greet or schedule their first service.

Managing Staff

Time To Pet makes managing staff members a breeze with a suite of tools you can use to easily assign events, optimize routes, track mileage, calculate their pay, and more! 

To add a staff member to Time To Pet, navigate to your company’s Staff List and select the “+ New Staff” button. You will be prompted to fill in some basic information and then an activation email will be sent to the address put on file for the staff member. You will also be asked to choose the role you would like to assign them. 

Time To Pet has four roles to select from: Administrators, Office Managers, Staff/Users (depending on the terminology your company uses), and Trainees. Administrators are able to access all features, client profiles, and settings within Time To Pet, while Office Managers have access to all client profiles and scheduling features by default. Additional permissions can be customized for the Office Manager role in the Staff Permissions section of your account. Staff and Trainees have the least amount of access to Time To Pet’s full features, as these roles are primarily intended for staff members who work in the field and whose main duties are to complete visits for the clients they are assigned to.

Once you have created profiles for your staff members, you can assign them to events, and use various mapping tools like the Daily Summary page or Geo Scheduler feature (which we cover further down below) to easily view and track their daily routes. Depending on how you pay your staff members, you can also set up staff pay rates on each of the services in your company’s Services List, or configure customized rates for your staff in the “Rates” tab of their profile. 

If you reimburse your team members for mileage or need a way to track the hours your staff work, consider enabling Time Shifts or Mileage Tracking for your company to allow your staff to input the times they clock in and out of their shifts and submit the mileage they’re covering in a day.

Time To Pet also makes it incredibly easy to keep in touch with your staff members through their Staff Conversation Feeds, which can be accessed from the “Conversation” section of their profiles.

Mapping Tools

Whether you’re running a solo operation or you have a team of staff members and manage multiple grooming vans, completing the appointments on your route in an efficient and timely manner is one of the most important aspects to running a successful mobile pet grooming business. Having a good understanding of what events are on you or your team’s route and the ideal order to do them in are crucial to delivering top-notch service to your clients and saving yourself time, fuel, and mileage expenses. 

With our Geo Schedule feature, you can view a specific day’s schedule plotted out on a map for all of the members on your team or you can focus on a particular team member using the Map Staff Schedule tool and see the suggested order of events. This order is based on the times services are scheduled, but if you schedule events in windows and have more than one event scheduled at the same time, it will defer to the order in which they were scheduled.

Our Geo Schedule plots not only the clients scheduled to receive service that day but also can display where you and your staff members live. This can be helpful if you and your team begin your routes from home. It can also tell you when events are out of a staff member’s service area (as you can set which areas a staff member serves on their profiles). If you or one of your team members is assigned to someone far away from the rest of their events, you can make the necessary changes to ensure that each team member’s route is as optimized as it can be. This will go a long way in terms of ensuring both client and staff satisfaction. 

The Geo Schedule and Map Staff Schedule features are ideal for Administrators or Office Managers who oversee route optimization or handle assigning staff members to visits. However, we haven’t forgotten about staff members! We also offer a Daily Visit Map feature that is only available through the Staff App. This feature lets staff view their scheduled events by day on a map within the app, change the suggested order of their visits, and easily get directions to their next event from their current location.

Scheduling Repeat Services Using Templates

Do you have a lot of regular clients that you’re scheduling the same appointments for week after week or month after month? Does it cause you to expend more energy than you’d like doing administrative work when you could be spending that time growing your business and lavishing more attention on your grooming clients instead? If the answer is yes (and it most likely is), then look no further than our Templates feature!

Using our Templates feature, you can configure services to be scheduled on a weekly, multi-weekly, or monthly basis once and then have those services automatically added onto the schedule without you having to lift a finger! This makes it easy to schedule your clients that require consistent grooming appointments while saving you the hassle of manually scheduling one after the other. 

You can set up a Template on an individual client-by-client basis and keep track of them from the Scheduler > Templates tab section of your Staff Dashboard.

You can also configure the billing frequency and have it either match or differ from your company’s default invoice settings.

You can also configure how far in advance Templates are approved, how far in advance Templates services are shown on the company calendar using the Projections feature, and have them display on the client’s calendar as well so that they will always know when they have upcoming services booked in the event they need to cancel. When the Projections feature is enabled, the Template events will appear in an orange color that will be visible to Administrators and Office Managers on the main Scheduler but that will not be visible to staff members (the events will become visible to staff once the Template they are a part of is approved onto the calendar).

This will ensure you don’t overbook yourself or your staff and are aware of upcoming services in advance so that you can plan accordingly.

Sending Clients Automatic Reminders For Their Appointments

Oftentimes, clients make grooming appointments for their pets weeks or months in advance, while others may require regular upkeep and are scheduled to be seen by your team multiple times per year. Whatever a client’s situation, life can get busy, time can fly by, and they may not recall the exact time or date you’ve scheduled with your team. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but you and your team show up as scheduled, except nobody’s home! To help you and your clients avoid such misunderstandings and remind clients of upcoming appointments, consider making use of our Automatic Service Reminders! 

Our Automatic Service Reminders can be enabled on a service-by-service basis straight from your company’s Services List by clicking “Edit” on the desired service and navigating to its “Setup” tab. This way, if you don’t want clients to receive reminders for particular services, you can easily disable them as needed.

To configure how far in advance these reminders are sent and customize the messaging your clients receive, navigate to the Settings > Company Settings > Messaging section of your account and locate the message in the “Custom Messages” section titled “Auto Scheduled Message - Service Reminder.” Once you select the message, a text area will appear on the right-hand side of the screen that will allow you to edit the contents of the message. 

Automatic Service Reminders are especially handy because if a client’s services are cancelled or deleted, the scheduled message will be deleted automatically as well, and because our system treats these messages as Scheduled Messages, you can edit and delete them as needed before they are sent to the client. 

Visit Report Cards

Before and after photos are a must-have for each of your grooming clients! With our Visit Report Cards feature, you can write up a report of how the appointment went, keep your clients apprised of any add-ons or complimentary services that were included as part of the visit by checking off what was done, and stun them with stylish photos or videos of their pet’s finished look.

To get started with Visit Report Cards, you will first want to enable them in the Settings > Mobile App > Visit Reports Cards section of your account. Once enabled, you can create custom visit reports that you’ll be prompted to complete when concluding an event in the Time To Pet Mobile App. 

While one Visit Report Card will be available for you to customize by default, you can create as many additional reports as you would like and include a number of different questions on each one. So if you offer grooming services for both cats and dogs, for example, you could create a report specific to each one and link your company’s corresponding services to their respective Report Card

Each question you add to your Visit Report Card includes text (what you are asking), how often you want to show the question (once per pet or once per visit), a question icon, and the type of question you’re asking. Currently, Time To Pet supports nearly 100 different icons for you to choose from, so feel free to get creative! However, we do strongly recommend choosing icons that are related to the question being asked. For example, if you want to indicate that a pet’s nails were trimmed as part of a visit, the “Nail Trimmer” icon would be a great choice for such a question. 

Question types can be simple "Yes/No" questions, "Count" questions (where you can enter a number of how many times something occurred), or customizable "Multiple Choice" questions. As soon as you finish adding all of the questions you’d like to include as part of the report, you can also reorder them by dragging and dropping them. 

A sample Yes/No question may look like this:

A sample Count question may look like this:

A sample Multiple Choice question may look like this:

Visit Report Cards are great ways to connect with your clients and display the love and care you’re giving to their pets. Grooming can be a stressful time for everyone involved, but keeping pet parents in the loop can go a long way to establishing trust and ensuring that their pet got everything they wanted done. When utilizing our Visit Report Cards feature, you can even enable Happiness Scores, which will provide clients with a link that gives them a chance to submit feedback on their experience with your team with each post-visit report that is sent to them through their email or via the Time To Pet Client App. 

For more information on this fantastic feature, check out our help documentation on them here: Visit Report Cards & Best Practices For Visit Report Cards. 

Blocking Service Order Requests

Whether you run a business that focuses solely on mobile pet grooming or you only offer select grooming services, having the ability to effectively manage your schedule and prevent overbooking yourself or your team is vital. Whether there are times that you are fully booked and can’t ft any more appointments or you have days where you aren’t offering services, with Time To Pet’s Block Requests feature, you’ll have the opportunity to block out specific time periods or black out entire days, which will make those times and dates un-selectable to your clients when they go to submit a request.

To block service requests from being made by your clients, first navigate to your Company’s Scheduler and select the red “Block Requests” button located in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, nestled between the Bulk Update and the Schedule Client tools: 

Clicking the “Block Requests” button will open up a new window, and you will be prompted to select a date that you would like to block service requests. Once your selection is made, a new question will appear asking what time you would like to block, and you will have two options: (1) to block out requests for the entire date you have chosen, or (2) to only block out a specific part of the day. The specific time blocks you have to choose from will be based on the Schedule Blocks you have configured for your company for clients to pick when requesting services. To make adjustments to your company’s Schedule Blocks, you can head over to the Settings > Client Settings > Schedule Blocks section of your account. For tips on what Schedule Block set up is best for your company, please see our suggestions and best practices here: Best Practices For Schedule Blocks. 

Once you have chosen whether you would like to block off a Schedule Block or an entire day, you’re ready to click the “Block Requests” button. This will set the block, which is visible on your calendar as a red-colored event. If you are blocking off a certain Schedule Block, the block will appear as a normal event. If you choose to block off an entire day, on the other hand, the block will appear as a header for that date at top of that calendar day:

By making use of the Block Requests feature, you can better manage scheduling for your clients and minimize the number of requests you receive for times or dates that are already fully booked or when you aren’t offering services. It will count down the number of times you might need to directly turn clients down or feel pressured to fit them in regardless of time constraints. (If you’re someone that has a hard time telling your clients “no”, check out our helpful blog post on the subject here: How To Say “No”.

Collecting Payments

Ensuring you and your team get paid is one of the most important aspects of managing a business. Time To Pet makes this effortless through the use of our integrated payment processor, Time To Pet Payments, which allows clients to pay their invoices directly through their Client Portal or Time To Pet Mobile App. Depending on your location, when connected to Time To Pet Payments, your clients may be able to pay using their credit or debit card, Apple or Google Pay, or by connecting their bank account. 

As soon as a client has scheduled services with your team, an invoice is generated that can be sent directly to them via email. They can also view their due or unpaid invoices through their Client App/Portal, depending on your company’s settings. 

You can also require that clients add a payment method when going through your company’s onboarding process or limit their ability to request services if they don’t have a payment method on file. This greater control makes it easier to assure that your clients pay for services rendered and don’t require you to chase them down to collect payment. To make things even easier for you and your clients, if you are integrated with Time To Pet Payments, you can enable Automatic Charging for your company and never have to worry about late payments again!

If you prefer to have clients pay by cash or check, however, you can also manually enter and track payments through Time To Pet as well.

Additional Tools

Customize Additional Details Field

By default, the service request form includes a text field titled "Additional Details". By navigating to the Settings > Client Settings > Portal Settings section of your account, however, you can  customize this field to better suit your mobile pet grooming company’s needs under the “Scheduling” heading. For example, you can use it to ask for specific pieces of information, such as the add-on services a client might like to add on top of the primary service they have requested, their preferred appointment times within their chosen Schedule Block, or a place to include other information that may be pertinent for you and your team to be told in advance. This can further streamline scheduling for your clients and ensure that you and your team have everything you need before approving the services onto the calendar.

Client And Staff Flags

The Flags feature has countless possibilities and can help you organize your clients and staff members. Both clients and staff can have up to ten flags assigned to their profile, and these flags will appear almost everywhere you see a client or staff member’s name within Time To Pet. These flags cannot be seen by clients and are only visible to Administrators, Office Managers, or Staff. Some mobile grooming companies label clients based on the frequency of their services, the neighborhood they live in, or by a specific route name if they split up jobs between multiple vans based on a client’s location.

Easy Communication With Clients

Time To Pet has several tools that allow for seamless communication between you, your clients, and your staff members. Each client and staff member has their own conversation thread that you and your team can communicate with them through. We also allow you to enable a secondary private message thread for clients that will only be visible to Administrators or Office Managers with the appropriate permissions. This can be useful when handling invoicing, client questions or concerns, and if there are certain matters you would prefer staff members not be privy to. You can also create and send mass email campaigns to both clients and staff from the Messages Center. For more information on the different methods of communication possible within Time To Pet, please see our help article on Understanding Messaging In Time To Pet. You can follow the link in each section for a more in-depth look and instructions on how to utilize each particular method.

Tipping

If connected to our integrated payment processor, Time To Pet Payments, you can enable tipping for your clients. If they would like to regularly tip you or your team for your services, you can set up an Automatic Tip on their account, or they can add tips when submitting payments through their Client App/Portal. For more information, see our help article here: Tipping In Time To Pet.

Other Resources

If you’re just getting started and would like more information on starting your own mobile pet grooming business, consider checking out our great guide on How to Start a Mobile Dog Grooming Business, as well as our blog on Wrapping Your Car for more information on how to effectively market your business using your company’s grooming vans.