Doastly ERP — User Manual

Version: 2026-07 (Draft) | Status: DRAFT — IN PRODUCT REVIEW Each section earns a Verified mark only after product sign-off against the live application. Audience: Salon Owners, Managers, Groomers, Bathers, Receptionists, and Pet Families Portal: manual.doastly.us | Downloadable PDF: doastly-user-manual.pdf

What is Doastly?

Doastly is an all-in-one, AI-powered business platform built for pet grooming salons and pet service businesses. It replaces the patchwork of spreadsheets, paper appointment books, and disconnected point-of-sale tools with a single system that handles everything from booking to payment — and layers real artificial intelligence on top to help groomers do their best work.

Who uses Doastly?

• Salon Owners and Managers — run the whole business from one screen: appointments, live pet tracking, payments, staff, analytics, and AI-generated insights.
• Groomers and Bathers — see their schedule, track active pets in real time, and get an AI Copilot brief before every appointment.
• Receptionists — check pets in and out, manage the appointment calendar, and look up customer information.
• Pet Families (Customers) — track their pet's groom live from their phone, receive automated notifications, view past sessions, and book future appointments.

The Doastly Difference

Unlike competing platforms (MoeGo, Groomer.io, DaySmart Pet), Doastly embeds real AI assistance directly into the daily workflow — not as a marketing feature but as a core operational tool:

• AI Groomer Copilot — before every appointment, the system surfaces breed notes, health flags, coat history, and seasonal care suggestions specific to that pet at your location. The brief is scoped strictly to your salon's own grooming history for that pet — the AI never sees records from other salons the pet may have visited.
• AI Report Card Narrator — after each groom, a narrative report card is written by AI, covering what was done and flagging any health concerns the groomer noted. The platform uses a full reasoning model (not a fast-but-shallow summary model) for this task, because surfacing a groomer's health flag — such as "found a lump, see vet" — over a sea of positive attributes requires genuine judgment. A deterministic safety guard backs this up: if the narrative omits a flagged concern, the system falls back to a verbatim description rather than risking false reassurance.
• AI Booking Notes — when a pet family books online, the system generates personalized notes based on their pet's history. Shown at Step 3 of the booking flow (service + groomer selection), using a fast model cached per pet-location pair for 24 hours.

How to navigate this manual

This manual reads as a story — a salon's day with Doastly, then the same day from the pet parent's side. Read it front to back, or use the index on the left to jump to a part.

Manual generated July 2026 · Doastly ERP · © Doastly, Inc.

How to Use This Manual

If you are new at the front desk, on the grooming floor, or in the kennels, start here. This manual follows one salon through a working day on Doastly, from opening the doors to the last pickup, and then tells the same day from the pet owner's side. Read it straight through on your first day, or use the menu on the left when you need one answer fast.

Where to look

Every chapter walks through its screens in order, one step at a time, with a screenshot for each step.

Who this is for

This is the public user manual. It covers what a salon owner, manager, receptionist, groomer, kennel technician, or pet owner needs day to day.

Roles: why some screens are missing for you

Doastly shows each person the screens their job needs and hides the rest. A receptionist does not see payroll; a groomer does not see the analytics pages. This is on purpose. It keeps the menu short on a busy morning and keeps sensitive pages away from people who do not need them.

Rather than a separate chapter for each role, each role appears where it does its work: the owner setting up in Part One, the groomer at the table in Part Two, the pet owner throughout Part Four. When a section applies only to certain roles, it is marked like this:

No role box means it applies to everyone. The full list of who can see what is in the Appendix.

"No access" means two things at once. The page is not in your menu, and if you type its address directly the server refuses and sends you back to your home screen with a "You don't have permission" message. If you need a page you cannot reach, ask your owner or manager to change your role.

Services and "Coming Soon"

One Doastly subscription can cover Grooming, Boarding, Daycare, Mobile Grooming, and Pet Training. Your salon may not have all of them switched on, so some chapters may describe screens you do not have. Anything not yet available everywhere is marked:

About the screenshots

Every screenshot comes from a real demo salon with realistic data, in light mode on a desktop screen.

Conventions and Legend

This page explains the icons, callouts, and screenshot annotations used throughout the manual.

Callout styles

The manual uses four types of callout boxes:

Coming Soon

Role restriction

Tip

Warning

Screenshot annotations

Screenshots throughout this manual use the following overlays:

All screenshots are taken from a seeded demo salon ("Doastly Grooming Co.") in light mode at a 1440-wide desktop viewport unless noted otherwise.

Terminology

Screenshot key — quick reference

Part One — Opening Your Doors

What Doastly is

Doastly is the software a pet-care business runs on. It handles the whole of the work a salon does in a day: booking appointments, checking pets in, tracking each groom as it happens, taking payment, sending the owner their pet's report card, and keeping the books. One salon or a group of locations, one service or several — grooming, boarding, daycare, mobile grooming, training — all of it lives in a single account.

Three ideas run through everything that follows, and it helps to have them straight from the start.

The first is how a business is shaped. At the top is a salon group — the company. Inside it are one or more locations — a storefront on Main Street, a second branch across town, a grooming van. Each location has its staff (owners, managers, groomers, bathers, receptionists, drivers) and serves its pet families — the customers and their pets. Almost everything you do in Doastly happens at the level of a location.

The second is that a pet's records belong to the pet, not to the salon. A dog that visits two different salons carries one health profile — its breed, its vaccines, its medications — visible to both, because a groomer needs to know a dog is up to date before handling it. What each salon did with the pet, though — the grooming notes, the report cards, the payments — stays private to that salon. The customer sees all of it in their own app; no salon sees another's.

The third is the part no competitor offers: real AI, built on Anthropic's Claude, doing genuine work inside the product. It briefs the groomer before a session, writes each pet's report card in warm and honest language, and helps the owner understand and grow the business. It is not a novelty bolted on the side — it runs through the daily workflow, and a later chapter is devoted to it.

Chapter A1 — Signing up

Everything starts with setup, and Doastly gets a new salon through it in a single guided pass called the Salon Setup Wizard. It has twelve steps. A panel down the left lists them all and marks each one required or optional; a bar at the top shows how far along you are. You can move between steps freely, skip the optional ones, and come back later — the wizard saves your progress, so closing the browser and returning leaves your answers exactly where you left them. Nothing here is a one-way door.

The example we follow is a new studio called Barkside Grooming Studio opening its account for the first time.

Step 1 of 12 — Business Verticals. The wizard opens by asking what kind of work the salon does. Each service type is a card with its monthly price per location — Grooming, Boarding, Daycare, Mobile Grooming, and Pet Training — and you select every one you offer. A pricing summary updates as you choose, showing the running per-location total against a thirty-day free trial with no card required to start. Payments processing is included with every plan, so there is nothing to add for it. (Retail and Pickup & Drop-off are add-ons configured elsewhere, not verticals chosen here.) Barkside selects Grooming.

Step 2 of 12 — Salon Info. Next the salon describes itself, across three tabs. The Business tab holds the essentials a customer and a receipt need — legal and display names, phone, email, website, tax ID, and a short description. The Social tab connects Instagram, Facebook, and the Google Business profile that later feed review syncing and marketing. The Cancellation tab is where the salon writes the cancellation policy customers will see on their booking confirmations, and picks a brand color for customer-facing materials.

Step 3 of 12 — Locations. Here the salon tells Doastly where it operates. Each location gets a name, full address, phone, email, time zone, and a type — Storefront / Brick & Mortar, Mobile Van, or Home-Based. One location is marked primary. More can be added later from Settings, and because each location is billed separately, this step is also where the subscription total takes its final shape.

Step 4 of 12 — Team & Roles. The salon can invite its staff now or later — this step is optional. Each invite takes a name, an email, and a role: Owner, Manager, Groomer, Bather, Receptionist, or Driver. Everyone invited receives an email with a sign-in link and can set up their own account while the owner keeps going through the wizard.

Step 5 of 12 — Staff Payment. This optional step sets the default way groomers are paid. There are three pay types — commission (a percentage of each session's revenue), hourly (a rate per hour, which asks staff to clock in and out), and fixed (a flat amount per pay period) — plus how tips are handled and how often payroll runs. These are defaults for new staff; any individual can be set differently later.

Step 6 of 12 — Service Catalogue. Now the salon builds its menu. Three common services come pre-filled — Full Groom, Bath Only, Nail Trim — ready to edit or replace. Each service has a name, a duration, and a price, and the price can follow whatever model the salon uses: a flat rate, a rate by size, by coat type, by size-and-coat grid, by breed, by weight, or by time. Services can also be bundled into packages sold at a set price.

Step 7 of 12 — Pickup & Drop-off. If the salon collects and returns pets, it sets that up here — the service radius in miles, a home-visit fee, and the earliest pickup and latest drop-off times. Salons that don't offer it skip the step and can turn it on later from Settings.

Step 8 of 12 — Online Booking. This step turns on the customer-facing booking page and sets its rules: whether bookings confirm instantly or wait for the salon's approval, how far ahead customers may book, how much advance notice a booking needs, whether a deposit is collected, and what a late cancellation costs.

Step 9 of 12 — Live Tracker. The Live Tracker is the real-time view a customer watches while their pet is in the salon, and this step chooses how much of it they see. In Basic mode they see four stages — Checked In, Grooming, Ready, Checked Out — and a text message goes out twice: when grooming starts and when the pet is ready. In Detailed mode they see each individual service stage, with optional notes and photos from the groomer; the text messages still fire only at the start and at Ready, never on the stages in between. Detailed mode also lets the salon choose which stages appear and set an alert for sessions running long.

Step 10 of 12 — Gateway Setup. Doastly never holds a salon's money. Instead the salon connects its own payment processor — Stripe or Square — and funds flow straight to its account. This step takes those credentials, and Doastly checks them with the processor on save, returning a plain-language message if a key is wrong. The same step sets the default tip percentages shown at checkout, which payment methods to accept, whether receipts email automatically, and whether customers may pay ahead of pickup.

Step 11 of 12 — Pet Reference Data. This step defines what the salon accepts — which pet types, sizes, and coat types appear on the check-in form — and, importantly, which vaccines a pet must have on file. The vaccines chosen here are the ones enforced at the check-in gate later. Sensible defaults come pre-selected, ready to adjust to the salon's real intake.

Step 12 of 12 — Compliance & Liability. The final step sets the safety and legal checks that apply at check-in: whether customers must sign a liability waiver in their app before each visit, a maximum number of pets per staff member on shift, and the vaccine gate — the rule that blocks check-in for a pet whose required vaccines are missing or expired. These settings, like all the others, can be changed any time from Settings.

Once the required steps are complete, a Complete Setup button appears. Selecting it creates the salon group and opens the owner dashboard — the screen from the start of this part — and Barkside Grooming Studio is open for business. Everything set here remains available, individually, in Settings, so nothing chosen in fifteen minutes of setup is ever locked in.

Chapter A2 — Your command center

Signing in lands the owner on the dashboard shown at the start of this part, and it is worth a moment because it is the screen a salon opens to every morning. Across the top sit the numbers that answer "how are we doing right now": how many pets are in care, revenue collected and checked out today, the average groom time, and who is next for pickup. Below them are the day's schedule, any health alerts flagged on today's pets, and a Copilot card that fills with AI insight once sessions are running. It is a single glance that tells an owner whether the day is on track.

Getting anywhere else is done from the panel down the left. It is grouped the way a salon thinks: the everyday actions at the top — Check-in, Check-out, the Live Tracker, Live Chat — then Operations (the dashboard, appointments, the AI Copilot), then the business side (customers, analytics, payments, reports, reviews), and settings at the foot. The panel is role-aware: a groomer signing in sees the tools a groomer needs and not the owner's financial pages, so everyone lands in a workspace scoped to their job. A location switcher at the top lets an owner with more than one branch move between them without signing out.

Chapter A3 — Setting your rules

Before the first pet arrives, three settings are worth getting right, because they decide how the salon protects itself and how it talks to its customers. All three were touched in the wizard and all three live permanently under Settings, ready to change whenever the salon's practice changes.

The first is the compliance gate — the salon's safety rules for who may be checked in. This is where the salon marks which vaccines are mandatory and turns on the vaccine gate, the rule that blocks check-in for any pet whose required vaccines are missing or expired. The same screen sets whether customers must sign a liability waiver, and whether a manager may override a block by recording a reason. These rules are the promise the next chapter pays off: with the gate on, a pet that is not up to date simply cannot be checked in until the records are fixed.

The second is which messages go out. Doastly texts a customer at only a few carefully chosen moments — when their pet's groom begins, when it is ready for pickup, to confirm or remind about an appointment, and a small number of others — and never on the small stage-by-stage changes in between. This screen is where the salon switches each message type on or off for the whole location. It is deliberately restrained: the point is to keep the customer informed at the moments that matter, not to fill their phone.

The third is the Live Tracker mode, set per location. Basic mode shows the customer four stages and sends the two texts; Detailed mode shows every service stage as it happens, with the same two texts and nothing extra in between. A salon can start on Basic and move to Detailed whenever it wants a richer live view for its customers — the choice is a single setting and takes effect on the next session.

With the salon set up, the team in place, the menu priced, the money wired, and the rules in force, Barkside is ready for its first customer — which is where the next part begins.

Part Two — Your First Groom

Barkside is set up; now we step into a salon already busy with a day's work and follow the pets who come through its door. Part Two moves through a working salon's real day — a customer and their pet arriving, a check-in past the safety gate, a groom crossing the live board, a report card going out, a paid receipt — in the order the day presents them. Every screen a salon touches in a normal day appears here.

Chapter A4 — A customer and their pet

A new customer starts on the Customers page. It lists everyone the salon serves, with a search box across the top and a New Customer button that opens a short, two-part form — the customer first, then their pet.

The first part captures the owner: their name, phone number, and email. Phone and email are how the salon later reaches them with appointment reminders and the pet's report card, so they matter. Saving the owner moves the form straight to the second part.

The second part builds the pet's profile — the record the groomer and the AI both read before a session. Beyond the pet's name, breed, size, and coat, this is where handling matters most: medications, allergies, diet notes, and anything about the pet's temperament the salon should know before it puts hands on the dog. A thorough profile here is what makes the Copilot brief in Chapter A7 genuinely useful; a thin one gives the groomer little to go on.

With the customer and pet saved, the salon lands on the pet's record, where its vaccines are added — the certificates that the safety gate in the next chapter checks. Staff can upload them here, or the customer can add them from their own app before they arrive; either way the records are visible to any salon serving the pet. The pet is now known to the salon, and ready to be checked in.

Chapter A5 — Check-in: the safety gate

Checking a pet in is a short, guided flow, and it is the moment the salon's safety rules do their work. The flow has up to seven steps, shown along the top so staff always know where they are.

The first step, Verticals, asks which service this visit is for — grooming, boarding, daycare — and appears only at salons that offer more than one; a grooming-only salon never sees it and starts on the next step.

Next is Identify: staff find the pet by searching the owner's name, phone, or the pet's name, scan a QR code, or add a walk-in on the spot.

With the pet found, Visit details confirms the service and any notes for the day.

Then come the two checks that can stop a check-in. Compliance looks at the paperwork: any mandatory document the customer has not signed blocks the check-in until it is signed, while optional documents are shown as reminders but never block.

And Vaccines is the safety gate itself — the heart of this chapter.

This is where the rule set in Chapter A3 earns its place. Consider two dogs arriving the same morning. Rex is due for everything: his Rabies, DHPP, and Bordetella have all lapsed. The Vaccines step shows each one in red with the date it expired, and the check-in cannot proceed — the pet is blocked at the door until the records are made current, or a manager overrides the block with a recorded reason. This is not a suggestion the staff can wave past; it is enforced. And the owner already knew it was coming, because Doastly texts the thirty-day expiry warning automatically.

Coco arrives the same morning with every vaccine current. Her Vaccines step is green, nothing stands in the way, and her check-in proceeds straight through. Same gate, same rules — one dog stopped for its own safety, one waved through. That is the whole point: the salon never has to remember to check, because the software will not let an out-of-date pet through.

Past the gate, Payment handles any deposit or pre-authorization the salon collects at check-in.

Confirm finishes the flow. The pet's status flips to Checked In and it appears on the live board — which is where the next chapter picks up. No message goes to the owner yet: the salon texts sparingly, and the first text waits for the moment grooming actually begins.

Chapter A6 — The groom in motion

Once pets are checked in, the day runs on the Live Tracker — a single board that shows every pet in the salon and exactly where each one is. Its columns follow the arc of a visit: Checked In, Grooming, Ready, and Checked Out. A glance tells the whole room who is waiting, who is on the table, and who is ready for their owner.

Two moments on this board send the owner a text, and only two. When a groomer starts the groom — moving the pet from Checked In into Grooming — the first text goes out: their pet's groom has begun. When the pet is finished and marked Ready, the second goes out: their pet is ready for pickup. Between those two points, nothing is sent. This is deliberate and it is a firm rule: a customer hears from the salon when work starts and when it is done, and is never buzzed for every small step in between.

How much of those in-between steps the customer sees depends on the tracker mode set back in the salon's settings. In Basic mode the board keeps to the four stages, and the customer following along at home sees the same four.

In Detailed mode the groomer can advance the pet through each individual service — bath, blow-dry, nails, ears — adding a note or a photo at any stage, and the customer watches those stages update live on their phone. Even here the rule holds: those per-stage updates reach the customer as a quiet in-app update, never as a text. The two texts still fire only at the start and at Ready. Detailed mode gives the customer a richer window into the visit without turning their phone into a stream of alerts.

Chapter A7 — The AI briefs the groomer

Before a groomer puts a hand on a dog, the Copilot tells them what to know. On the pet's card, a short brief is generated for the session — not a canned tip sheet, but a read of this specific pet drawn together from several places at once: the pet's profile and any handling notes, its vaccines and health records, and what happened at its recent visits to this salon. It reads the whole picture and hands the groomer a paragraph or two of what matters today.

Two things about that brief are worth understanding. The first is where its information comes from. A pet's health facts — breed, weight, medications, allergies, vaccines — are read across every salon that serves the pet, because a groomer needs them regardless of who entered them. But the pet's grooming history — what was done, the notes a groomer left, past report cards — is read from this salon only. What another salon did with the pet is never part of the brief. The dog's health travels with it; the salon's record of its work does not.

The second is why this particular brief runs on Doastly's more capable AI model rather than the fast, inexpensive one. A handling note like a bruise behind the ears or a history of anxiety is not something to simply repeat back — it needs to be turned into a real adaptation for today's groom, and quietly missing it would be worse than useless. That is reasoning, and it is the same judgment the report card in a later chapter depends on. The brief is generated once per session and reused, so the care costs the salon almost nothing.

Chapter A8 — The report card writes itself

This is the feature that sells the platform. When a groom is finished, the groomer fills out a report card — not free-form, but a quick set of findings across the things an owner cares about: eyes, ears, coat, skin, nails, teeth, nose, mood, and behavior, with a note wherever something needs one. It takes a groomer a few taps.

What the owner receives is not that grid of checkboxes. It is a warm, plain-English note about their pet's day, written by the AI from exactly those findings — and the difference between the two is the whole point of this chapter.

Take a real example. Doast, a Bernese Mountain Dog, had a lovely session on nearly every measure: bright eyes, clear ears, a silky coat, perfect nails, a happy mood, faultless behavior. But during the skin check the groomer found something and flagged it — possible lumps, should be seen by a vet — and noted a little tartar on the teeth. Eight good findings, one that genuinely matters. The danger with any cheerful summary is that the one thing the owner needs to act on gets lost in the praise.

It does not get lost. The narrative opens warmly, then — before the good news, not buried after it — surfaces the concern in its own paragraph: "During our skin check, I found some lumps that must be seen by a vet…" It explains why it matters, folds in the dental note, gives the reassuring news last, and closes with a clear instruction to book a vet appointment. A pet parent reading it cannot miss what to do next. That is the difference between summarizing and reasoning, and it is why this runs on Doastly's more capable model.

Two guardrails make this safe to trust. The model was deliberately chosen after an earlier, cheaper one was seen to write a glowing summary that dropped a flagged concern — exactly the failure that would matter most. And beyond the model's own judgment, the system checks the finished narrative: if a groomer flagged something for the vet and the narrative somehow does not mention it, Doastly appends the groomer's own words before it ever reaches the owner. The concern cannot be lost, by the model or by anything else.

The report card reaches the pet parent in their app and by email. For the salon it is automatic — a few taps from the groomer become a message that reads as if a caring professional wrote it by hand for that one dog, every single time.

Chapter A9 — Checkout and getting paid

The pet is ready, the owner has arrived, and the visit ends where it began — with a short guided flow. Checkout starts with Lookup: find the pet or owner who is leaving.

If a customer has more than one pet finishing at once, a Sessions step lets staff pick which ones to check out together; a single pet skips straight past it. Then Visit details brings up everything owed for the visit — the services, any add-ons, tax as the salon's own processor calculates it, and a place for a tip — so the total is in front of both the staff member and the customer before anyone pays.

Payment is where Doastly's promise to stay out of the money shows. The salon takes payment through its own Stripe or Square account — card, or cash — and the funds go straight to the salon; Doastly never holds them. A session that was Unpaid on the board becomes Paid the moment payment settles, and if a refund is ever needed it is issued here too and recorded as Refunded, so a visit's payment state is always one unambiguous word.

Finally, Review confirms the visit and produces the receipt, which emails to the customer automatically if the salon has that turned on. The receipt itemizes exactly what was charged — the same figures shown a moment earlier, with no surprise between the preview and what actually settles. With that, the pet is Checked Out, the board is clear, and the visit that began as a new customer in Chapter A4 is complete.

Part Three — Running the Business

A single groom is one thing; running a salon week after week is another. This part covers the tools a salon uses between and around the grooms — seeing the shape of the day, keeping customers coming back, growing the top line, and managing the people who do the work.

Chapter A10 — Your day at a glance

Two screens tell an owner how the business is doing. The calendar is the forward view: every appointment, in day, week, or month layout, with click-through to any booking's detail. It is how a salon sees what is coming and fills the gaps.

Analytics is the backward view: revenue over time, the busiest days, which services sell, and which customers are drifting away. Where the dashboard gives a live pulse, Analytics gives the trend — the numbers an owner uses to decide what to promote, when to staff up, and who to win back.

Chapter A11 — Keeping them coming back

The cheapest customer is the one who returns, and Doastly gives a salon two ways to earn that. The first is loyalty: customers earn points as they visit and spend, and redeem them for rewards the salon defines. The salon sets how points accrue and what they are worth; the earning and redeeming then happen on their own, quietly rewarding the regulars.

The second is reviews. After a visit, Doastly can ask the customer for a review, collect it, and — this is the part no competitor offers — draft the salon's reply with AI, ready for an owner to glance at, adjust, and post. A salon stays on top of its reputation without a manager writing every response from scratch.

Chapter A11b — Growing the top line

Beyond keeping customers, Doastly helps a salon find new revenue, and it leans on AI to do it. The Marketing Strategist is a chat an owner can simply ask: which customers have not visited in three months, how to promote boarding for the holidays, which services do well with doodle owners. It answers from the salon's own data, with real numbers — and says so plainly when it does not have the answer.

Alongside it, Opportunities surfaces revenue the salon might be leaving on the table — a cluster of double-coated dogs overdue for a groom, a Saturday that fills faster than the calendar allows — each written up in plain English with an estimated value. And a campaign builder drafts the subject line and message for a targeted send.

Chapter A12 — Your team

A salon runs on its people, and Doastly manages them from one place. Staff are invited and given a role — Owner, Manager, Groomer, Bather, Receptionist, Driver — and each role sees only the tools its job needs, the same scoping the owner met in Chapter A2. Each staff member carries their pay setup (commission, hourly, or fixed), and hourly staff clock in and out, which feeds payroll directly.

With the team in place and the business tools in hand, a salon can run its grooming operation end to end. What remains is everything grooming is not — the other services a salon can switch on — which the rest of this part covers.

Chapter A13 — Beyond grooming

Everything so far has followed grooming, because grooming is the fullest example. But a salon that also boards, runs daycare, sends out a grooming van, or teaches training classes turns those on the same way it chose grooming at signup — a single switch in settings — and gets the same shell around them: the same dashboard, the same customers, the same safety gate, the same billing. What changes from one vertical to the next is only the shape of the work itself, and the chapters that follow show just that shape — not the parts already learned.

Chapter A14 — Boarding

Grooming is a visit that starts and ends the same day. Boarding is a stay — a pet arrives, lives at the salon for a stretch of nights, and goes home later — and everything different about boarding follows from that one fact.

The work is organized around reservations rather than appointments. A reservation is booked for a date range, confirmed, and then, when the pet arrives, checked in to begin the stay; it stays open across the nights and is checked out at the end. A boarding board therefore tracks stays in progress, not grooms in progress.

Inside a stay, the differences are the ones an overnight guest needs. Each pet is assigned a kennel. Feeding and medication run on a schedule across the days, not a single pass. And instead of one report card at the end, boarding is built to send the owner a daily update — a note on how their pet slept, ate, and played — so a family away from home can hear from their pet every day of the stay. (As of this writing, that daily pipeline isn't running for most active stays yet — a data-pipeline issue being fixed, not a missing feature — so read "every day" here as the design the product is built for, not a guarantee of today's experience.)

Everything else a salon already knows carries straight over: the same customers and pets, the same vaccine gate at check-in, the same payment and receipts at checkout. Boarding simply adds the shape of a multi-day stay on top.

Chapter A15 — Daycare

Daycare is a same-day rhythm: pets are dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening, and the salon tracks attendance rather than grooms or stays. An attendance is booked, the pet is checked in on arrival, and checked out at pickup — a full turn every day, often for the same familiar faces several days a week.

Two things set daycare apart. Because regulars come often, daycare sells passes and packages — a book of days bought up front and drawn down per visit — rather than a price per appointment. And because daycare is group play, it watches the staff-to-pet ratio: set a maximum number of pets per staff member on shift, and the system warns the moment a check-in would cross it, so the yard never quietly becomes unsafe.

As with boarding, the rest is familiar — same customers, same vaccine gate, same payment. Daycare adds the daily in-and-out and the safety of watching the ratio.

Chapter A16 — Mobile Grooming

Mobile Grooming flips the whole model around: instead of the pet coming to the salon, the salon drives to the pet. That single change reshapes the day around a route — a sequence of home visits a van works through, one stop after another.

A route is planned as a map, so stops fall in a sensible order and the day's driving stays efficient. Each stop is a single pet's visit at its own address, moving from booked, to in service when the groomer begins, to completed when the van pulls away.

The other difference is quieter but real: a mobile groomer works alone, at a stranger's home, with no salon around them for backup. So the per-stop tools lean safety-first — the pet's profile, handling notes, and any warnings surface before the groomer knocks. The visit itself — the groom, the report card, the payment — works exactly as it does in the salon; only the setting, and the care taken because of it, is different.

Chapter A17 — Pet Training

The other verticals are all a single service, done and finished. Training is a course — a pet enrolls in a program, attends a series of class sessions over weeks, and works up through a set of skills — so the unit of work here is a curriculum, not a visit.

A salon runs training from its enrollments: which pets are in which courses, and how far along each one is. A pet is enrolled, moves through the sessions, and the enrollment closes as completed when the program is done.

What makes training distinctive is how the owner hears about it. After sessions, the trainer records each skill's progress along with notes and homework, and the AI turns that into a plain-English progress narrative for the family — what the pet has mastered, what to practice at home, what is coming next. This runs on Doastly's more capable model for the same reason the report card does: a trainer flagging aggression, a bite risk, or a regression is exactly the kind of concern a lesser model would soften or skip, and here it must be reasoned into honest, useful guidance instead.

Chapter A18 — Pickup & Drop-off

Not everything a salon offers is a vertical. Pickup & Drop-off is an add-on — a paid option a salon switches on inside grooming, boarding, or daycare — that lets the salon collect a pet from home and return it, rather than asking the owner to make the trip.

Once it is on (its service area, home-visit fee, and time windows were set back in the wizard, and live in settings), the work it adds is dispatch: scheduling which driver collects which pet, when, and in what order, so a run of pickups is planned much like a mobile route.

It changes nothing about the groom, stay, or daycare day itself — it simply adds the leg that gets the pet there and back. This is the last of the ways a salon can shape its services; the rest of the manual turns from the salon's side of the glass to the customer's.

Part Four — The Pet Parent's Story

Everything so far has been the salon's side of the glass. The same day looks different from the other side — the customer's — and it has its own app, the pet-family portal. This part follows a pet parent through the visit the salon just delivered: finding the salon, booking, getting ready, watching the day happen, and hearing how it went.

Chapter B1 — Finding your salon

A pet parent gets into Doastly the simplest way there is. When a salon adds them as a customer, or when they book online, they reach the pet-family portal and sign in with a one-time code sent to their phone — no password to invent or forget. Inside, they see their own pets, their history, and everything the salon has shared with them, and nothing that belongs to anyone else.

Chapter B2 — Booking a visit

Booking online is a few steps: pick the service, the groomer, and a time. What makes it Doastly is a small card that appears along the way — a note written for this pet. It pulls together the health reminders that matter (a vaccine coming due, a note from the profile) and the pet's own pattern at this salon (the usual service, roughly how often), so the parent books with the useful things in front of them rather than from memory.

Chapter B3 — Getting your records ready

The gate the salon relies on at check-in is easiest to clear before anyone leaves the house. From the portal, a parent can upload the pet's vaccine certificates and sign the salon's waivers ahead of time. Do that, and drop-off is instant — the paperwork the salon would otherwise stop for is already done.

Chapter B4 — Watching the visit live

On the day, the parent can follow along. The same board the salon works from appears in the app as a simple live status: their pet is checked in, then being groomed, then ready. Two text messages punctuate it — one when the groom begins, one when the pet is ready for pickup — and, if the salon runs the detailed view, the parent can watch each stage tick by in the app, with the occasional photo, without a single extra text.

Chapter B5 — The report card arrives

When the groom is done, the report card lands — in the app and by email. This is the same narrative the salon generated back in Chapter A8: the warm, honest note about the pet's day, with any real concern surfaced rather than buried. From the parent's side it simply shows up under the pet's history, ready to read, keep, and act on.

Chapter B6 — Staying loyal

Over time, the visits add up to a relationship. The parent can see their loyalty points grow with each visit and redeem them for the rewards the salon offers — the same program the salon set up in Chapter A11, seen from the earning end. It is the quiet payoff of coming back to a salon that remembers the pet, keeps its records safe, and tells the truth about how each visit went — which is the whole of what Doastly is built to do.

Role and Capability Permissions Matrix

This table lists every significant action in Doastly and which staff roles can perform it. The six salon roles are: Owner, Manager, Groomer, Bather, Receptionist, and Trainer. The Driver role is specific to Mobile Grooming and Pickup/Drop-off.

Legend

1. Authentication and Account

2. Staff Management

3. Customer and Pet Management

4. Check-In and Check-Out

5. Session and Tracker

6. Report Cards and AI Copilot

7. Payments

8. Appointments

9. Settings

10. Analytics and Reports

11. Reviews and Reputation

12. Mobile Grooming (day-of route work)

Whoever is out with the van runs the day. Doastly treats Groomer and Driver identically for every day-of route action below — the person doing the visit does not need a particular job title to record it. Building and dispatching routes stays with Owners and Managers.

**\* Known limitation for staff whose only role is Driver.** These two rows describe what a Driver is permitted to do, and the permission is correct. In the current release a Driver-only account cannot actually open the day's route — the route belongs to the van, while the account belongs to your salon location, and the two do not yet line up. The practical effect: the route list comes up empty for a Driver-only account. The remaining rows in this table are unaffected in themselves, but a driver reaches them through the route list, so in practice they are held up by the same thing. What to do today: have an Owner or Manager open the day's route — their accounts cover every location, so the route list loads for them. This is a known gap and we are tracking it; contact support if it is blocking you.

Manager vs Owner — Key Differences

Managers can do nearly everything an Owner can do. The four things that require Owner role:

1. Grant the Owner role to another staff member
2. Connect or disconnect Stripe or Square payment gateways
3. Manage the platform subscription (add or remove verticals, update billing card)
4. View Doastly billing invoices for the platform subscription

Calculations Reference

Every number displayed in Doastly is computed by a specific formula. The table below documents the key formulas so you can verify totals, understand reports, and answer customer questions accurately.

Payments and Receipts

Boarding

Daycare

Analytics and Reports

Security, roles and the audit trail

This chapter is for owners and managers of groups with several locations. It answers three questions: who can do what, what gets written down when someone overrides a safety or money check, and whose data this is. It describes what the platform does today. Where something is not built yet, it says so.

Who can do what

Every staff login has one role at each location. The role decides which screens appear in the menu and which actions the server will accept. For the money and staff actions listed below, both are enforced: the page is hidden from the menu, and the server refuses the request if someone types its address, with a "You don't have permission" message. Not every hidden page is also refused by the server; one known case is listed under "Known gaps" at the end of this chapter. Do not rely on a page being hidden as the only control for something that matters.

The salon roles

Above these sits Super Admin, which is Doastly's own platform role and is never assigned to salon staff. Pet owners log in to a separate family app with a customer role; they never see salon screens.

The full action-by-action table is the Permissions Matrix. Four rows worth knowing without opening it:

• Connecting Stripe or Square is Owner only. A Manager cannot change where the money settles.
• Refunds are Owner or Manager. Front-desk staff cannot refund.
• Revenue reports and analytics are Owner or Manager.
• Overriding a vaccine or document block at check-in is Owner or Manager, and it is recorded (next section).

Location scope. A staff member sees only the locations they are assigned to. This is not a filter in the screen; it is enforced in the database itself (row-level security), so a report, a search or a direct request for sessions, appointments, stays, attendance or payments cannot return another location's records even if the address is guessed.

The one deliberate exception: pet profiles. A pet's profile, vaccine records and health documents are readable by any signed-in salon staff member, at any salon, because a pet may be boarded at one salon and groomed at another and the next salon needs the vaccine record before it lets the pet in. Session history, stays and payments are not shared this way. If your policy requires that pet profiles be visible only to the salon that serves them, know that the platform does not enforce that today.

Staff turnover. Removing a staff member's access is done by the Owner or Manager on the Staff page. Their past actions stay in the record under their name; the audit rows below reference the user, not a free-text name, so a departed employee's overrides remain attributable.

What is written down when someone overrides a check

Doastly stops a check-in when a required vaccine is missing or expired, when a mandatory document is unsigned, or (daycare) when a yard would go over its staff-to-dog ratio. An Owner or Manager can push through. When they do, the platform writes a record that the app has no screen to edit or delete. Each record carries the user's ID and a server timestamp, not a name someone typed.

What each record contains

Step by step: overriding a vaccine block at boarding check-in

1. The Vaccines step lists what is missing or expired and the Continue button stays grey.
2. If the owner has the certificate, add it on the spot and the block clears; nothing is overridden.
3. If not, an Owner or Manager (or, on your behalf, a Doastly platform Super Admin) chooses the manager override on that step. Groomers, bathers and receptionists do not see it, and the server refuses it from them. The reason must be at least a few words; an empty reason is rejected.
4. A reason is required. The record is written in the same action that completes the check-in, so an override and its check-in cannot exist without each other.
5. The reservation proceeds; the record stays.

Why it is built this way: an out-of-date vaccination is a risk to every animal in the building. The block makes proceeding a manager's decision, on the record, with the reason next to it.

Step by step: a daycare ratio override

1. The yard's staff-to-dog ratio is computed live from dogs present and attendants clocked in and shown on the dashboard and live tracker. It is a visibility indicator: passing it does not by itself block a check-in.
2. What blocks is the yard's capacity limit (Settings → Yard Management). A check-in that would exceed it is refused with "Yard is at capacity."
3. A Manager or Owner may override, where your policy allows it. The reason is required, and the record stores the measured counts and the configured ratio at that moment, so "what was the ratio when she let the twenty-first dog in" has a stored answer, not a recollection.

How to read these records today. Owners and Managers have an Override Log in the grooming menu listing checkout overrides. Boarding, daycare and mobile override records appear on the affected reservation, attendance or route; login audit is available to Doastly on request. There is no single audit screen across all of these tables yet; a consolidated audit view for group owners is on the roadmap.

Not logged today

Stated plainly so nobody plans a control around something that does not exist:

• Cash drawer opens. The platform records a cash drawer count; it does not record each time the drawer is opened or by whom.
• Refund approvals. Refunds are recorded with their amounts and the transaction they reverse, and only Owners and Managers can issue them. There is no separate approval record naming a second approver.
• Manual price adjustments. Discounts and adjustments at checkout are stored with the checkout; there is no separate audit row naming who applied a price change and why.

Each of these is a roadmap item. If any of them is a condition of your operating policy, ask before you rely on it.

Whose data it is

Your customer records, pet records, health documents, stay and session history, and transaction history belong to you. Doastly stores and processes them to run your business; it does not sell them, and it does not use one salon's records to serve another. A pet's profile and vaccine documents can be seen by any salon currently caring for that pet, because that is a safety matter; a salon's session history is visible only to that salon.

Money never sits with Doastly. Card payments settle into your own Stripe or Square account. If you leave, the account, the customer cards on file and your negotiated rate are already yours.

What you can export today, as CSV:

• Sessions (grooming), from the Sessions page
• Payroll, from the Payroll page: hours, shifts, sessions, revenue, tips, pay type and payout per staff member
• Staff clock report
• Boarding analytics

What you cannot export today: a complete, one-click export of the whole account (every customer, pet, document, stay and transaction across all verticals). That is a roadmap item. If you need a full export before it ships, ask Doastly and it is done for you.

Known gaps

Recorded here so that a control is not planned around them. Each has a ticket; the manual is updated when it closes.

• The checkout Override Log can be read by any staff member who calls the API directly. The menu entry is shown only to Owners and Managers, but the server does not currently check the role on that request. A groomer or receptionist cannot see it in the app; one who addresses the API directly can read it. Reading is the exposure; the records cannot be changed. Tracked as #1877.

Glossary

Every Doastly-specific term a new user might encounter, in plain English.

A

Active Vertical The business category a salon has currently enabled. For example, a salon with Grooming and Boarding subscriptions has two active verticals. Your active vertical determines which sidebar navigation items appear and which features are unlocked.

AI Booking Notes A short AI-generated paragraph shown to a pet family customer during the grooming booking flow (Step 3 — Services). It summarises the pet's health profile and any relevant history at that salon to help the customer mention important details to the groomer. Generated by Claude Haiku; cached for 24 hours per pet-per-salon.

AI Groomer Copilot An AI-powered brief shown to groomers on the Live Tracker and on the Copilot page. It summarises the pet's breed characteristics, health notes, vaccine status, and recent grooming history at this salon. Generated by Claude Sonnet. See also: Copilot Brief.

AI Report Card Narrator The AI feature that reads a groomer's attribute ratings and notes after a session and writes a customer-friendly narrative paragraph. Runs on Claude Sonnet. If a groomer flagged a health concern in their notes, the AI always surfaces it in the narrative — it never softens or omits health flags.

Anniversary An annual SMS that fires on the anniversary of a pet's first visit to a salon. Sent once per year per salon.

Appointment A scheduled visit booked in advance, as opposed to a walk-in. Appointments appear on the appointments calendar and in the groomer's daily schedule on the dashboard.

B

Basic Tracker Mode The default session tracking mode. Four stages: Checked In, Grooming, Ready, Checked Out. A maximum of two SMS messages fire per session (Grooming Started and Pet Ready). This is the mode all new locations start in. Contrast with Detailed Tracker Mode.

Bather A staff role responsible for bathing and drying pets. Bathers can check in pets, advance session stages, add notes, and add service photos but cannot process payments or access management settings.

Belonging (Boarding) An item the pet owner lists during the boarding pre-check as accompanying their pet during the stay — for example, a favourite blanket, toy, or medications. Boarding staff track the status of each belonging (with salon / returned / lost) on the reservation detail page.

Birthday SMS An SMS that fires automatically on a pet's recorded birthday. Sent once per year per salon. Respects the customer's opt-out preference.

Breadcrumb (Mobile Grooming) The GPS trail of a mobile grooming van's recent path, displayed as a line on the live tracking map. Updated on every 30-second poll. Customers see only the current day's trail — the live tracking page does not expose earlier days.

BYOA (Bring Your Own Account) Doastly's payment model. Each salon connects their own Stripe or Square merchant account. Doastly never holds customer payments — funds go directly from the customer's card to the salon's bank account.

C

Check-In The process of registering a pet's arrival at the salon and starting a session. Opens at /salon/checkin. The check-in flow identifies the pet, selects services, assigns a groomer, handles compliance signatures, and creates the grooming session record.

Check-Out The process of completing a session, collecting payment, and releasing the pet to the owner. Opens at /salon/checkout. The check-out flow reviews services, processes payment, and triggers the receipt email and report card delivery.

Checked In The first session status. The pet has arrived and the session has been started, but grooming has not yet begun.

Checked Out The final session status. The pet has left the salon and payment has been collected.

Compliance Gate A check-in requirement that blocks a session from proceeding unless the customer has signed the required waiver or compliance document. Owners and Managers can override the compliance gate with a log entry. Groomers and Receptionists cannot override it.

Compliance Template A digital waiver or release form configured by the salon under Settings > Compliance. Customers sign these during check-in. All signed records are preserved permanently even if the template is later edited or archived.

Copilot Brief The AI-generated summary that appears on a session card in the Live Tracker and on the Groomer Copilot page. Contains pet health, breed, and history information relevant to the current groom. Scoped to this salon's history only.

Copilot Proposal An AI-generated suggestion shown in the Copilot inbox (not the brief). Examples: "Biscuit is overdue for their 8-week groom" or "Cooper historically prefers the afternoon slot." Proposals require Owner or Manager approval to act on.

Customer A pet owner who brings their pets to a Doastly salon. Also called Pet Family. In the database and throughout the app, "customer" refers to the person; "pet" refers to their animal.

D

Daily Report Card (Boarding) A per-day summary card generated for a multi-night boarding stay, combining logged medication/feeding/activity/incident data into an AI-generated narrative. Visible to the pet owner on their stay dashboard. Distinct from a Grooming Report Card. This is a real, built capability (§25-verified end to end) — but it is currently generating no cards for most active stays system-wide, a data-pipeline issue (root-caused, being fixed), not a missing feature. Distinct also from the salon-staff "Daily Card Form" entry screen in the Kennel Grid (mood/feeding/walks staff enter manually) — that form's own narrative-generation code path is separately non-functional (unwired, not a data-pipeline gap) and does not feed this card; see the check-in/live-tracker reference pages for that distinction.

Day Pass A credit that a daycare customer purchases in a package deal and redeems for a single daycare attendance day. Passes have a balance (number remaining) and an expiry date. See also: Package.

Deposit (Boarding) A portion of the estimated boarding total intended to secure the kennel at booking. The booking confirmation screen displays estimated_total × 25% (rounded to the nearest cent) — but confirmed no gateway charge occurs and no deposit is recorded when a reservation is created through the pet-family booking flow (verified by reading pf_boarding_service.py::create_pf_reservation directly: no payment call, no deposit value passed through at all). The checkout-time credit mechanism (subtracting any stored deposit from the balance due) IS correctly built and works when a deposit value exists on the reservation — it simply has nothing to subtract today, since nothing gets stored at booking. In practice, the full stay amount is paid at checkout, not a remaining balance after a deposit.

Detailed Tracker Mode An optional per-location tracker mode that tracks each service individually within a session. Groomers can mark Bath started, Bath done, Haircut started, etc., and add per-service photos and notes. SMS still fires only at Grooming Started and Pet Ready — never at individual service-stage transitions. Enabled per location under Settings > Tracker.

Dispatch Board (Mobile Grooming) The salon-side operational view at /salon/mobile/dispatch for managing active mobile grooming vans and routes on a given day. Shows a two-column layout with a map panel and a route detail panel. Distinct from the Live Tracker (/salon/mobile/live) which is a monitoring view.

Doastly The platform. Doastly ERP is the full product name. The customer-facing brand name is Doastly.

Driver A staff role specific to Mobile Grooming and Pickup/Drop-off. Drivers can view their assigned route, mark stops as arrived, and check pets in and out at each stop. Drivers do not have access to salon-side management features.

E

Email Trigger An event in Doastly that fires an automatic email. Examples: Grooming Started, Pet Ready, appointment confirmation, receipt after checkout, report card delivery, pay-ahead request. Each trigger can be toggled on or off by the salon under Settings > Notifications.

F

Full Groom A common service type that typically includes bath, dry, haircut, and nail trim. The exact definition depends on how the salon has configured their service catalogue.

G

Gateway Short for Payment Gateway. The Stripe or Square merchant account a salon connects to accept card payments. Each salon brings their own (BYOA model). Configured under Settings > Payment or in Wizard Step 10.

Groomer A staff role responsible for performing grooms. Groomers can check pets in and out, advance session stages, add notes and report cards, and view the AI Copilot. Groomers cannot process refunds, change settings, or manage staff.

Grooming Record The full record of a grooming session, including services performed, payments, groomer notes, report card, and AI narrative. Visible to salon staff and to the pet owner in their pet family app. Route: /salon/grooming/sessions/[id] (salon) or /petfamily/sessions/[id] (customer).

Grooming Session A single grooming visit. Created at check-in and closed at check-out. Contains the status, services, groomer assignment, notes, report card, and payment record.

Grooming Started An SMS notification trigger. Fires when a session status advances from Checked In to Grooming. Text: "Grooming has started for [Pet Name] at [Salon Name]!"

GUC (Grand Unified Context) A PostgreSQL session variable (for example, app.location_ids) used internally by Doastly's Row Level Security system to scope all database queries to the correct tenant location. Not visible to end users; referenced here for completeness.

H

Health Flag A note added by a groomer to a session indicating a potential health concern (for example, "Found a lump on the left shoulder"). Health flags appear prominently in the AI Copilot brief for all future groomers who see the pet, and in the report card narrative so the customer is notified.

J

JWT (JSON Web Token) The authentication token stored in your browser after you log in. Contains your user ID, role, salon group, and active locations. Doastly uses this token to enforce role-based access and multi-location data scoping. Not visible to end users; referenced here for completeness.

K

Kennel The physical unit in a boarding facility where a pet stays during a reservation. Each kennel has a name/number, a size category (Small, Medium, Large, Suite), and a nightly rate. Kennels are managed in the salon's Boarding Settings > Kennel Management.

Kennel Grid The visual layout in the boarding Live Tracker that shows all kennels in the facility, colour-coded by status rather than nights remaining: teal = Occupied, orange = Checking in, amber = Checking out, red = Alert (LiveKennelGrid.tsx's own legend).

L

Late Checkout Fee (Boarding) A fee applied when a pet owner picks up their boarding pet after the agreed checkout time. The amount is set by the salon in Boarding Settings. It appears as a line item on the final boarding receipt.

Late Pickup Fee (Grooming) A grooming-specific fee that accrues per minute after the configurable grace period expires following a session being marked Ready. Formula: max(0, (minutes_since_ready − grace_period_minutes)) × per_minute_rate. Configured in Grooming Settings > Fees.

Live Tracker (Grooming) The real-time operational view at /salon/grooming/tracker showing all active grooming sessions as a Kanban board with columns for each status. Available to all salon roles.

Live Tracker (Boarding) The boarding operational view at /salon/boarding/live-tracker showing the kennel grid with occupancy status and a chronological events feed of check-ins, daily updates, and check-outs.

Live Tracker (Daycare) The daycare operational view at /salon/daycare/live-tracker showing per-yard panels with the pets currently in each yard, staff count, and staff:pet ratio badges.

Location A physical salon branch. Each location operates independently: its own staff, schedule, sessions, settings, and compliance templates. A Salon Group can have multiple locations.

Location ID The unique identifier for a salon location. All session and appointment data is scoped to a location ID at the database level using Row Level Security.

M

Manager A senior staff role with nearly identical permissions to Owner, with four exceptions: Managers cannot grant the Owner role, connect payment gateways, manage the platform subscription, or view platform billing invoices. Managers CAN issue refunds — the refund endpoint's role gate is Owner and Manager both (require_role("OWNER","MANAGER","SUPER_ADMIN")). Designed for a trusted general manager.

Milestone (Mobile Grooming) One of the six chronological events in a mobile grooming booking: confirmed, day_started, en_route, arrived, service_started, completed. Milestones are shown on the customer live tracking page and in the salon's route management view.

Mobile Grooming A vertical where grooming is performed at the customer's address by a van equipped with grooming tools. The salon manages vans, routes, and stops from /salon/mobile/. Customers book at /petfamily/book/mobile.

Multi-Location Owner A salon Owner who manages more than one branch. The Location Switcher in the top navigation bar lets them switch between locations. Data for each location is kept separate.

N

Necklace Beads The step indicator design pattern used in the Doastly onboarding wizard and booking flows. Completed steps show as soft grey, the current step shows as teal with a pulse animation, and future steps show as an outlined ring.

O

OTP (One-Time Password) The 6-digit code Doastly sends to your email or phone to verify your identity. Used for both signup and login. Doastly uses OTP-only authentication — there are no passwords to remember.

Owner The highest-level salon staff role. Owners have full access to all features including payment gateways, refunds, staff management, and subscription management. Every salon has at least one Owner.

Onboarding Wizard The 12-step guided setup flow that new salon owners complete after creating their account. Covers business verticals, salon info, locations, team, services, tracker mode, payment gateway, and more. Route: accessed from the dashboard banner or Settings.

P

Package (Daycare) A bundle of day passes sold to a daycare customer at a discounted rate. Examples: "5-Day Bundle ($125 = $25/day)" or "Monthly Unlimited ($299)." Configured by the salon in Daycare Settings > Packages. Customers browse available packages at /petfamily/daycare/packages. Online purchase is Coming Soon — passes are currently added by salon staff at the desk.

Pass (Daycare) A single credit within a daycare package. Each attendance booking can redeem one pass. Pass balances and expiry dates are shown on the packages page and in Step 2 of the daycare booking flow.

Pay-Ahead Request An SMS message containing a secure payment link, sent to a customer before their appointment so they can pay in advance. Useful for reducing wait time at checkout.

Payment Gateway See Gateway.

Per-Night Rate The cost per night for a boarding kennel, set by the salon in Boarding Settings > Kennel Management. Formula for a reservation total: per_night_rate × nights.

Pet Family The term Doastly uses for a pet-owning customer. A Pet Family account gives access to /petfamily/ routes: booking, live tracking, session history, and more.

Pet Ready An SMS notification trigger. Fires when a session is marked Ready. Text: "Your pet [Pet Name] is ready for pickup at [Salon Name]!" Also has an equivalent for boarding and daycare.

pgvector The PostgreSQL extension Doastly uses to store AI embedding vectors for semantic search. Not visible to end users.

Pre-Check (Boarding) An optional set of detailed care instructions a pet owner provides when booking a boarding stay: feeding instructions, medications, emergency contacts, and belongings list. Stored on the reservation record and visible to boarding staff at check-in. Entered in the boarding booking flow Steps 4–7.

R

Receptionist A staff role responsible for front-desk operations. Receptionists can check pets in and out, process payments (money in only), and manage appointments. They cannot issue refunds or access management settings.

Report Card A post-session summary sent to the pet owner after checkout, containing attribute ratings (coat, behaviour, condition) and an AI-generated narrative. Delivered by email and available in the pet family app.

Review Request An SMS sent approximately 1 hour after checkout asking the customer to leave a review. Fires once per session maximum.

RLS (Row Level Security) PostgreSQL's built-in access control mechanism. Doastly enforces RLS on all salon data tables so that each location's data is visible only to authenticated users with that location in their JWT. Not visible to end users.

S

Salon Group The top-level entity representing a salon business (for example, "Paws and Claws Holdings Inc"). A Salon Group contains one or more Locations. Billing is at the Salon Group level.

Service Catalogue The list of services a salon offers, with names and prices. Configured under Wizard Step 6 or Settings > Services. Each service can have breed-specific price overrides.

Session See Grooming Session.

SMS Trigger See Email Trigger (same concept for SMS).

Square One of two supported payment gateways (the other is Stripe). Salons with an existing Square account can connect it under Settings > Payment.

Stripe One of two supported payment gateways (the other is Square). Salons with an existing Stripe account can connect it under Settings > Payment.

Supabase The authentication and storage provider Doastly uses. Handles OTP delivery, user accounts, and media file storage. Not visible to end users in normal operation.

T

Tenant A single salon group. Doastly is a multi-tenant platform — each salon's data is completely isolated from every other salon's data at the database level.

Tracker Mode See Basic Tracker Mode and Detailed Tracker Mode.

Tracker Colour The colour chip assigned to each groomer, shown on their session cards in the Live Tracker. Configurable per groomer under Settings > Staff. Makes it easy to see at a glance which groomer is handling which pet.

V

Vaccine Gate A check-in feature that checks whether the pet's required vaccines are current before allowing the session to proceed. If a vaccine is expired or missing, a warning is shown. Owners and Managers can override the gate with a log entry.

Vertical A business service category: Grooming, Boarding, Daycare, Mobile Grooming, Retail, Pickup/Drop-off. Each vertical has its own subscription, settings, and operational workflows. Salons subscribe to one or more verticals.

W

Waiver A compliance document (such as a grooming release form) that customers sign before or during check-in. See Compliance Template.

Walk-In A pet visit with no prior appointment. Walk-ins go through the same check-in flow as appointments.

Wizard See Onboarding Wizard.

⚠ Open accuracy item — the Boarding SMS section below is WRONG. Boarding DOES send a customer SMS on check-in today. Verified against code, not against a screen (Tara, 2026-08-14, vs origin/master). The doc states "Boarding sends no customer SMS today" and lists "Pet Checked In (Boarding) — Planned, not sent today." In fact boarding/backend/services/reservation_service.py:537 calls _fire_checkin_sms(), which sends SMSTrigger.BOARDING_CHECKIN at :560 — inside the live check-in service path, after commit, ungated (wrapped in try/except only, so failure is non-fatal but the send is unconditional). A salon owner reading this page would believe boarding customers receive no SMS, and they do. The other four Boarding rows (Reservation Confirmed, 24h Reminder, Ready for Pickup, Pay-Ahead) are correctly marked not-sent — each has zero firing call sites.

Notification Trigger Reference

This page lists every notification type in Doastly — when it fires, which channel it uses, who receives it, and whether it can be disabled.

Notifications are controlled at two levels. The salon level (Settings > Notifications) controls whether any customer at that location receives the notification type. The customer level (/petfamily/settings/notification-prefs) is a personal opt-out. The customer's opt-out always wins over the salon setting.

How to Configure Notifications (Salon Side)

Go to Settings > Notifications (/salon/settings/notifications). The page has four tabs:

Quiet Hours: In the SMS tab, you can set a "quiet window" (for example, 9 PM to 8 AM) during which no SMS messages are sent. Reminders that would fire during quiet hours are held until the window ends.

SMS Notifications

SMS messages go to the pet owner's phone number. A 60-minute deduplication window prevents the same notification from being sent twice to the same customer within an hour.

Grooming SMS Triggers

Anniversary SMS is in the notification policy (§8) but is not yet wired — only Birthday SMS currently fires — tracked as #925.

Boarding SMS Triggers

Current status (2026-07): Boarding sends no customer SMS today. The triggers below are planned but not yet enabled — pending the notification-policy decision (§8). Boarding currently notifies customers by email (daily report cards and payment receipts).

Daycare SMS Triggers

Daycare sends two customer SMS today. All other daycare updates are delivered by email, not SMS.

Attendance confirmation, drop-off, and ready-for-pickup updates are delivered by email (not SMS). A 24-hour daycare reminder SMS is planned but not yet enabled.

Mobile Grooming SMS Triggers

Mobile Review Request has no separate dedicated trigger — Mobile Grooming appointments have no review-request path of their own the way Grooming does. But as of #860 (landed 2026-08-11), the Mobile Service Complete SMS body itself now carries the review ask and link ("Your pet's service is complete! Thank you — we'd love a review: {review_url}") — so a customer functionally does get asked to review, via the existing trigger's copy rather than a new one. Mobile appointment confirmation and the 24-hour reminder are still not sent today by any channel — see the Email section below. The no-link-in-the-app gap is also closed (#860, same date): the Appointments list now shows a "Track live →" link on the row once a mobile appointment goes en route, and a "Leave a review →" link once it's complete — both mirrored in the corresponding SMS. See the Mobile Grooming FAQ.

Cross-Vertical SMS (All Verticals)

Anniversary SMS is in the notification policy (§8) but is not yet wired — only Birthday SMS currently fires — tracked as #925.

SMS Hard Rules — These Never Fire via SMS

The following events do not trigger SMS regardless of salon settings. These are architectural constraints, not configuration choices.

Email Notifications

Email notifications go to the pet owner's email address. Some email types cannot be disabled because they serve as financial or care records.

Email Triggers — Grooming

Email Triggers — Boarding

⚠ Boarding Daily Report Card — accuracy note: this trigger is real and built, but currently fires for very few stays — the automatic generation path is not running for most active stays system-wide (a data-pipeline issue, root-caused, being fixed), so most families are not receiving this email today even though the mechanism works whenever a card exists.

Email Triggers — Daycare

⚠ Payment Receipt (Daycare) — this is a known gap, not intended design. Daycare was built with a resend action and no original send, so a customer who pays receives nothing unless a staff member sends it by hand. The automatic send has been built and is awaiting wiring; this row will change to "after the daycare checkout is settled" in the same release that turns it on. Recorded here explicitly because an honestly-documented gap can otherwise read as a deliberate product decision, and stop being reported.

Email Triggers — Mobile Grooming

Mobile Appointment Confirmed is not sent today — the email template exists in code, but no booking flow calls it yet. There is no Mobile Appointment Reminder (24 hours) trigger in code at all today.

SMS Hard Rules — These Never Fire via SMS

The following events do not trigger SMS regardless of salon settings, vertical, or configuration. These are architectural constraints.

Notification Control Hierarchy

Two levels control whether a customer receives a notification. Both must allow it.

The customer opt-out always wins. A customer who has opted out of Appointment Reminders will not receive them even when the salon has the type enabled.

Notification Preferences — Pet Family Side

Pet owners manage their preferences at /petfamily/settings/notification-prefs. The page lists all notification types with on/off toggles organized by vertical (Grooming, Boarding, Daycare, Mobile Grooming). For types that support both SMS and email, a channel selector lets the customer choose SMS, Email, or Both.

Changes take effect immediately.

Per-Vertical Deduplication Rules

Review Request — Special Rules

The Review Request SMS has extra constraints beyond the standard deduplication:

• Fires exactly once per session/booking. If the customer does not respond, no follow-up is sent.
• Fires approximately 1 hour after checkout/service completion, not immediately.
• If the customer has already submitted a review for this session, the review page shows the existing rating in read-only mode.
• Can be disabled by the salon or opted out of by the customer.

Birthday and Anniversary — Special Rules

• Birthday: fires on the date stored in the pet's profile as their birthday. Once per year per salon per pet.
• Anniversary: fires on the calendar anniversary of the pet's first recorded session at that salon. Once per year per salon per pet.
• Both are SMS-only.
• Both respect the customer's opt-out preference.

Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the questions new salon owners and pet families ask most often.

For Salon Owners

Getting Started

Do I need a Stripe or Square account to use Doastly?

No. You can start using Doastly for check-in, tracking, and report cards without a payment gateway. You will need a Stripe or Square account to process card payments through Doastly. Cash payments can always be recorded without a gateway. Connect your gateway under Settings > Payment or in Wizard Step 10.

Can I have multiple locations on one account?

Yes. Add additional locations in the onboarding wizard or later under Settings > Location. Each location has its own staff, settings, schedules, and data. Your billing covers all locations under one Salon Group account.

How do I add my staff?

Go to Settings > Staff and click "Invite Staff." Enter their name, email, and role. They receive an email invitation and set up their own login. You can also invite staff during the onboarding wizard in Step 4.

Can a groomer see another location's data?

No. Staff see only the data for the location(s) they are assigned to. A groomer at your Frisco branch cannot see sessions or customers from your Dallas branch.

What does "BYOA" mean?

BYOA stands for "Bring Your Own Account" — it means you connect your own Stripe or Square merchant account. Your customers' card payments go directly to your bank account. Doastly never holds, processes, or touches your funds.

The Onboarding Wizard

Do I have to complete all 12 wizard steps before using Doastly?

No. Only steps marked "Required" (Business Verticals, Salon Info, Locations, and Service Catalogue) must be completed before accepting customers. Optional steps (Team, Staff Payment, Online Booking, Tracker Mode, Gateway, Pet Reference, Compliance) can be filled in any time. You can close the wizard and return to it from the dashboard banner.

I closed the wizard and now I cannot find it. Where is it?

Click the "Finish setting up your salon" banner on the Dashboard, or go to the Settings menu. The wizard is accessible any time until you click Complete Setup.

Why does the "Complete Setup" button say it is disabled?

One or more required steps have not been saved. Look for steps without a checkmark in the wizard left rail. Required steps have a red dot next to them. Complete all required steps before clicking Complete Setup.

Check-In and Check-Out

What is the vaccine gate and can I disable it?

The vaccine gate checks whether a pet's required vaccines are current before completing check-in. If a vaccine is expired or missing, it displays a warning. Owners and Managers can override the gate (with a reason logged automatically). Groomers and Receptionists cannot override it. You cannot disable the warning entirely — it is a safety feature — but you can override it per check-in.

A customer is at the desk but their pet is not in the system yet. What do I do?

Use the Walk-In / New Customer button in the Check-In flow. When you do not find the pet in the search results, click "Walk-in / New Customer." An inline form opens directly in the check-in flow where you enter the owner's name, phone, email, and the pet's details. Doastly creates both the customer and pet records and returns you to the check-in immediately — no need to leave the check-in page.

Can I add services after check-in?

Yes. At check-out you can add or remove services before processing payment. The final price is calculated at check-out.

A customer has not picked up their pet for a long time. Is there a late fee feature?

Yes, if your salon has configured a late pickup fee under Grooming Settings > Fees. Once the grace period expires, a countdown appears on the session card in the Live Tracker and the fee begins accruing. The fee is added automatically to the checkout total.

SMS and Notifications

How many SMS messages does a customer receive per groom?

A maximum of two SMS messages per session in Basic Tracker Mode: one when grooming starts, one when the pet is ready. In Detailed Tracker Mode the same two SMS messages fire — individual service-stage updates are push-notification only (in the pet family app), never SMS.

Can I send customers an SMS reminder before their appointment?

Yes. Doastly automatically sends appointment reminders at 24 hours and 2 hours before the appointment time. Enable these under Settings > Notifications.

Can I stop a specific customer from receiving SMS messages?

You can disable a notification type for your entire location under Settings > Notifications, but you cannot disable it for just one customer from the salon side. Customers can opt themselves out from their own notification preferences in the pet family app.

Do customers get an email with the report card?

Yes. The report card and receipt are emailed after checkout. These emails cannot be disabled — they are financial and care records.

Payments

Can I process a refund?

Yes, if you are an Owner or a Manager. Go to the session record, click "Issue Refund," and specify the amount. Full and partial refunds are supported, across all verticals. (Groomers, Bathers, and Receptionists cannot issue refunds.)

A customer's card was declined. What do I do?

Try a different card, use cash, or ask the customer to contact their bank. You can save the transaction as "Cash" and collect payment later, or send the customer a pay-ahead payment link via SMS.

My Stripe connection is showing an error. How do I fix it?

Go to Settings > Payment and click "Reconnect Stripe." This takes you through the Stripe OAuth flow again. If the issue persists, contact Stripe support — Doastly's connection depends on your Stripe account being in good standing.

AI Features

What is the AI Groomer Copilot?

The AI Groomer Copilot is a brief shown on each session card in the Live Tracker. It summarises the pet's breed characteristics, health notes, vaccine status, and previous grooming history at your salon. It is generated by AI to give groomers relevant context before they start a groom.

Does the Copilot see data from other salons?

No. The Copilot brief only includes sessions and notes from your salon. If the pet also visits another salon, you will not see those records and they will not see yours.

Can the AI miss a health flag?

We have designed the AI to always surface health flags. The Report Card Narrator (which generates the customer-facing narrative) is built so that if a groomer flagged a concern in their notes, the AI includes it prominently in the narrative — it does not soften or omit health flags. The system also has a fallback: if the AI narrative does not mention a flagged concern, the system substitutes a verbatim note from the groomer instead.

For Pet Families

Getting Started

How do I create a pet family account?

Go to doastly.us/signup and click "I'm a Pet Owner." Enter your email or phone, verify with the 6-digit code, enter your name, and click Create Account.

I received an error when verifying my code. What should I do?

The 6-digit code expires after a short time. Go back to the "Create Account" step and click "Try again" to request a new code. Make sure you are entering the most recent code.

Can I have more than one pet on my account?

Yes. After signing in, go to Pets in the sidebar and click "+ Add Pet" for each of your pets.

Booking

How do I book an appointment?

Go to Book > Grooming in the sidebar and follow the six-step booking flow: choose a salon, choose your pet, select services, pick a date and time, confirm, and you are done.

Why can I not see my usual salon in the booking list?

Online booking must be enabled by the salon. If your salon does not appear, they may not have enabled online booking. Call the salon directly to book.

Can I cancel an appointment I booked online?

You can request a cancellation through the app at /petfamily/appointments. Whether a cancellation fee applies depends on the salon's policy, which is shown during the booking flow before you confirm.

Live Tracking

How do I know when my pet is ready?

You will receive an SMS when grooming starts and another SMS when your pet is ready for pickup. You can also open the Track page in the app to see the progress in real time.

What does "Detailed" mode look like in the tracker?

Some salons use Detailed Tracker Mode, which shows individual service stages (Bath, Haircut, Nail Trim). You may see push notifications as each service stage updates. This does not change the SMS behaviour — you still only receive SMS at Grooming Started and Pet Ready.

Records and Reports

Where can I see my pet's grooming history?

Go to History in the sidebar. All sessions across all salons are listed. Click "View Record" on any session to see the full report card, services, payment, and groomer notes.

Can I download the grooming record?

Yes. On any session record page, click "Download PDF" to save the record to your device.

What does the AI Report Card say?

The AI Report Card Narrator reads your groomer's notes and ratings and writes a one-paragraph summary in plain English. It tells you how the groom went, the pet's coat and behaviour, and any observations the groomer made. If your groomer flagged a health concern, it will always appear in the narrative.

Boarding (For Pet Families)

How do I book a boarding stay?

Go to Book > Boarding in the sidebar and follow the three-step flow: choose your dates, location, and pet; choose a kennel; and confirm. You can add detailed care instructions (feeding, medications, emergency contact) in the optional pre-check path at Step 3.

What is the deposit and when is it collected?

The booking confirmation screen shows a deposit figure — a fixed 25% of your estimated total, not a salon-set amount. As of this writing, that figure is not actually charged when you book — no payment is taken at that step. In practice, the full stay total is collected at checkout when you pick up your pet, the same as the remaining-balance step described below always was.

How do I sign the boarding waivers?

Go to /petfamily/boarding/compliance or follow the "Sign Documents" link in your confirmation email. You can sign digitally from your phone before drop-off. Required waivers must be signed before the salon can check your pet in.

How do I know how my pet is doing during the stay?

Your stay page shows a status pill, a photos section, and collapsible daily report cards for each day of the stay. How to reach it is worth being precise about: confirmed (frontend/app/petfamily/appointments/page.tsx::AppointmentRow) that rows on the Appointments list are not clickable — no link, no navigation, at all — so "find it in your Appointments list" is not a working path today. Whether the confirmation/reminder communication links directly to the stay page was not something I could confirm one way or the other. Both the photos and the daily report cards are real, built features — but as of this writing they are producing very little for most active stays: the automatic report-card generation isn't running for most stays system-wide (a data-pipeline issue, being fixed, not a missing feature), and most stays will show few or no photos. The page itself is honest about this — it won't claim a photo or card exists when one doesn't. Some facilities also provide a live webcam.

When do I get the final receipt?

The final receipt appears on your stay page after the salon checks your pet out. A receipt email is also sent automatically.

Daycare (For Pet Families)

How do I book a daycare day?

Go to Book > Daycare. Choose your date, location, and pet (Step 1). Choose Full Day or Half Day, and optionally apply a day pass if you have one (Step 2). Confirm (Step 3). You are done.

What is a day pass and how do I use one?

A day pass is a pre-purchased credit from a daycare package. If you have active passes at the selected location, they appear in Step 2 of the booking flow under "Use a Day Pass." Select a pass and the booking cost drops to $0.00.

How do I buy a daycare package?

Online purchase is not yet available in the app. Contact your daycare or ask staff to add a package to your account at check-in. Once added, your pass balance appears automatically in the booking flow.

Can I watch my dog at daycare?

If your daycare has a camera on the yard your dog is in, a live view appears on that day's page. It shows only while your dog is checked in — before drop-off and after pick-up the page says the camera is not available, which is normal rather than a fault. Not every yard has a camera, and it is your daycare that sets one up, so ask them if you do not see it.

How do I see what my pet did at daycare?

Open the attendance record at /petfamily/daycare/[attendanceId]. Your Appointments list does not link to it — the rows there are not clickable — so reach it from a link your daycare sends you, or by opening that address directly with the day's id. The page shows a chronological activity timeline of everything staff logged (naps, play groups, feedings, notable moments), plus a written summary of the day when staff have completed one for that visit.

Mobile Grooming (For Pet Families)

How do I book a mobile grooming appointment?

Go to Book > Mobile in the sidebar. Enter your pet and home address (Step 1) — the app checks which vans can reach you. Choose a van and arrival window (Step 2). Choose your service and add any access notes (Step 3). Confirm.

How do I track the van on the day of my appointment?

Open your Appointments list — once the van is en route, that row carries a "Track live →" link straight to the tracking page (shows the van's live GPS position on a map, an ETA countdown, the groomer's card, and a milestone timeline). A "Leave a review →" link appears the same way once the visit is marked complete. You'll also get an SMS at those two moments with the same links. (This closed a real gap — #860, landed 2026-08-11 — where neither path existed and a customer had to ask the salon directly; if your account is older than that, make sure you're on the current app.)

Can I opt out of GPS tracking?

Yes. On the live tracking page, look for Live tracking and tap Turn off. The map stops showing the van and displays a notice instead. Your service is not affected. Tap Turn on to start seeing the van again.

What is the ETA countdown based on?

The ETA comes from the salon's live van GPS data and refreshes every 30 seconds. The progress bar is an estimate of how far along the trip is: once the van sets off, Doastly compares how long it has been travelling against its current estimated arrival time, and re-does that comparison on every refresh. Because the arrival estimate moves with traffic, the bar can slow down, pause, or occasionally step back — that is the estimate updating, not an error.

Privacy

Can Salon A see my pet's records at Salon B?

No. Each salon can only see the sessions that happened at their own location. Your pet's health profile (breed, weight, medications, vaccines) is shared for safety purposes — any Doastly salon serving your pet can see this profile information. But no salon can see another salon's session records, boarding stays, daycare attendance, or mobile appointment history.

Can I delete my account?

Contact Doastly support to request account deletion. Doastly performs a soft delete plus PII scrub — reversible by support, not an irreversible hard delete of every record.

Troubleshooting

Plain-English solutions for the most common "it didn't work" situations.

Login and Access

"I entered my code but it says it is invalid."

The 6-digit code expires after a short time. Go back to the login screen, click "Try again" or "Resend Code," and use the new code that arrives.

If you continue to see this error:

• Make sure you are entering the code from the most recent email or SMS (older codes are immediately cancelled when a new one is sent).
• Check your spam folder if using email.
• Try using the phone number option if email is not working.

"I am being redirected back to the login page every time I try to open the app."

Your session has expired. Log in again. If this happens frequently within a single session, your browser may be blocking cookies. Make sure cookies are enabled for doastly.us.

"I see 'You don't have permission' when I try to open a page."

You are signed in, but your role does not have access to that page. For example, groomers cannot access Settings pages. Contact your salon Owner or Manager if you believe you should have access.

"I can see data from one location but not another, even though I work at both."

Your second location may not have been added to your staff profile. Ask your Owner or Manager to go to Settings > Staff, click your name, and confirm that both locations are listed under your assigned locations.

Check-In

"I searched for a pet but nothing came up."

• Double-check the spelling of the pet's name or the owner's phone number.
• Try searching by the owner's email instead of phone.
• The customer may not have been added to the system yet. Go to Customers in the sidebar, click "+ Add Customer," add the owner and their pet, then return to Check-In.

"Check-In is stuck on the compliance step."

A required waiver document has not been signed. Either:

• Have the customer sign digitally on the screen.
• If you are an Owner or Manager, click "Override" and select a reason (a log entry is recorded automatically).
• If you are a Groomer or Receptionist, fetch a Manager to perform the override.

"The vaccine warning appeared but the customer says their pet's vaccines are current."

The pet's vaccine records in Doastly may not be up to date. Upload the current vaccine certificate under the pet's profile (Customers > [pet] > Vaccines). If you are an Owner or Manager, you can override the vaccine gate with a reason. Groomers cannot override the vaccine gate.

"I accidentally checked in the wrong pet. How do I undo it?"

If the session has not advanced beyond Checked In, contact your Owner or Manager to void the session. If the session has advanced, the Manager or Owner will need to edit or close the session manually and create a new one.

Live Tracker

"The Live Tracker is not updating."

The tracker refreshes every 30 seconds automatically. If it appears frozen:

1. Click the refresh icon in the top right of the tracker page.
2. Check your internet connection.
3. If the issue persists, refresh the browser tab (press F5 or Cmd+R).

"A session disappeared from the tracker but the pet has not left."

If a session moved to "Checked Out" in error, contact your Owner or Manager. They can reopen or amend the session record.

"I cannot find my session in the tracker."

Use the Groomer Filter Strip at the top of the tracker to make sure you are not accidentally filtering to another groomer's sessions. Click your name to show only your sessions, or click "All" to show everyone's.

Check-Out and Payments

"The payment failed. The customer's card was declined."

Common reasons and solutions:

• Insufficient funds: ask the customer to use a different card.
• Card expired: ask the customer to use a different card.
• Wrong CVV or ZIP: re-enter the card details carefully.
• Payment gateway not connected: go to Settings > Payment and check that your Stripe or Square account is connected. If not, reconnect it.

If the customer cannot pay by card right now, record the session as "Cash" to complete the check-out, and arrange to collect payment separately.

"I processed a payment but the customer received no receipt."

Receipts are sent by email after a successful payment. Check that the customer's email address is correct in their profile under Customers > [customer name]. If the email address is wrong, update it and ask the customer to check their inbox again.

Also check the customer's spam folder.

"I need to issue a refund but the Refund button is greyed out."

Refunds require the Owner or Manager role. If the Refund button is greyed out, you are signed in as a Groomer, Bather, or Receptionist — ask an Owner or Manager to issue the refund.

"I applied the wrong services at check-out. Can I change them?"

If payment has not yet been processed, edit the service list on the check-out page before clicking "Complete Check-Out."

If payment has already been processed, an Owner or Manager can issue a partial refund for the over-charged amount and manually note the correction. Contact your Owner for this.

SMS and Notifications

"A customer said they did not receive their SMS."

Check the following in order:

1. Go to Settings > Notifications and confirm the SMS type is toggled on.
2. Check the customer's phone number in their profile — confirm there are no typos and the number is a US mobile number.
3. The customer may have opted out of this notification type. The customer's opt-out preference overrides salon settings. Ask the customer to check their notification preferences in the pet family app.
4. The 60-minute deduplication rule may have suppressed a duplicate. If the same event fired twice within an hour, only the first is delivered.

"We are sending too many SMS messages. Can we reduce them?"

Go to Settings > Notifications and disable the types you do not want to send. You can turn off Appointment Reminders, Birthday messages, Vaccine Expiry Warnings, and Review Requests individually. The two core in-session SMS messages (Grooming Started and Pet Ready) are the minimum.

AI Features

"The AI Copilot brief is blank or says 'No history available.'"

The Copilot brief requires at least one completed session at your salon for the pet. If this is the pet's first visit, the brief will only show the breed profile and health notes (no grooming history section). This is expected behaviour.

"The AI Report Card narrative did not include a health concern my groomer noted."

This should not happen — the system is designed to always include health flags in the narrative. If you see a case where a health flag was omitted, the system includes a fallback: the groomer's verbatim note should appear in its place. If neither appeared, contact Doastly support and include the session ID so we can investigate.

"The AI Booking Notes card is not showing for a customer during booking."

AI Booking Notes appear only when there is relevant history at the selected salon. First-time visitors at a salon will see only the health profile section (vaccines, medications). The notes section appears starting with the second visit.

Onboarding Wizard

"The 'Complete Setup' button is disabled."

One or more required steps have not been saved. Required steps are marked with a red dot in the left navigation. Click each required step without a green checkmark, fill in the details, and click Save. Once all required steps are saved, the button will become active.

"I keep getting an error when I click 'Complete Setup.'"

This usually means a payment gateway is selected in the wizard but the connection was not completed. Go back to Wizard Step 10 (Gateway Setup) and either complete the connection or skip the step. Then try Complete Setup again.

Pet Family App — Grooming

"I cannot see my pet's grooming history."

Session history appears only after at least one completed checkout session. If you are a new customer, your first session history entry will appear after your first completed groom.

If you have previous sessions and they are not showing, make sure you are logged in with the same email or phone number you gave the salon at check-in.

"The live tracking page says 'No active sessions.'"

Live tracking only shows sessions that are currently in progress (Checked In, Grooming, or Ready status). If your pet has not been checked in yet, or if they have already been checked out, the page will show this message. Wait until the salon checks your pet in and the page will update automatically.

"I received a review request SMS but the link takes me to an error page."

The review link is session-specific. If you visit it more than once after submitting a review, it will show your submitted review in read-only mode (not an error). If you have not submitted a review and still see an error, try opening the link in a different browser or contact the salon to confirm the session completed correctly.

Boarding (Salon Side)

"A boarding pet's reservation is showing the wrong checkout date."

Go to Boarding > Reservations, open the reservation, and check the pick-up date. If it was entered incorrectly at booking, contact Doastly support to adjust the reservation dates. Notify the pet owner so they can update their expectations.

"A pet's belongings item is marked as 'Reported lost' but we found it."

Open the reservation at /salon/boarding/reservations/[reservationId]/pets/[petId] and update the belonging status to "Returned" with the current time. The pet owner will see the updated status on their stay page the next time it refreshes.

"The boarding Live Tracker shows a kennel as occupied but the pet checked out."

Check the boarding session status. If the system still shows CHECKED_IN, go to the reservation and click "Check Out." If the status appears stuck, refresh the page. If it persists, contact Doastly support with the reservation ID.

Pet Family App — Boarding

"I booked a boarding stay but I cannot see it in my app."

Open the Appointments page at /petfamily/appointments. If the reservation does not appear:

• Confirm you are logged in with the same email or phone number you used when the salon created your account.
• Check the confirmation email for the reservation ID and share it with the salon — they can confirm the booking is linked to your account.

"The stay photos are not updating."

The Today's photos section auto-refreshes every 15 minutes. Pull down to force a manual refresh, or leave the page and return. If no photos appear after the first full day of the stay, contact the salon — some facilities add photos only at certain times of day.

"The daily report card for today hasn't appeared."

The section does not show a "Being prepared" or pending state — if no card exists yet for today, the page says so plainly ("No daily cards yet." or "No daily report cards have been posted for this stay.," or, if earlier cards exist but today's is missing, "No report card posted since Day N."). A day with no logged activity does not block a card from generating — the system is built to still produce a card that honestly says nothing was logged that day, rather than invent one. So "no card" does not mean "not enough was logged" — as of this writing, most active stays are not receiving automatic daily cards at all, a data-pipeline issue being fixed, not something caused by how much staff logged. If a card is missing, this is expected right now rather than a sign something needs to be done differently; contact the salon if you want to know how your pet's day went in the meantime.

Pet Family App — Daycare

"My daycare day pass balance shows 0 but I know I have passes left."

The packages page loads pass balances from the location you selected. Make sure you are viewing the correct location in the URL (?location_id=...). If the balance is still wrong, contact your daycare and ask them to check your account — a staff member may need to adjust the balance.

"I tried to redeem a pass at booking but it did not appear as an option."

Passes only appear if they are: (a) active (not expired), and (b) associated with the selected location. If a pass was added by a different location's staff, it may not appear for a different location. Contact your salon to confirm the pass is correctly assigned.

"The daycare daily summary says 'No summary available yet' even though the day ended."

The AI daily summary requires at least some logged activities during the day. If the staff did not log any activities (naps, feedings, play, etc.), there is no data for the AI to summarize. Contact the daycare and ask them to add activity entries so the summary can be generated.

Pet Family App — Mobile Grooming

"The live tracking map is not showing the van's position."

Check the following:

1. The appointment must be in "en route" or later status — the van GPS only appears after the groomer clicks "Depart to next stop" in the salon's app.
2. If you turned live tracking off, the map shows a notice instead of the van. Look for Live tracking off on the tracking page and tap Turn on to resume.
3. The GPS position updates every 30 seconds. If the van has moved but the dot on the map has not, wait one refresh cycle.
4. If the map is blank entirely, check your internet connection.

"The ETA countdown is not moving."

The countdown updates every 30 seconds. If the number is frozen, the van's GPS may have gone offline temporarily — this is normal in areas with weak signal. If it stays frozen for more than 10 minutes, contact the salon directly using the phone number shown on the Groomer Card.

"I did not receive the review request for my mobile grooming appointment."

Mobile Grooming doesn't have a separate dedicated review-request text the way salon-based Grooming does — but the SMS you get when your service is marked complete carries a review link in its own text ("Your pet's service is complete! Thank you — we'd love a review: …"). If you didn't get that text at all, check that SMS notifications are enabled for your account. You can also open your Appointments list — once a mobile visit is complete, the row shows a "Leave a review →" link straight to the review page.

Getting More Help

If your issue is not listed here:

• Chat with us: click the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of any Doastly page.
• Email: [email protected]
• For urgent issues: describe the problem in chat and we will escalate it.

When contacting support, it helps to include: the salon name, the customer or session ID if relevant, and a brief description of what you expected to happen vs. what actually happened.

Marketing Home

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Marketing Home / Dashboard (AIM.1)

The Marketing Home dashboard is your starting point for AI-powered marketing. It surfaces top revenue opportunities, active campaigns, proactive Strategist suggestions, and quick paths to start a conversation or build a campaign. Note that several opportunity, campaign, and suggestion elements are display-only in the current build and do not yet trigger an action.

AI Marketing — Coming Soon placeholder (legacy route)

The legacy AI Marketing landing shows a static Coming Soon placeholder. The COMING SOON badge and feature grid are non-interactive; the only working control is the support email link.

AI Strategist

The AI Strategist is a conversational copilot that answers plain-English questions about your salon's marketing — top customers, win-back drafts, send timing, and campaign comparisons. Ask a question in the composer or tap a suggested prompt, and the strategist replies using only your salon's data.

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AI Strategist — Conversational Copilot

A chat-style workspace with a conversation timeline on the left and a right rail of suggested prompts, a data-privacy card, and a "What I know" summary.

Campaigns list

The Campaigns list (AIM.3) shows every marketing campaign the salon has created and provides the entry points to build a new one. When no campaigns exist yet, an empty state takes over the page and offers its own way to get started.

(dark mode also captured)

Note: When one or more campaigns exist, the page renders a list of campaign rows (name, campaign type, clicks/bookings/attributed-revenue metrics, and a status badge — Draft / Scheduled / Active / Completed / Paused / Cancelled). These rows are display-only in the current build — they are not clickable and contain no interactive controls, so no per-row control is documented. The header "New Campaign" button is the only control present when campaigns exist.

Campaign Builder

Campaigns List (Builder entry point)

The entry point to campaign creation. Lists your existing campaigns with performance metrics, and provides the button to start a new one.

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Campaign Builder — Topbar (all steps)

The topbar sits above every step of the builder, holding the draft actions and the step-advance control.

Campaign Builder — 5-step Pill Nav

A progress indicator running across the top of the builder, showing where you are in the five steps.

Campaign Builder — Disclaimer + Step Placeholders

While the builder is being finished, most steps show scaffold copy in place of live controls. These elements explain what is live now and what is still coming.

Campaign Builder — Step 3 Content Composer (3-touch)

Step 3 is the fully built step, where you compose the campaign's three outreach touches: an email (Day −7) followed by two SMS messages (Day −3 and Day −1). Text edits are held in the form as you work.

Campaign Builder — Right Rail (AI Assist / Audience / Estimated / Photos)

A sidebar alongside the builder that surfaces AI assistance, the target audience, projected performance, and campaign photos.

Campaign Builder — Footer

The footer runs along the bottom of the builder with the exit link back to your campaign list.

Opportunities

The Opportunities feed surfaces AI-generated marketing "stories" — moments in your salon's data worth acting on (for example, customers overdue for a visit). It is currently a read-only feed: stories render on load, but the action controls are not yet wired. — tracked as #971

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Opportunities · Right now (feed page)

The landing feed for the Opportunities screen. Stories load once when the page opens, and each is shown as a rich card. Each card renders an emoji-lead headline, a "Detected <date>" line, a status pill (estimated revenue, e.g. "Est. +$X", or "New"), an AI-confidence line, an italic AI-generated narrative, an optional meta-row (Best send / Channel / Audience), and three action buttons. Above the feed sits a strip of four non-interactive KPI tiles (High-priority, Time-sensitive, Customers reached, Est. total revenue) — these display only and are not clickable. Note that every interactive control on this screen is currently non-functional — the page displays data but no button yet performs its intended action.

_Non-controls (display only, correctly excluded above): the 4 KPI tiles in the header strip and the per-card status pill, confidence line, narrative, and meta-row are read-only elements with no interactive behavior._

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Templates & Brand Kit

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Templates (AIM.7)

The Templates tab lists your saved marketing templates as visual cards. Creating and uploading templates are still in progress, so the header actions are disabled for now.

Brand Kit (AIM.7)

The Brand Kit tab shows the brand details Doastly's AI has learned about your salon — your voice, colors, fonts, and (soon) photos and signatures. Everything here is read-only for now; editing and uploads are still in progress.

Compliance Center

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Compliance Center (AIM.8)

The Compliance Center is where salon owners and managers confirm that customer consent is being tracked and honored across every marketing channel. The page loads its consent numbers automatically and is restricted to senior roles because of the sensitivity of the data it shows.

Compliance Center — display-only panels

These panels present the compliance picture as read-only cards. The first two reflect real, live consent data; the remaining three are honestly labeled "Coming soon" and describe features that will surface once the supporting checks are in place.

Campaign Analytics

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Campaign Analytics (AIM.6)

A read-only reporting screen that summarizes marketing performance across all your campaigns — sends, opens, clicks, bookings, and attributed revenue. Every element on this screen is display-only except the two header pill buttons, both of which are placeholders that do nothing yet.

AI Marketing landing

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AI Marketing — Coming Soon placeholder (legacy route)

A static placeholder at the legacy /salon/ai-marketing route. It renders regardless of whether the AI Marketing add-on is active (it is not a subscription gate) — the live AI Marketing module lives at /salon/marketing. The four feature cards (AI-generated SMS campaigns · Churn-prevention triggers · Seasonal promo automation · Reengagement flows) and the COMING SOON badge are static tiles; the only working control is the support contact link.

Marketing Home / Landing Dashboard

The AI Marketing home. Two header links (styled as buttons) launch the main flows; the KPI cards, opportunity stories, active-campaign list, and strategist suggestions below are read-only summaries drawn from your live analytics and campaign data.

Global chrome (TopBar + Sidebar) — BOARDING active

The salon global chrome is a three-bar layout: a full-width system bar across the very top of every salon page, the sidebar down the left, and a secondary top bar inside the content column.

System bar (the topmost bar — appears on every salon page)

The full-width bar at the very top of every salon page. It holds the brand mark, a live date/time display, and a row of quick-action icons on the right.

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Secondary top bar (inside the content column)

A secondary bar that sits below the system bar, above the page content. It provides location switching, search, data import, and a quick check-in shortcut.

Location switcher dropdown

Opened from the top-bar location pill. Shown only for operators with more than one location; it selects which location's data the salon views.

Sidebar — BOARDING active vertical

The global left navigation. With Boarding as the active vertical, it groups links into Universal, Operations, Business, and Platform sections. Role- and subscription-based items appear only when applicable.

Owner Dashboard

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Boarding Overview (Owner Dashboard) — main populated view

The at-a-glance operational home for boarding, showing live occupancy, today's arrivals and departures, mid-stay alerts, revenue, and recent activity.

A read-only summary line sits under the "Boarding Overview" heading (e.g. "3 pets currently boarding · 2 checking in tonight · 1 departing tomorrow · 4 of 16 kennels occupied (25%)").

Empty sub-states (populated view): each of the three list panels shows a placeholder line when its collection is empty — the "Tonight's check-ins" and "Departures tomorrow" lists show "Nothing scheduled.", the "Mid-stay alerts" panel shows "No mid-stay alerts.", and the "Recent activity" panel shows "Nothing logged yet today." These are read-only text, not controls.

Boarding Overview — error state

Shown when the dashboard cannot load its data or returns nothing.

Boarding Overview — loading state

The placeholder view shown while the dashboard data is being fetched. This state contains no interactive controls.

Kennel Board / Live Tracker (Boarding)

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Live Boarding Operations (Live Tracker)

A real-time operations view of active boarding stays — kennel occupancy, live activity, and quick jumps to related admin screens. The tracker auto-refreshes every 15 seconds.

Boarding Operations / Kennel Grid (Boarding Home)

The main boarding workspace for managing reservations and occupied kennels — check pets in and out, view the kennel grid or calendar, and log daily care cards.

Reservations & Calendar (Boarding)

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Reservations Admin List

The admin list is the central register of every boarding reservation, with a date-range filter across the top and a live count of what the current filter returns.

Status Filter Chips

A row of toggle chips above the table narrows the list to a single reservation status. Each chip carries a live count, and selecting one keeps the filter across a refresh or shared link.

Reservations Table

The sortable table lists reservations under the current filter. Click a column header to sort; click a row to open its inline detail.

Reservation Detail Row

Expanding a table row reveals an inline detail panel with a cluster of action buttons for that reservation. These actions are placed for the full reservation workflow; they are not yet active.

Boarding Operations Home

The operations home is the day-to-day hub for boarding, combining reservation cards with a switchable Kennel Grid and Calendar view, plus quick links to the deeper operational screens.

Reservation Card (Confirmed — Awaiting Check-In)

Each confirmed, not-yet-arrived reservation appears as a card in the awaiting-check-in area of the operations home.

Kennel Grid (grid view)

The kennel grid shows every unit as a tile. Selecting a tile opens its detail panel below the grid.

Unit Detail

The unit detail panel shows the selected kennel and, when occupied, gives access to the pet's daily card and a history of prior daily cards.

Daily Card Form

The daily card captures a boarding pet's day — feeding, mood, walks, medications, and notes — from within the unit detail panel.

Boarding Calendar (calendar view)

The calendar view lays reservations out on a month grid, with a summary list of the month's reservations below it.

Settings (boarding tabs)

The Boarding Settings area is a tabbed workspace for configuring how a location handles overnight stays. The Kennel Management tab is live; Food Preferences, Medications, and Operations Preferences are placeholder tabs previewing planned configuration.

(dark mode also captured)

Boarding Settings — Shell + Tab Strip

The container screen for Boarding Settings. A horizontal tab strip switches between the four configuration sections; Kennel Management is the default.

Kennel Management Tab

Lists the kennels configured for the active location and provides the controls to add, edit, or remove them. This is the default tab when Boarding Settings opens.

Kennel Edit / New Kennel Modal

A dialog for creating a new kennel or editing an existing one, opened from the Kennel Management tab. Fields validate on save.

Food Preferences Tab (placeholder — Coming soon)

A preview of planned food-configuration options for boarding. All rows are non-interactive and marked "Coming soon."

Medications Tab (placeholder — Coming soon)

A preview of planned medication-configuration options for boarding. All rows are non-interactive and marked "Coming soon."

Operations Preferences Tab (placeholder — Coming soon)

A preview of planned operational-policy options for boarding. All rows are non-interactive and marked "Coming soon."

Kennel Map (care-logging)

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Kennel Map — care-logging page (roster of active stays)

The care-logging roster lists every currently checked-in stay, grouped by kennel, and gives staff one-tap access to log feeding, medication, playtime, and incidents for each pet.

Care-log bottom sheet (feed / meds / play / incident variants)

The bottom sheet that opens from a stay card's action buttons. It adapts to the chosen action — feed, medication, playtime, or incident — and saves the care log to the boarding record on Save.

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Boarding — Detail pages (Reservation / Customer / Pet)

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Boarding Reservation / Stay Record (salon view)

The salon-side record of a single boarding stay for one pet. It combines a sticky action bar with read-only panels covering kennel and care, incidents, timeline, daily cards, photos, belongings, compliance, vaccines, notes, and payment.

Customer Detail (shared; Boarding delta = Boarding Stays list)

The customer profile, shared across verticals. It shows the customer's profile, pets, sessions, waivers, and notes, plus vertical-specific activity. The Boarding delta is the Boarding Stays list, whose rows link to each reservation record.

Pet Detail (shared; Boarding delta = Boarding Stays list with live Record link)

The pet profile, shared across verticals. It covers pet info, vaccines, compliance, grooming history, and vertical activity. The Boarding delta is the Boarding Stays list, whose Record links are live here because the pet is in the current context.

Occupancy Forecast

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Occupancy Forecast (page)

The board is not showing bookings right now. The kennel rows and the week navigation work, but no reservation chips appear on the grid — it reads as a completely empty week even when the week is fully booked, and it does so without any error message. Everything below describes the board as designed, for when it is working again. Do not use this screen to judge whether a week is free. The Reservations list and the Kennel Grid are accurate and should be used instead.

The Occupancy Forecast is a week-at-a-glance planning board showing which kennels are booked across a seven-day window, so you can spot capacity, gaps, and risks before they hit. The controls at the top let you print the view, move the window forward or back, jump to the current week, and read the color key.

Occupancy Grid (kennel × day board)

The Occupancy Grid is the board itself — one row per kennel, one column per day — with each reservation shown as a colored chip. You reassign a pet to a different kennel by dragging its chip onto the target kennel.

Customers (list + detail) — Boarding vertical (shared Customers surface)

The Customers screens are shared across all verticals. From Boarding, staff reach them to look up an owner, review a pet's profile and vaccine records, add notes, and jump into a pet's boarding stays and daycare days. This section documents every control on the list, the customer detail, and the pet detail screens.

Customers List — page header

The top of the customer list, where you create a new customer or open the phone-lookup search.

(dark mode also captured)

Customers List — vaccine status filter strip

A row of chips that filters the customer grid by each customer's computed vaccine status.

Customers List — empty state

Shown when no customers appear in the grid.

Customers List — customer grid card

Each customer in the grid appears as a card. There is one card per customer.

Customers List — Search panel

The phone-lookup panel that appears when search is toggled on.

New Customer window — Customer step

The first step of the New Customer window, where you enter the owner's contact details.

New Customer window — Add-a-pet step

After the customer is created, this step asks whether to add a pet now or finish.

New Customer window — Pet form

The pet-creation form, used both here and from the "+ Add pet" button on a customer's detail page. (Note: this pet form does NOT close on backdrop click — only the ✕ closes it.)

Customer Detail — top breadcrumb bar

The bar at the top of a customer's detail page, with navigation and quick actions.

(dark mode also captured)

Customer Detail — profile card

The customer's profile card, with their photo and pet-related actions.

Customer Detail — KPI strip

Read-only metric cards.

Customer Detail — tab navigation

The tabs that switch between sections of the customer detail. Each shows a count.

Customer Detail — Overview tab (left column)

The left column of the Overview tab, listing the customer's pets and recent sessions.

Customer Detail — Overview tab (right column)

The right column of the Overview tab, with the cross-salon family panel, waivers, and communication preferences.

Customer Detail — Overview tab: Boarding Stays & Daycare lists

Lists of the customer's boarding stays and daycare days, within the Overview tab.

Customer Detail — Pets tab

The full list of the customer's pets.

Customer Detail — Sessions tab

The full list of the customer's grooming sessions.

Customer Detail — Waivers tab

The customer's signed waivers.

Customer Detail — Notes tab

The panel for reading and adding customer notes.

Customer Detail — session detail pane

The pane that opens when you choose "View →" on a session (renders as a window overlay here).

Pet Detail — header / back

The top of a pet's detail page, with the back link, photo, and status display.

Pet Detail — middle tabs

The tabs that switch between the pet's information sections.

Pet Detail — Pet Info tab

The pet's profile information.

Pet Detail — Vaccines tab

The pet's vaccine records.

Pet Detail — Add Vaccine form

The inline form for recording a new vaccine.

Pet Detail — Vaccines: existing record row

Each saved vaccine appears as a row with its own actions.

Pet Detail — Compliance tab

The pet's compliance documents and signing actions.

Pet Detail — Grooming History

The pet's grooming history, with filters and pagination, at the bottom of the page.

Pet Detail — Boarding Stays & Daycare lists

Lists of the pet's boarding stays and daycare days, near the bottom of the page.

Pet Detail — session detail pane

The pane that opens when you select a session from the grooming history.

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Analytics & Reports (Boarding)

The Boarding Analytics and Reports screens give owners and managers read-only visibility into boarding revenue, staff performance, and service quality. Analytics offers three focused sub-pages (Financial, Staff Efficiency, Quality) with period filters, while the tabbed Reports surface consolidates the same three domains with CSV export at every tab.

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Boarding Analytics — Financial (default sub-page)

The default analytics view. It reports boarding revenue for a selected period, broken down by day, kennel type, and stay length, with CSV export.

Boarding Analytics — Staff Efficiency

Reports staff handoff performance and coverage gaps for a selected range, with a sortable staff leaderboard and a coverage-gap heatmap.

Boarding Analytics — Quality Reports

Reports service-quality metrics for a selected period — satisfaction KPIs, a weekly review-score trend, and the top complaint themes.

Boarding Reports

The consolidated boarding reporting surface, organized into three tabs — Financial, Staff, and Quality — each with its own period filter and CSV export. Access is restricted to Owner, Manager, and Super Admin roles.

Payments

The Boarding Payments screen is a read-only financial overview for the Boarding vertical, summarizing revenue, paid reservations, and refunds over a selected period. In v1, this view is display-only — no refunds or edits are initiated from here. (Refund-issue, pay-ahead, and terminal flows are deferred to a later release.)

(dark mode also captured)

Boarding Payments (read-only admin view)

Reviews (Boarding — shared Reviews surface)

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Review Inbox (list + detail split view)

The central workspace for reading and responding to customer reviews. It uses a split layout: a filterable list of reviews on the left, and the selected review's detail and reply tools on the right.

Inbox Filter Bar (top of inbox list)

Controls at the top of the review list that narrow which reviews are shown by platform, star rating, and AI theme.

Review Detail Panel (right pane — reply + attribution)

The right-hand pane for a selected review. It shows the review text, its AI-detected themes, lets you attribute it to the groomer who did the work, and provides tools to draft and send a reply.

AI Review Insights

A summary view of review performance for a chosen time period, with KPI tiles, complaint themes, and per-groomer breakdowns. Reached via "View Insights →" from the inbox.

(dark mode also captured)

Staff & Payroll (Boarding) — Staff Clock / Payroll (shared cross-vertical surface)

Staff Clock is a shared surface used across verticals, including Boarding. It lets each staff member manage their own shift, gives managers a live team roster with per-staff controls, and provides shift history and payroll reporting. The Payroll Report tab and manager actions are visible only to manager roles (Owner, Manager, Receptionist).

(dark mode also captured)

Staff Clock — page shell (header + My Clock card + tab bar)

The main Staff Clock page. The "My Clock" card handles your own shift, and the tab bar switches between the team roster, shift history, and (for managers) payroll.

Live Status tab — team roster

A live roster showing each staff member's current clock state, with per-staff manager actions. A summary row above the roster shows read-only counts (Clocked In / Absent / Not In). All action controls in this view are manager-only and appear conditionally based on each staff member's status.

Shift History tab — shift history

A filterable, paginated table of past shifts with CSV export. Managers can additionally filter by individual staff member.

Payroll Report tab — payroll report (manager-only)

A payroll summary for a chosen period, with KPIs, a per-staff breakdown table, and CSV export. This tab is visible only to manager roles.

Boarding — Check-in flow

The Boarding check-in flow walks staff from pet identification through a compliance-gated, multi-step arrival confirmation. All Boarding check-ins now run through the unified Check-In screen; the old Boarding-specific entry point redirects into it automatically. This reference documents every screen and control in the flow.

Boarding Check-in redirect

The old Boarding-only check-in entry point no longer holds its own screen — it forwards subscribed salons into the unified Check-In flow, and shows a subscription prompt to salons that don't have Boarding.

(dark mode also captured)

Step 0 — Vertical select (multi-vertical salons only)

Shown only to salons subscribed to more than one vertical. Staff pick which services this visit covers; only the chosen verticals become tabs later. Arriving from the Boarding redirect pre-selects the Boarding chip.

Step 1 — Identify (Who's here?)

The starting point for a check-in: find the pet by owner, phone, or pet name, or create a new walk-in customer on the spot. Selecting a pet advances the flow and pre-checks its compliance and vaccine status.

Persistent 3-panel shell (all post-identify steps)

Once a pet is identified, a pet identity row plus three read-only reference panels stay visible for the rest of the flow — the pet's safety profile, vaccine status, and signed documents — so staff can double-check details at any step.

Progress indicator (necklace beads)

A non-interactive step tracker across the top of the flow.

Step 2 — Visit details / Tab flow

The heart of the check-in: a top bar with a Quick Check-in shortcut, and a tab strip (for multi-vertical visits) that moves between each vertical and a final Review tab.

Step 2 — Boarding tab

Where the boarding stay is built: pick services from the catalog, assign a kennel, set the stay dates, and record food, medication, and care notes.

Step 2 — Review tab

A read-only cross-vertical summary of the whole visit — selected services, kennel and dates, pricing, and a compliance roll-up — plus the controls to complete or abandon the check-in.

Step 3 — Compliance gate

Current state: Boarding check-in uses the same compliance-status component as every other vertical, and the query behind it is not filtered by vertical — a document configured as active and mandatory in Settings → Compliance for a location is picked up regardless of which vertical it was added under. There is no separate "boarding compliance library" — the existing Settings → Compliance page already applies to boarding. Most locations have not added a mandatory template there, so for those locations this screen has nothing to sign, and check-in proceeds without a documents step.

Signing a document here records it — a compliance record is created and the reference panels update. Whether an unsigned mandatory document actually blocks completing check-in has not been verified for boarding: the status shown here correctly reports which documents are missing, but confirming that check-in cannot complete while one is outstanding requires testing the flow directly, not reading how the status is computed.

Ensures all mandatory documents are signed before the pet can be checked in. Unsigned documents must be signed here to continue.

Step 4 — Vaccines gate

Confirms the pet's required vaccines are present and current before check-in. Missing or expired vaccines must be resolved here to continue — or, for Owner/Manager/Super Admin roles, the gate can be overridden with a logged reason.

Confirms the pet's required vaccines are present and current before check-in. Missing or expired vaccines must be resolved here to continue.

Step 5 — Payment pre-auth (optional)

An optional step to place a card hold for the estimated stay cost. It never blocks the check-in — staff can always skip and bill at checkout.

Step 6 — Confirm arrival

The final step: a summary of the visit and the button that officially checks the pet in, creating the stay records, adding it to the Live Tracker, and sending the arrival SMS.

⚠ Open accuracy item (tip) — the charge is correct on this path; the record of it is not, and a second checkout path drops it entirely. Every "tip" control described below is a real, working input that correctly updates the on-screen running total. Confirmed by my own read of backend/app/services/multi_vertical_checkout_service.py (_build_breakdown, :95-99): the unified/UOUT-V2 checkout path — which this screen's Review & complete tab uses — genuinely includes the entered tip in the actual charge (final_cents = base_cents + tip + late_fee − discount, and final_cents is what gets sent to the gateway). So on this path there is no display≠charge problem; tip is not "unrecordable" in the sense of never being charged. Three separate, real gaps remain, and collapsing them into one is the mistake to avoid: (1) the tip amount charged this way is stored only in checkout_adjustments_json.uout_v2_breakdown — a JSONB blob, not a dedicated column or ledger row (#845, retitled from "unimplementable" to "persisted unledgered"). (2) boarding also has a second, separate checkout code path (boarding/backend/services/checkout_service.py's checkout_reservation()) which has no tip parameter at all — confirmed by reading it directly — so a checkout that goes through that path drops tip entirely (#847, dual-write-path). Which path a given check-out actually uses is not something I've traced here. (3) even for a tip charged correctly via path (1), the reservation-record Payment section (boarding-15) and the itemized receipt window still show tip as a hardcoded $0 — that receipt code never reads the JSONB blob at all, so a correctly-charged tip is still invisible on the historical record. Do not read "tip is charged correctly" as "tip is recorded, ledgered, or receipt-visible" — those are the open items.

Boarding Check-out flow

The unified à-la-carte check-out, in boarding context. A staff member finds the pet, selects which active sessions are settling, itemizes the boarding reservation (extras, tip, late fee, discount), reviews a cross-vertical roll-up, takes payment, and completes. Steps auto-simplify for single-session pets.

Boarding Check-out entry / redirect

The old Boarding-only check-out entry point no longer hosts its own screen — it forwards to the unified check-out. When the salon lacks the Boarding vertical, it instead shows a not-subscribed gate.

(dark mode also captured)

Step: Lookup — "Who's checking out?"

The first step of the unified flow: find the pet whose visit is ending.

Persistent panels (Pet Status + Pet Documents)

Once a pet is picked, these two read-only panels sit above the step body throughout check-out, giving staff at-a-glance awareness. In check-out mode they are informational only — the add-to-visit, sign, and upload actions available at check-in are suppressed here.

Progress indicator

A three-bead necklace showing where you are in the flow. Read-only — it does not navigate.

Step 0: Session select — "Which sessions are checking out?"

Shown when the pet has more than one active session; skipped automatically for a single-session pet. Choose which sessions to settle in this check-out.

Tab strip (multi-session only)

When more than one vertical is being settled, a tab strip lets staff move between each vertical's check-out and the final Review tab. Hidden when only one vertical is involved.

Boarding check-out tab

The itemized boarding settlement: the reservation summary plus fields for extras, tip, late fee, discount, and the return checklist. A live running total updates as you enter values. Tip's reach to the actual charge is unverified — see the flag above.

The itemized boarding settlement: the reservation summary plus fields for extras, tip, late fee, discount, and the return checklist. A live running total updates as you enter values.

Review & complete tab

The final step: a cross-vertical roll-up of every settling session with tax and grand total, payment-method selection, and completion.

Payment capture (card methods)

An interstitial shown before completion when a card-based method is chosen, to run the card capture.

Success panel

Confirmation shown after the check-out completes, summarizing what was settled.

Check-out — Retail Ring-up Section

Appears inside the Boarding tab when Retail is enabled, letting you add products to the sale before settling.

Checking in a boarding pet that needs medication or a special diet

This is the flow to use when a dog or cat arrives for a stay and comes with instructions: tablets twice a day, a prescription kibble, insulin, anything the owner hands you on a sheet of paper. It has two halves. First you check the pet in. Then you turn the owner's instructions into routines, so every dose and every meal is on a schedule with a name next to it.

Why two halves. Check-in records that the pet is in the building and what the owner told you. Routines are what the kennel staff actually work from, shift after shift. Writing "Insulin 2 units AM and PM" in a notes box tells the morning person what to do; a routine tells the evening person too, and records whether it happened.

Before you start

Have in front of you:

• [ ] The owner's written instructions: medication name, dose, how often, with food or without
• [ ] The food the owner brought, and how much to give at each meal
• [ ] The pet's vaccination certificate, if it is not already on file
• [ ] The dates of the stay

Part A — Check the pet in

1. Open Check-in. In the left menu under Pet Boarding, choose Check-in. The page is titled À la carte check-in. If your salon runs more than one service you are first asked which services this visit covers; Boarding is already selected when you arrive from the Boarding menu. Press Continue →.

2. Find the pet. Type the owner's name, phone number, or the pet's name in the search box and pick the pet from the results. If the pet is greyed out with "Pet already in session", it is already checked in somewhere; go to the Live Tracker instead of checking in twice.

Why this matters: selecting the right pet is what pulls up the right vaccine record and the right file. Two dogs called Bella is the commonest check-in mistake there is.

New customer? Press + Walk-in / new customer and fill in the owner first, then the pet. The flow continues with the new pet.

Once a pet is selected, three panels sit at the top of every step: Pet Status (behavior, diet, medication, allergies, handling notes from the pet's file), Pet Vaccines, and Pet Documents. Glance at Pet Status now; if the file already says "Medication: None on file" and the owner has just handed you a medication list, the file is out of date and the routines you build in Part B are what will keep the stay safe.

3. Build the stay on the Visit details step (Boarding tab). Under Services, pick the boarding service (for example Overnight Boarding) and any Add-ons. Choose a Kennel from the dropdown and set the Check-in date and Check-out date; all three are required. Then fill in the three text boxes:

• Food schedule: what the owner brought and when it is fed, in the owner's words (for example 1 cup kibble AM + 1 cup PM).
• Medication: the medication list exactly as written on the owner's sheet.
• Notes: crate preferences, fears, anything the kennel team should know.

Why this matters: these boxes are the owner's instructions in their own words. In Part B you will turn them into scheduled routines. Copy them in full now, because the owner will be gone when a question comes up.

Press Continue to Review →. It stays grey until a kennel and both dates are set.

4. Review, then sign paperwork. The Visit Summary shows the kennel, the dates and the price. If any required document is unsigned, a red notice says so and points you to the Pet Documents panel. Press Continue to Compliance → (or ← Cancel all to abandon the visit). On the Compliance step, each unsigned document has a Sign → button. Pressing it opens the signing window: Full name, Relationship to pet (Owner is the default), and a Signature the owner can Draw or Type. Sign Document stays grey until both a name and a signature are present. The Sign N documents to continue button unlocks once everything is signed.

Why this matters: a signed waiver stored against this stay is one you can find in three years. A paper one is in a drawer.

5. Vaccines. If a required vaccine is missing or expired, the Vaccines step lists it and you cannot continue. If the owner has the certificate, use the add-vaccine control on this step to enter it now (vaccine, date given, expiry). If they do not, the pet cannot be checked in unless an Owner or Manager uses the manager override on this step and types a reason. The override is recorded with who, when, and why. (Controls per the reference chapter; not screenshot-verified this session.)

Why this matters: an out-of-date vaccination is a risk to every other animal in the building, not just this one. The block exists so that the decision to proceed is a manager's decision, on the record.

6. Card hold (optional). The Payment step lets you take a card for a hold on the estimated stay, or skip and bill at checkout. Skipping never blocks the check-in. (Per the reference chapter.)

7. Confirm arrival. The Confirm step shows a summary; the confirm button creates the stay, puts the pet on the Live Tracker, and sends the owner one text saying their pet has arrived. (Per the reference chapter.)

Part B — Turn the instructions into routines

8. Open Routines. In the left menu under Pet Boarding, choose Routines. The page is titled Daily Routines and shows today's medications and meals to follow, by time, for every pet currently checked in, grouped by the hour they are due. A History button opens past days.

9. Add each medication. Press + Add routine. In the sheet that opens, choose the pet (only checked-in pets are offered, which is why Part A comes first) and set the type to medication. Then fill in:

• Medication name, for example Insulin
• Dose / portion (optional), for example 2 units
• Route / instructions (optional), for example Subcutaneous, with food
• Times (today's schedule): the first time, then + Add another time for each further time it is due
• The Critical checkbox: a missed dose escalates immediately (no 3-strike grace). Tick it for insulin, seizure medication, anything where one missed dose is dangerous.

Press Save changes.

Why this matters: one routine per medication, with its own times, is what makes "was he given his 6pm insulin on night four" a lookup instead of an argument.

10. Add each meal the same way. + Add routine, set the type to meal / diet, give it a name such as Breakfast, the portion (1 cup kibble), the times, and any instruction such as Mix into meal.

11. Check the list. The page now shows every dose and every meal for today in time order, each as a card with the pet's name, the item, and the dose. Read it back against the owner's sheet once. This is the last moment it is cheap to fix.

During the stay — recording each dose and meal

Each card carries four buttons. When a routine comes due, press one:

• Give: done as written. A small sheet asks for optional notes; press Confirm.
• Partial: some of it. A note is required.
• Skip: not given. A reason is required.
• Refuse: the pet would not take it.

A card that is past its time shows Overdue. A critical medication that is overdue is outlined in red with an OVERDUE — MEDICAL · CRITICAL banner across the top of the card, so it is visible from across the room.

Why this matters: each press is stamped with your name and the time, and it goes into the owner's daily report card, including the times something did not go to plan. A skip with a reason is normal. A dose with nothing recorded is the thing this page exists to prevent.

Quick fixes

The pet is not offered when adding a routine. It is not checked in yet, or it was checked in at a different location. Finish Part A first, or check which location you are on (top left).

Continue to Review is greyed out. A kennel or one of the two dates is missing. Check-out must be after check-in.

The red compliance notice will not go away. A required document is unsigned. Press Continue to Compliance and sign it there; the notice reads the Pet Documents panel.

The vaccine block will not clear and the owner has no paperwork. Only an Owner or Manager can override it, and they must type a reason. If neither is available, the pet waits.

A routine was entered with the wrong time, or the wrong dose. Open its card's edit control to get the Edit routine sheet, fix the field, and press Save changes. Today's remaining slots update on save.

Every card says Overdue. Nobody has recorded today's doses yet. Work down the page from the top and record each one as it is done.

Not in this flow (stated so nobody looks for it)

• Routines are set up from the Routines page after check-in, not inside the check-in screens. The check-in Boarding tab captures the owner's instructions as text only.
• QR scan on the pet search is a placeholder and does not work yet.
• Whether an unsigned mandatory document actually blocks a boarding check-in has not been verified by the reference chapter; this guide tells you to sign, which is correct either way.

Windows & Forms — Boarding vertical

The Boarding vertical uses focused windows, bottom-sheets, and inline forms to handle single tasks — configuring kennels, logging care, capturing belongings, and running checkout — without leaving the current screen.

New Kennel / Edit Kennel window

Opens from the Kennel Management tab to create a new kennel or edit an existing one. The same window serves both modes; button labels switch accordingly.

Kennel Management tab

The Settings → Kennel Management tab lists every kennel and hosts the triggers for creating, editing, and deleting them.

Care-log entry sheet

A bottom-sheet triggered from the Kennel Map for logging a single care event — Feed, Meds, Play, or Incident. The available controls change with the selected action.

Boarding Checkout window

Triggered by Checkout on the Boarding home. A three-step flow: settle belongings, review the price, then confirm.

Manager Override window

Triggered from a check-in that is blocked by a vaccine or kennel-capacity gate. Lets a manager record a reason and override the block.

Log Belongings window

Opens after check-in to capture the items a pet arrived with, each with an optional note and photo.

Add Daily Care Card form

Opened from the Unit Detail panel's Add Daily Card action. Records the pet's day and generates an AI narrative summary.

Reservation-row action cluster

The expanded view of a reservation row on the Reservations list, showing key details and quick actions. In this version the action buttons are placed but do not yet navigate — all four are inert (tracked as #943).

Reservation / Stay record action bar

The action bar rendered on a boarding stay record, for sending documents, printing, and refunds.

Unit Detail panel

Opens from a Kennel Grid cell to show the kennel's current occupant, their daily card history, and the entry point for adding a new card.

Itemized Receipt window

Triggered by the receipt quick action on a Boarding home reservation card. Shows the shared itemized receipt for that reservation.

Conversational AI — where it lives

Conversational AI has its own section in the salon sidebar. This page is the map; every other Conversational AI page assumes you can get to the screen it describes.

In the sidebar

Under the Conversational AI heading you will find one entry today:

Screens reached by address

Two further screens exist and work, but do not yet have a sidebar entry. Reach them by typing the address, and bookmark them:

Settings live with your other location settings, not in this section — Settings → Location Settings → AI Phone, at /salon/settings/location.

What the agent is allowed to do on a call is set per location too, on that same AI Phone tab. That is a separate decision from turning the phone line on, and it is the one that decides whether a caller asking about a boarding stay gets an answer or a message taken — see What the agent can do, per vertical.

Which location you are looking at

Conversational AI is configured and reported per location. The location switcher in the top bar decides which one you are seeing, exactly as it does for every other vertical. If you run more than one salon, check the switcher before reading any number on these screens.

Conversational AI — AI Phone Answering

Doastly's AI phone agent answers your salon line, understands grooming, boarding and daycare, and books into the same calendar your front desk uses. This section covers subscribing, setting it up, reading what it did, and — most importantly — exactly where its limits are.

Availability today — read this first

The AI phone agent is not yet taking live customer calls. Three things are still being finished, and knowing which is which will save you a support call:

1. No phone carrier is connected yet. The software that talks to a caller is built, but it is

not yet joined to a live phone network. A number you enter today will not ring through to the AI.

1. The AI Phone settings screen does not save yet. You can open it and fill it in — the screen

tells you so itself — but your choices are not stored when you leave the page.

1. The AI service is temporarily interrupted platform-wide and is being restored.

Everything below describes the product you are buying and how it behaves. Where a screen exists but is not yet finished, this section says so rather than letting you discover it.

1. Subscribing

Conversational AI is priced on talk minutes per month, not per location:

Minutes are consumed only while the agent is actually on a call — ringing time and voicemail do not count against your bundle.

If you expect to run past your bundle, ask us before you do. What happens at minute 501 on the Starter plan — a hard stop, an overage charge, or a fallback to voicemail — is not yet settled in the product, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out on your busiest Saturday.

2. Setting up the agent

Go to Settings → Location Settings → AI Phone — the page is at /salon/settings/location, and AI Phone is one of the tabs across the top. The tab is selected by clicking it; unlike some settings pages it does not yet have its own bookmarkable address, so bookmark the page and pick the tab each time.

• AI Phone Answering — the master on/off switch for this location. Off by default.
• Business phone number — the number customers call. Enter it in the format shown, e.g.

(555) 123-4567.

• Coverage window — when the agent is allowed to answer. The default is Always (24h). Choose

Window instead to give it a start and end time; there is a helper that fills these from your existing business hours so you do not have to retype them.

• Voice — the speaking voice callers hear.
• Languages — English is what the agent speaks. A Spanish option appears on the screen,

but the agent does not yet switch language on a call; see Settings (AI Phone tab) for the full list of controls that are present but not yet active.

• Escalation targets — who a call is handed to when the agent steps aside. This part of the

screen is a placeholder and is not yet configurable.

The screen will show a notice saying your settings are not yet saved to the server. That notice is accurate. Fill the form in to see the shape of the configuration, but expect to enter it again once saving is switched on. Nothing you type here is lost anywhere — it simply is not stored yet.

3. Reading the call log

In the sidebar, open Conversational AI → Call History — /salon/conversational-ai/calls. It lists calls, most recent first, and selecting one opens /salon/conversational-ai/calls/<call id>. Selecting one opens the call detail view, which shows three things:

• Transcript — the full exchange, turn by turn. There is no language selector on this view.
• Route trace — what the agent did and in what order: what it looked up, what it proposed, what

it wrote, and where it handed off. This is how you check why it did something, not just what.

• Customer feedback — where the caller left any.

The Call History list is present but will show no calls yet, because none have been taken. It shows an empty list rather than sample rows — if you ever see a call here, it is a real one.

4. Reports and analytics

Reports — /salon/conversational-ai/reports — answers "how is the phone actually doing." A companion Analytics view sits at /salon/conversational-ai/analytics. Both are reached by address for now: the sidebar currently links Call History only, so bookmark these two. Reports gives you:

• Call volume and an outcome breakdown
• Average handle time
• The transfer split — see §5, this is the one to read carefully
• Resolution by source — how calls were resolved, with the agent's own self-assessment shown

separately and never folded into the headline number

Two metrics you might expect are deliberately absent rather than approximated: top intents and after-hours capture. Neither is built yet, and the page says so instead of showing a plausible zero. If a number appears on this page, something measured it.

5. Transfers — why you will see three numbers, not one

Live transfer is not built yet. The agent does not currently connect callers to a person; on anything it must not answer it refuses, captures the question, and ends the call. This section describes reporting that is built and waiting for the transfer it measures. Until that ships, these three numbers will not move.

When the agent hands a call to a person, the outcome is recorded as one of three distinct facts:

Most systems report a single "transferred" count. That number hides the case that matters most to you: a caller the agent tried to pass to a human, who never reached one. Read ABANDONED as your missed-call figure for the AI line. A rising ABANDONED count means the agent is doing its job and your coverage is not.

6. What the AI will and will not do

This is the most important section here. An owner who expects more than the agent does will be disappointed in the product; the point of this list is that you should never be surprised.

It will:

• Ask before it changes anything. The agent does not silently book. It says back what it is about

to do and waits for the caller to agree. An illustrative exchange — an example of the intended behaviour, not a recording of a real call:

Caller: Thursday works. Agent: Before I book anything — that's a ninety-minute de-matting groom, Thursday at two. Shall I go ahead and confirm it? Caller: Yes, please. Agent: Booked. A confirmation is on its way to your email.

• Book into your real calendar. It writes through the same appointment system your front desk

uses. There is no separate "AI calendar" that can drift out of step with yours, and the customer receives the ordinary confirmation email.

• Account for the job. It is built to know that a matted double coat needs a longer slot than a

standard groom, rather than booking every call into a default sixty minutes.

• Refuse what it must not answer — and capture the caller's question in your words, so nobody has to explain themselves twice. (Handing the call to a live person is not built yet — see §5.)

It will not:

• Give health or medication advice. Questions about symptoms, medication, or an injury are

treated as a class the agent must not answer. Doastly's safety-critical AI writing — report-card narration and the like — runs on a stronger model with a deterministic check that a flagged health concern cannot be dropped from what a customer is told. The phone agent is built to the same principle: it does not reassure anyone about an animal's health.

• Book, move, or cancel anything without confirming it out loud first.
• Quietly swallow a failed transfer. When transfer ships, a handoff that did not reach a

person will be reported as ABANDONED, never counted as a success — the reporting for that is already built (§5).

• Take payments, or discuss pricing beyond your published services.
• Answer calls outside your coverage window — once you can save one. The restriction itself is

built and runs: outside the window a caller hears a short "we're currently closed" message and the call ends without ever reaching the agent. What is missing is the saving (see Settings — AI Phone tab), so today every location runs on the default Always (24h).

6.1 What to do when it gets something wrong

Open the call in Call History and read the route trace — it shows what the agent looked up and what it wrote, which is usually enough to see where a call went sideways. Anything it booked is an ordinary appointment and can be edited or cancelled from the calendar exactly like one your staff took by hand.

7. What it can do in each vertical — and the three gaps

The agent works across grooming, boarding and daycare. It is not identical in each, and the differences are deliberate rather than accidental, so they are listed here rather than left to be discovered on a Tuesday.

Boarding alone answers "how is my dog doing right now", because boarding is the vertical where the owner cannot see the pet.

Daycare has no phone reschedule on purpose. Cancel and rebook is the path. If a customer asks, that is the answer to give them — it is not a fault to apologise for.

8. The guardrails — what the agent will not do

These are enforced underneath the agent, not written into its instructions, so a caller cannot talk it out of them.

• You choose what it may do. Nine switches, per location. Turn boarding bookings off and the

agent cannot see those actions at all — it does not decline them, they are not there.

• It confirms before it acts. Nothing is booked, moved or cancelled until the caller has heard it

read back and said yes. Every proposal and every action is recorded.

• Vaccination is a warning, never a refusal. The agent flags an expiry on the call and

never turns a customer away over the phone. If there is no record on file it says exactly that — it does not call it expired.

• It never assigns a kennel. It takes the boarding booking; which run the dog goes in stays a

staff decision.

• Every call is on the record — turns, transitions and guardrail evaluations, readable back word

for word.

9. What it does NOT do in this release

• It does not transfer a live call to a person. When it reaches something it must not handle, it

takes the message in the caller's own words and flags it for callback. It will not pretend to put someone through.

Conversational AI — the call log

Conversational AI → Call History, at /salon/conversational-ai/calls. This is the record of every call the agent handled, most recent first.

What each row tells you

Selecting a row opens the full call — see Reading one call end to end.

Calls from every vertical land in this one log

If you run boarding or daycare alongside grooming, this is one log, not three. The row itself does not name the vertical; open the call to see what was booked. Two habits follow:

• Reconcile each booking to the right book. A stay the agent took is on the boarding board, a

day is on the daycare roster, an appointment is on the grooming calendar — all ordinary records, all editable by hand exactly as if your front desk had written them.

• Open the boarding rows first. Boarding is the only vertical where the agent answers *how is my

dog doing right now*, and it is the one where the caller is most often anxious rather than transactional. Those calls tell you more about how your line sounds than a straightforward booking ever will.

Reading outcomes honestly

The outcome column is the fastest read on the health of your phone line, and it repays a habit of scanning it weekly rather than monthly.

• A run of refusals is not a failure of the agent. It usually means callers are asking

something the agent is correctly refusing to answer — most often a health question.

• A run of messages taken at similar times of day tells you when your customers actually call,

which is rarely when you assume.

• Bookings should reconcile to your calendar. They are ordinary appointments, written by the

same system your front desk uses, so anything the agent booked can be edited or cancelled normally.

When the list is empty

An empty Call History means no calls have been handled — nothing more. The screen shows an empty list rather than sample rows, deliberately: if you see a call here, it is a real one. No demonstration or placeholder data is ever mixed into this screen.

Conversational AI — reading one call end to end

Opening a call from the log gives you three panels. Together they answer not just what happened but why the agent did it, which is the part that matters when something goes wrong.

Transcript

The conversation, turn by turn, in the order it happened. This is the record of what your customer actually heard — useful both for checking the agent and for settling any question about what was agreed on a call.

Route trace

The agent's decision path, step by step. Each step shows:

This is the panel to open first when a call went wrong. The transcript tells you what was said; the route trace tells you what the agent decided and when. A transfer that never connected, for example, shows as a transition into a transfer state without a corresponding connection. Every transfer looks like this today, because live transfer is not built — the agent records the intent and ends the call. That is the difference between "the agent tried" and "someone picked up."

Anything the agent booked appears as a pair of steps, never one: what it proposed and read back to the caller, then what it wrote once they said yes. If you ever need to settle whether a customer actually agreed to a boarding stay — days of your capacity, not an hour of it — that pair is the answer, not the outcome column.

Customer feedback

Where the caller left any, it appears here.

If the agent got something wrong

Anything it booked is an ordinary appointment: edit or cancel it from the calendar exactly as you would one taken by hand. Then read the route trace to see where the call diverged — that is the detail worth passing on when you report it.

Conversational AI — settings (AI Phone tab)

Settings → Location Settings → AI Phone, at /salon/settings/location. The AI Phone tab is one of the tabs across the top of that page; it is selected by clicking, and does not have its own bookmarkable address.

Read this before you fill the form in. The screen carries a notice saying your choices are not yet saved to the server, and that notice is accurate. You can open the tab and see exactly what will be configurable, but nothing you enter is stored yet. Saving is still being wired.

The controls

What the AI can do on the phone — the capability switches

Below the controls above, the tab carries a card titled What the AI can do on the phone. It is the most consequential part of this screen and the easiest to walk straight past.

Each switch hands the agent a whole group of abilities, or withholds them — and withholds is the accurate word. Turn boarding booking off and the agent does not decline a boarding request; it has no boarding booking ability to reach for at all, so there is nothing a persistent caller can talk it into.

A location starts with two of them on — grooming booking, and re-sending a receipt by email. Boarding and daycare answering stay off until someone turns them on. That is why an owner running four verticals hears a grooming answering service on day one and assumes the product is grooming-only. It is a setting, not a limit.

Boarding information and boarding booking are deliberately two switches, not one. Turning on "how is my dog doing, when do I collect her" never turns on the ability to write to your boarding board. Reading and writing are separate consents.

Nine switches exist; seven currently change what the agent can do. The other two — service area and van location for mobile grooming, and the AI calls the customer when the pet is ready — are listed ahead of the features they will govern, so that you opt in before either can ever fire rather than afterwards. Do not plan around them.

This card does not save yet either, the same as the rest of the tab. Ask us and we will set your location's capabilities. The full per-vertical breakdown, including the three places the verticals genuinely differ, is in What the agent can do, per vertical.

What is genuinely active today, and what is not

Being straight with you here saves a support call later. The controls above are all present on the screen; not all of them yet change what happens on a call.

Active: the agent answers around the clock. Coverage defaults to Always, and 24/7 answering works today.

Present but not yet active — do not rely on these:

• A narrowed coverage window — the restriction WORKS, but you cannot save one here yet. This

is the same situation as Voice below, and the distinction matters: outside the window the agent does not answer at all — the caller hears a short "we're currently closed, please call back during our regular hours" and the call ends before it ever reaches the agent. What is missing is the saving, so the window you type is not the one the phone reads. Until saving is wired every location runs on the default Always (24h) — so in practice the agent answers at all hours today, because your window never reaches it, not because it would be ignored.

• Voice selection — the agent DOES use it, but you cannot set it here yet. The male/female

choice now genuinely changes the voice callers hear; the phone agent reads the configured voice per location. What is still missing is the saving, so the choice you make on this screen is not yet what the agent reads. Until saving is wired, ask us to set it for your location.

• Spanish. The option appears, but the agent does not yet switch language on a call.
• Escalation targets. This part of the screen is a placeholder.
• The AI-disclosure setting. The control exists; automatic disclosure on a call is not yet

wired. If your jurisdiction requires callers to be told they are speaking to an AI, do not rely on this setting to satisfy that obligation yet.

Tone and accent tuning does not exist in any form. If you have seen it described anywhere, that was ahead of the product.

Conversational AI — transcripts

Every call the agent handles is transcribed and kept. The transcript sits in the call detail view — open a call from Call History and read it turn by turn.

What a transcript is good for

• Settling a question about what was agreed. A customer who says "I asked for a full groom"

can be checked in seconds rather than argued with.

• Hearing how you sound. The agent answers your phone. Reading a handful of transcripts is the

fastest way to know what your customers are experiencing out of hours.

• Finding the questions you should be answering on your website. Repeated questions in

transcripts are unmet demand for information.

If you board, read those transcripts first. A boarding caller is ringing about an animal they cannot see, sometimes days into a stay. How the agent handles how is she doing? is the clearest read you will get on whether it sounds like your salon — and boarding is the only vertical where it can answer that question at all.

A weekly habit worth forming

Read the last five transcripts once a week. You are looking for three things: a booking that does not match what the caller asked for, a transfer that should not have been needed, and a question the agent could not handle that it plausibly should. Each of those is worth reporting, and the route trace beside the transcript will show where the call diverged.

Language

Transcripts are recorded in the language the call was conducted in. There is no language selector on the transcript view, and the agent does not yet switch languages during a call — English is what it speaks today. If you were expecting to read a Spanish call back in English, that is not available yet.

Conversational AI — what the agent can do, per vertical

If the agent only seems to know about grooming, that is a setting, not a limit. A location we have not configured starts with two things switched on — grooming booking, and re-sending a receipt by email. Boarding and daycare answering stay off until someone turns them on, so an owner running four verticals still hears a grooming answering service on day one. Ask us and we will switch the rest on for your location (§3).

Once they are on, the agent is more than a grooming answerer — and it is also less, in two specific places. This page is the honest list: what it can do in each vertical you run, what it deliberately cannot, and what stops it.

Read the availability notice in AI Phone Answering first. Everything below is what the product does when a call reaches it. No customer call reaches it yet — no phone carrier is connected. This page tells you what you are buying, not what rang this morning.

1. The capability table

Each row is one thing a caller can ask for. A ✅ means the agent can do it in that vertical today; a ✗ means it cannot, and the note says why.

Four more work regardless of vertical: what do I owe, how is my pet in care, where is this call up to, and flag this call for a person to follow up. Two more answer the questions every salon gets most: your opening hours and your published prices.

2. The three asymmetries — the ones to know before you promise a customer

These are not oversights we are hiding. They are the three places where the verticals genuinely differ, and an owner who assumes parity will find out from a customer rather than from us.

1. Daycare bookings cannot be moved by phone. Cancel and rebook is the path. The ability is

built and deliberately switched off, because a daycare day is capacity-and-ratio bound in a way a grooming slot is not, and a move is two decisions, not one. Grooming and boarding can be moved.

1. Daycare cannot re-send a receipt or a report card by phone. Grooming and boarding can. If a

daycare customer calls asking for either, your staff send it; the agent will take the message.

1. Only boarding answers "how is my pet doing right now." That is on purpose: boarding is the

one vertical where the owner cannot see the pet. A grooming caller asking the same question gets the general in-care status instead.

3. Switching the rest on

Everything in §1 beyond the grooming column is off until it is switched on, per location. Nothing about your subscription changes when you switch one on — these are consent switches, not products.

Today, which capabilities your location has is set by us, not by you. The AI Phone settings tab shows a card titled What the AI can do on the phone with a list of switches — the switches are real controls in the product, but that screen does not yet save them. Ask us and we will set your location; when saving is wired, the screen becomes the place you do it yourself.

4. What the switches actually do

Each switch withholds a whole group of abilities from the agent — not from a menu it can still see and be talked past, but from what it is offered at all. Turn boarding answering off and the agent has no boarding ability to reach for; there is nothing for a persistent caller to argue it into.

Two more switches exist and do nothing yet: service area and van location for mobile grooming, and the AI calls the customer when the pet is ready. They are listed ahead of the features so that you opt in before either can ever fire, never afterwards. Do not plan around them.

Switching everything off does not mute the line. The agent will still answer, give your opening hours and published prices, say what a customer owes, say where the call has got to, and flag the call for a person. It simply will not touch a booking. If you want the phone not answered at all, that is the master AI Phone Answering switch, not these.

5. What stops it doing the wrong thing

• It says what it is about to do, and waits. Anything that changes your book — a booking, a

move, a cancellation — is read back and confirmed out loud before it happens. It is not a confirmation screen the caller cannot see; it is the agent asking.

• Every call is on the record. The turns, the decisions, what it looked up, what it wrote, and

what the caller said afterwards are all kept, per call. If you ever want to know why it did something, that is in the call detail — not reconstructed afterwards from an outcome.

• A vaccination gap is a warning, never a refusal. The agent will tell a caller a vaccination

looks expired, and will still take the booking; your staff hold the decision to turn an animal away, at the door, with the animal in front of them. If there is no record at all it says there is no record — it does not call that "expired", because those are different facts and one of them is your filing rather than their vet.

• Phone bookings never assign a kennel. The agent books the stay; which run the dog goes in is a

staff decision made with eyes on the board.

• It does not give health or medication advice. Symptoms, medication, injury — that whole class

is handed to a person. Where Doastly's AI writes anything about an animal's health elsewhere in the product, a flagged concern cannot be dropped from what a customer is told; the phone agent is held to the same rule from the other direction, by not going there at all.

6. What it will not do this release

• It cannot put a caller through to a person. There is no live transfer in this release. When a

call needs a human, the agent takes it as a follow-up — a callback, flagged on the call — rather than connecting anyone. Do not staff a transfer line for it, and do not tell customers they can ask to be put through.