Grooming & Add-On Services

Grooming is a first-class service type in Goodstay alongside boarding and daycare. You can create grooming appointments, manage a daily grooming schedule, assign groomers, track appointment progress, and let clients book grooming online.

Setting Up Your Grooming Menu

1. Go to Facility Settings → Services — the Service Catalog card.
2. On an empty catalog, click Add default services to load a standard set as a starting point:
   • Full Groom ($45 / 90 min)
   • Bath & Brush ($25 / 45 min)
   • Nail Trim ($12 / 15 min)
   • Teeth Brushing ($10 / 10 min)
   • De-shedding Treatment ($35 / 60 min)
   • Ear Cleaning ($8 / 10 min)
   • Flea & Tick Treatment ($15 / 30 min)
   • Pawdicure ($20 / 20 min)
3. Edit, delete, or add services to match your actual menu.

Adding a Grooming Service

Click Add Service and fill in:

Two of these fields now do more than display:

• Duration drives the Grooming Calendar timeline. An appointment's total length is the sum of the durations of every service attached to it, so a Bath & Brush (45 min) plus a Nail Trim (15 min) reserves the station for a full hour. If an appointment has a drop-off time but no services yet, it defaults to a 60-minute block.
• Species filters what clients can pick in the customer portal, where only species-eligible services are offered. On the public booking page every active service is listed, and any the pet turns out not to be eligible for is dropped when the request is submitted. Staff creating an appointment internally are not restricted.

Enabling / Disabling a Service

Use the eye icon next to any service (Activate / Deactivate) to enable or disable it. Disabled services won't appear when adding services to a reservation.

Reordering Services

Services are displayed in menu order — drag rows to reorder them on the Service Catalog card (this is the order customers see when booking). The Menu position field on the edit form does the same by number.

Grooming Spaces (Stations)

Grooming appointments are assigned to grooming spaces (also called stations). These work like any other space but are designated for grooming use.

To add a grooming station:

1. Go to Spaces → New Space.
2. Set the Space Type to Grooming Station. No rate fields appear — the form notes that appointment prices come from your grooming services catalog.
3. Set Capacity (typically 1 — one pet per grooming table at a time).

Creating a Grooming Appointment

1. Go to Reservations → New Reservation.
2. Set Service Type to Grooming.
3. The form adapts automatically:
   • The check-out date is hidden (grooming appointments are always same-day).
   • Only grooming stations appear in the space dropdown.
   • Optionally set a Scheduled Drop-off Time. Once a drop-off time is set, Goodstay reserves the station for the appointment's full duration (the combined length of its services); the estimated pickup time shows on the Grooming Calendar. You can still set an explicit Scheduled Pick-up Time to override the estimate.
4. Optionally assign an Assigned Groomer from your staff list (see Groomer Assignment below). The field appears once your facility has staff.
5. Click Create Reservation.
6. After creation, add specific grooming services from the reservation detail page.

Tip: You can also create grooming appointments from the Grooming Schedule page by clicking New Appointment.

Grooming Appointment Status Flow

Grooming appointments follow a 5-step workflow that tracks the pet from drop-off to pickup:

Each status transition records a timestamp. The "In Progress" and "Complete" steps are optional — facilities that don't need that level of detail can go directly from Check In to Check Out.

Groomer Assignment

For facilities with multiple groomers, you can assign a specific staff member to each grooming appointment.

• On the reservation form, select a Groomer from the staff dropdown.
• The assigned groomer appears on the reservation detail page and on the Grooming Schedule.
• Filter the Grooming Schedule with the groomer pill row (All, plus each staff member's name) to see one groomer's appointments.
• Groomer assignment is optional — single-groomer shops can skip it.

Daily Grooming Schedule

The Grooming Schedule is your groomer's home screen — the page they open every morning. Access it from Grooming in the sidebar navigation.

What You'll See

• All grooming appointments for the selected date, grouped by grooming station
• Each appointment card shows: pet name, breed, owner name, services requested, groomer assigned, drop-off time, and an elapsed timer once grooming starts
• Appointments are grouped by status within each station; read-only stat pills count Expected, Checked In, In Progress, and Complete
• A stats bar at the top shows total appointments and capacity
• Date navigation arrows to move between days

Quick Actions

• Click Check In, Start Grooming, Complete Grooming, or Picked Up directly from the schedule cards
• Click New Appointment to create a grooming reservation for the current date

PDF Download

Click the PDF button to open the day's schedule as a PDF in a new tab (grooming-schedule-YYYY-MM-DD.pdf). It includes total appointments, status counters (expected, in-progress, complete, picked up), and appointments grouped by station in landscape orientation.

Staff Calendar

The Staff Calendar shows the day's grooming appointments organized by staff member rather than by station. This is useful for multi-groomer facilities where you need to see each groomer's workload.

• From the Grooming Schedule page, use the Daily / Weekly / Staff view toggle and pick Staff, or navigate directly to /grooming_staff_calendar.
• Each staff member is listed with their assigned appointments, showing pet name, services, status, and scheduled time.
• Use date navigation arrows and a Jump to Date picker to view any day.

If no team members have been added to your facility, the Staff Calendar displays a prompt to add staff first.

Grooming Appointment Calendar

The Grooming Calendar is the weekly view: stations run down the side, and the seven days of the week run across the top (weeks start Sunday).

• Each day cell carries its own vertical timeline following your configured grooming hours (8 AM–6 PM by default); appointments are blocks positioned by drop-off time and sized to duration, so you can see at a glance how the week fills up and where the gaps are.
• When two appointments at the same station overlap, they're laid out side-by-side so nothing is hidden behind another block.
• Each block shows the pet name and time range, with a status dot — and a live elapsed timer once grooming starts. Click any block to open the reservation.
• A "Set time" flag (amber, dashed border) appears for any appointment that has no drop-off time yet. These don't occupy a slot on the timeline until you give them a time — a quick reminder to schedule them.
• Capacity for each station ("Cap: N") is shown so you can tell when a station is full.

Reach it from the Weekly segment of the grooming view toggle, or the Grooming tab on the Availability page. This is the "at-a-glance" scheduling view for planning your grooming week.

Grooming Hours & Time Slots

Appointment time slots — in the public booking wizard, the customer portal, and the weekly calendar — are generated from your facility's grooming hours:

• Opening hour and closing hour (default 8 AM – 6 PM)
• Slot length of 15, 30, or 60 minutes (default 30)

Configure them in Facility Settings → General, under the Grooming Schedule card. Changing the hours immediately changes which slots are offered everywhere; existing appointments keep their times.

Several dogs from the public page: a client booking two or more dogs for grooming on your public page gets back-to-back appointments — each dog starts when the previous one's services finish, and a slot is only offered if every dog in the run can start before closing. See Several Dogs for Daycare or Grooming.

Public Grooming Catalog

You can publish a public grooming menu page at yoursubdomain.goodstay.pet/grooming. This page auto-generates from your active grooming services and shows:

• Service names, descriptions, prices, and durations
• Services grouped by species (Dogs, Cats, All Pets)
• A Book Now button linking to the online booking page with grooming pre-selected

The catalog page publishes automatically when your public landing page is on and you have at least one active grooming service.

Tip: Share the grooming catalog link on your social media and website to drive online bookings.

How Clients Book a Time

When a client books grooming online, the wizard now walks them through real availability rather than a generic request:

1. Pick a date and time slot. The wizard shows only the genuinely-open slots within your configured grooming hours — full slots simply don't appear.
2. Select services. In the customer portal only species-eligible services are offered; on the public page, ineligible services are dropped at submission.
3. Confirm. Goodstay automatically assigns a free grooming station for that time — the client never picks a station. If no station is free, the booking is refused with "No grooming stations available on that date."

Requests from a request-only facility arrive without a station — the client names a preferred time, and your staff assign the station when confirming.

Grooming Appointment Reminders

Goodstay can automatically send reminders — email and, when SMS is on, text — the evening before grooming appointments (7:00 PM). The message includes the pet name, appointment date and drop-off time, the services booked, the assigned groomer, and your facility name and phone number. Only confirmed appointments are reminded — a pending grooming request gets no reminder email or text until your team confirms it.

To enable or disable grooming reminders, use the Grooming reminders toggle in Settings → Notifications → Customer Notifications (Email Automations panel).

See Notifications & Emails for more details.

Add-On Services (Reservation Services)

Individual services can be attached to any reservation — the service's Category decides where: grooming appointments offer Grooming/Both services, boarding and daycare stays offer Boarding add-on/Both. These appear on the invoice and can have their own lifecycle.

Adding a Service to a Reservation

1. Open a reservation's detail page.
2. Under Add-on Services, click Add Service.
3. Select a service from your menu. Price auto-fills.
4. Set the Quantity if the pet is getting the service more than once (e.g., two massages across a five-night board).
5. Click Add.

You can also attach add-ons — with quantities — while creating the reservation; the add-on picker on the reservation form has the same Qty input.

Customers can pick add-ons too: at public booking and from the customer portal on any upcoming or in-house stay. Those arrive as Requested for your team to confirm.

You can add the same service multiple times to a single reservation — for example, two separate nail trims on different days, or the same service at different price points.

Quantities & Billing

Each attached service bills at price × quantity when the stay is invoiced — and this works on every reservation type, not just grooming: boarding and daycare stays list add-ons as "Add-on — pet: service" line items on the invoice, grooming appointments as "Grooming — pet: service".

To raise or lower an existing service's quantity, edit the reservation and adjust the picker. Lines already marked Completed are locked — they may already be billed, so their quantity can't be rewritten.

Service Statuses

Use the icon buttons on the reservation service — Confirm, Mark complete, Cancel, or Remove — to update or drop it.