Making, changing and completing appointments, and managing your diary.
Create an appointment from the diary by choosing the customer, their animal, a service and a time. PetDesk only offers slots when the chosen staff member is actually working, and you can send the customer a confirmation text as you save.
Open the appointment from the diary and change whatever needs changing — the time, the staff member, the service or the price. If you move it, you can text the customer the new time at the same time as saving.
Marking a booking complete is how it becomes a sale. Open the appointment, confirm what was actually done, take payment, and the booking closes and feeds into your reports.
Cancel Booking is the red button at the bottom of Quick Actions on the booking. A cancelled booking stays on the record rather than disappearing. If it was prepaid, or holds a deposit the customer has paid, you must choose what happens to the money — refund it, move it to their credit, or forfeit it — and whichever you pick is recorded against the booking. On a multi-pet visit, cancelling one pet leaves the others alone and the deposit moves to a pet still coming in.
Appointments booked by customers online wait for you to accept them and appear in an orange Pending Booking Requests bar on the dashboard. Each shows the time wanted, the animal, the service and any notes the customer typed. Accept confirms it into your diary; View Details lets you move it to a better time before confirming.
The diary shows the same appointments five ways — Calendar, Week, Day, Staff and List — switched with the row of small buttons above the calendar. Staff view gives each person a column, List view is far easier on a phone. PetDesk remembers the view you last used. Appointment colours come from the staff member they belong to.
Custom fields let you record things PetDesk does not ask for as standard — a kennel number, a collection time, a coat condition. Set them up once under Settings and they appear on every booking form.
One customer bringing two or three animals is a single visit, not separate appointments. Tick the other pets under Other animals on this booking and each one gets its own price and length, with the diary blocking out the whole period as one block. Items, payment, the invoice and completion all happen on the first pet, marked with bill; confirmations and reminders go out once and name every animal. Customers can request a multi-pet visit online too.
If you keep changing the price or length for the same animal and service, PetDesk offers those figures back next time you book it. It needs at least two previous bookings for that animal and service, and only appears when the usual figures differ from the service defaults. Use the usual fills in the duration and price; Keep the defaults ignores it. Customers never see these suggestions.
Block out time puts a gap in the diary that nobody can book into — lunch, a delivery, an hour off. Use the crossed-out calendar button above the diary, or click any empty square in Staff view. You choose the length, whether it applies to one staff member or the whole business, and whether it repeats every week.
Closures block out days when the whole business is shut — bank holidays, training days, the Christmas break. Nothing can be booked on a closed day, by you or by a customer online.
If you can't find the answer here, raise a ticket from inside PetDesk and it comes straight to us.
