The call comes three weeks after pickup. Mrs. Alvarez is polite, but she's been to the vet: Biscuit has lost four pounds, and she doesn't think he got his thyroid pills while he was with you. You know he did. You remember him spitting one out on the second night and taking it in cheese. What you need now is a page that says so, with a date, a time, and somebody's initials.

Good kennel record keeping comes down to six record types: intake, vaccination, feeding, medication, incident, and financial. For each one you need to know which fields to capture, how long to keep it, and whether you could put your hands on it in a few minutes if an inspector, an insurer, or an owner asked. This guide covers all three questions for each record, so you can audit your own system against it.

What Records Does a Boarding Kennel Need to Keep?

Six record types cover nearly everything a boarding kennel needs. A few are required by law, depending on your state. The rest exist because they protect you in a dispute or an insurance claim.

Record	What it holds	Who asks for it
Intake	Owner and emergency contacts, vet, feeding and medication instructions, signed agreement	You, every day; an inspector in some states
Vaccination	Proof of rabies, DHPP, and bordetella from a veterinarian	An inspector; the owner of the dog in the next run
Feeding	What each dog was offered and what it actually ate	An owner asking about weight loss
Medication	What was given, how much, when, and by whom	An owner, an insurer, or a lawyer
Incident	Injuries, bites, escapes, fights, medication errors	Your insurer
Financial	Deposits, invoices, payments, refunds, no-shows	The IRS and your state

What the law requires depends on your state. Fewer than half of states license boarding kennels at all, and those that do set their own record rules. Two examples from the regulations themselves: Kansas requires licensees to keep a record for each animal, including its description and any vaccination information, and to store the current license year and the previous two on the premises for inspection. Georgia requires records of custodial care and health for all animals, kept for twelve months and produced on request. Pennsylvania requires kennel records on forms the state issues or approves. Our state-by-state licensing guide tells you whether your state licenses kennels and links the statute, and Michigan State's Animal Legal & Historical Center is a good place to read the rules in full.

Whatever your state says, organize the same way: one file per animal per stay. Every record in this guide hangs off that. If you can pull one dog's one stay and find the intake, the vaccines, the meals, the doses, any incident, and the invoice together, you can answer almost any question anyone will ever ask you.

What Should a Kennel Intake Record Include Before a Pet Is Admitted?

A complete intake record captures five things before a dog walks through the door: owner and emergency contacts, vet details, vaccination status, behavior and feeding notes, and a signed agreement with any deposit. Collect them at booking, not at check-in, and you skip the scramble of chasing paperwork while a lobby full of dogs barks at you.

Owner, vet, and emergency contacts. Owner name, phone, and email, plus an alternate contact who can make decisions and pick up the dog. The vet's clinic name and phone number. Two signed permissions belong here too: permission to treat, so you can take the dog to a vet up to a spending limit the owner chooses if nobody can be reached, and permission for their vet to talk to you, so you can confirm a vaccine or a dose without a three-way phone call.

Vaccination status. Record the expiry dates for rabies, DHPP, and bordetella, and check them against the last day of the stay, not the first. That's how you spot a record that lapses mid-stay before the booking is confirmed. Here's more on keeping vaccination records without chasing paperwork.

Behavior flags and feeding instructions. Ask about reactivity, escape risk, resource guarding, and whether the dog has boarded before. Write down the food, the amount, the times, and every medication on the intake record itself, in the owner's words. Your feeding board should be copied from this page, not from memory.

The agreement and the deposit. Keep the signed boarding agreement, the deposit amount, and the signed permissions with the intake record. If a stay is ever disputed, the first question is what the owner agreed to and when.

How Do You Document Medication So It Holds Up in a Dispute?

Record every dose as it's given, with five fields, and treat anything unusual as an event worth writing down. If an owner says you missed a dose, your log is the evidence. A tick on a whiteboard that gets wiped on Friday is not.

The five fields every entry needs. The drug name, the dose, the route (by mouth, injection, on the skin), the time given, and the initials of the person who gave it. "Gave meds" tells nobody anything. "Insulin, 6 units, under the skin, 8:05 AM, JT" answers the question before it's asked.

Three habits that prevent most errors. Keep every medication in its original pharmacy bottle. Log as you go, not at the end of the shift. And whoever starts the medication round finishes it, because a pill gets given twice when two people each think the other hasn't.

A second check for high-stakes drugs. For insulin, seizure medication, and anything else where a wrong dose is dangerous, have a second person read the label and the dose and add their initials. It takes ten seconds. If you work alone, read the label back against the owner's written instructions before every dose and note that you did.

Refusals, missed doses, and changes mid-stay. Log a refusal as an event, not a failure: "Refused pill in food, 5:30 PM. Offered in cheese, accepted 5:45 PM." If an owner changes the instructions during the stay, get it by text or email, and write down the date and who took the message. A dose that's missed or given twice gets an incident report the same day, and a call to the owner.

How Should Feeding and Behavior Be Logged During a Stay?

A daily log needs three things for each dog: what it ate, how it acted, and anything unusual. Captured daily, that's a complete answer when an owner asks about a lost pound or an upset stomach after pickup.

The feeding board. Keep one board, on the wall or on a screen, listing every run, the dog's name, the feeding instructions from intake, and whether each meal was eaten. Staff mark a meal at the time it happens, not from memory at closing. Add a column for stool and energy and a line for anything odd: not drinking, loose stool, pacing at night. It costs about two minutes per dog per day. Here's how to run a feeding board that doesn't slip.

The two-meal rule. A dog that skips two meals in a row is something to tell the owner about that day. Most are just settling in. You still want the owner to hear it from you and not discover it on the scale at home.

Report cards are records too. A report card at pickup covers appetite, energy, potty habits, and how the dog settled. Owners share them, and a good one earns the rebooking. Keep a copy with the stay, and make sure it matches the log. A cheerful card that contradicts your own feeding record is worse than no card.

What Incidents Should Be Written Up, and When?

Write up anything that could turn into a claim, the same day it happens. That means a bite, a scratch, a fall, a fight between boarders, an escape or a gate left open, a seizure, a reaction to a medication, a medication error, and any trip to the vet. Repeated vomiting counts too. If an owner could call you about it later, write it up now.

What goes in the report. Date and time. Which dogs, and whose they are. Who was on shift and where it happened. What happened, in order. Any injuries, the first aid given, and what a vet said if one was called. Who told the owner, when, and how. What you'll do differently.

Stick to what people saw. "Max and Bella were playing; Bella yelped and had a small cut above her left eye" is a report. "Max is aggressive" is a judgment, and it may not even be true.

Call before pickup, not at the counter. Owners forgive a scratch far more readily than a surprise. And ask your insurer how they want incidents reported before you have one. Most want to hear early, even when no claim seems likely.

Same-day reports matter because a claim can arrive long after the stay. The deadline for an owner to sue over an injured pet is set by your state and is measured in years. A report written that afternoon is worth far more than anyone's memory when the letter arrives.

How Long Should a Kennel Keep Client and Animal Records?

Keep financial records for seven years, and keep each stay's file for as long as a claim over that stay could still be brought in your state. Those are two different clocks, set by different people.

Financial records. The IRS's guidance on how long to keep records is three years in most cases, six years if you left out income worth more than 25% of what you reported, and seven if you claimed a bad-debt deduction. Employment tax records are at least four years. Seven years is the cautious convention because it outlasts every period on that list short of fraud or a return that was never filed. Your state may have its own rule, so ask your accountant once and write the answer down.

Stay records. State kennel rules set a floor, like the twelve months in Georgia or the two previous license years in Kansas. The floor is rarely the number that matters. The medication log, the feeding log, the incident report, and the signed agreement are your defense if an owner brings a claim, so keep them until the deadline for that claim has passed, plus a margin. Ask your insurer or your attorney what that deadline is in your state. And keep a stay's file whole. A vaccination record thrown out a year before the incident report it belongs with is no use to anyone.

A workable schedule for a small kennel:

Record	Keep for
Invoices, payments, deposits, refunds	7 years
Payroll and employment tax records	At least 4 years
Medication logs, feeding logs, report cards	Your state's claim deadline, plus a year
Incident reports	Your state's claim deadline, plus a year
Vaccination proof for each stay	As long as the rest of that stay's file
Signed agreements and permissions	As long as the client's most recent stay file
Anything your state's kennel rules name	At least the state minimum

Whatever schedule you choose, apply it consistently. An inspection or a lawyer's letter never asks for everything. It asks for one record on one date.

When Is It Time to Move Kennel Records From Paper to Digital?

Move when a record has gone missing during a stay, or when you've started avoiding the paperwork because it feels worse than the kennel work.

Where paper and spreadsheets break down. Paper fails at the worst moment: a feeding instruction gets separated from the run card, or a bordetella date lives in a binder nobody opens until check-in. Spreadsheets fail differently. They have no reminders, no vaccine expiry alerts, and no safe way for two people to update the calendar at once. Here are five signs you've outgrown them.

What to look for as an owner-operator. Four things. A boarding calendar you can read at a glance. Vaccination records that flag an expired vaccine before the dog arrives, not after. Feeding, medication, and report cards your team can update from the run in under a minute, with a name and a time on every entry. And invoices and deposits handled without a separate ledger. Anything that needs training sessions to operate will end up unused, and you'll drift back to the fridge door. Our buyer's guide to kennel software goes deeper.

How Do You Keep Your Records Inspection-Ready Year-Round?

Run a 15-minute audit once a quarter, and make one person responsible for what it finds.

The quarterly audit. Pull one completed stay at random and read its file end to end: intake, vaccines, feeding entries, medication log, report card, and invoice. If any piece is missing or hard to find, that's the gap an inspector or a lawyer would find too. Next, check every dog on the books for the coming month against your vaccine requirements. Finally, time yourself producing one specific record, such as last March's medication log for a named dog. If it takes more than a few minutes, fix the filing before your next inspection, not after.

Who owns record quality. One person, often you. On a team of two or three, make check-in the gate: no dog enters a run until its vaccines and intake paperwork are complete. Go over what the audit found in a five-minute conversation with your staff, and fix the habit that caused the gap, not just the file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need written consent to give medication at my kennel? Get it whether or not your state requires a particular form. Capture it at intake: the drug, the dose, the schedule, and what the owner wants done if a dose is refused or they can't be reached. For insulin and other high-stakes drugs, have the instructions in writing before the stay starts.

Can I be cited for missing records at a licensing inspection? In a state that licenses kennels and sets record rules, yes. Kansas and Georgia both require kennel records to be available for inspection, and an inspector who can't see them has a violation to write up. If your state doesn't license kennels, your county or city may. Check both.

What's the difference between a report card and an incident report? A report card is a routine summary for the owner at pickup: appetite, energy, potty habits, how the dog settled. An incident report documents one specific event that could become a claim, written the same day with a timeline and a note of who was told. One builds the relationship. The other protects it.

Should I keep paper backups of digital kennel records? Not a full paper mirror, which defeats the purpose. A sensible middle ground is to keep the originals of anything that arrived on paper with a signature, and a few blank incident forms for the day the internet is down. Everything else can live digitally, as long as you can produce a specific record on demand.

How Goodstay Fits

We built Goodstay so that a kennel's records get made as a side effect of running the day, and all of them hang off the stay.

Before a first visit, one emailed link collects the intake questions, the signed agreement, and the vaccination certificate. Expired vaccines are flagged before check-in. On the Daily Tasks board, every feeding and every medication is marked done with the staff member's name and the time, and past days can't be changed. Incident reports can't be edited once they're filed, only added to. Each one prints as a PDF for your insurer, and check-out stops if a dog is about to go home before its owner has been told. Report cards and invoices sit on the same stay, and Pennsylvania kennels can print the state's kennel log straight from their bookings.

Plans are $29, $59, and $99 a month with every feature on every plan, and we move your existing records over for you, free. The honest trade-off: Goodstay is a newer product with a shorter track record and a shallower feature list than Gingr or Kennel Connection. If you need heavy customization, that matters. If you need the paperwork handled and your evenings back, it fits.

Try the quarterly audit on one stay this week. If it takes you more than a few minutes to find the medication log, see how Goodstay keeps every record on the stay.