Frequently asked questions

No. Card payments go straight into your own Stripe or Square account, and Dogly takes no commission. Stripe or Square charge you their normal processing fees, and your Dogly subscription is separate from that.

There is no free plan, but there is a 30-day free trial and you do not need a card to start it. After the trial it is $75 CAD a month, or $750 CAD a year (two months free). No tax is added to the price. It is one plan with everything included, no setup fee, and no extra charge for more dogs, staff or locations.

No. You can cancel any time from your billing page. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and the current period is not refunded.

We email you 7 days and 1 day before it ends. If you have not added a payment method by then, your public booking site shows a holding page until you subscribe. You can still sign in to your dashboard.

We do not set limits on customers, dogs, bookings or staff logins, and there is no per-location charge.

Yes, any time. The owner can download everything as a zip: customers, dogs, bookings, photos and vaccination files. If you want your data deleted, tell us and we do it by hand. Backups expire within about 14 days.

Yes, it is included. Add your domain in Settings and we show you the DNS records to create: a verification record and the pointer to Dogly. We check every 15 minutes, and once it is verified we set up the SSL certificate automatically. You can also send booking emails from your own address, which needs a few extra DNS records.

Not on your public site or in the emails your customers receive. Your own staff dashboard shows a small "Powered by Dogly" mark that customers never see. There is no white-label fee.

Pick from 9 templates and 16 colour themes, then set your own logo, colours, fonts and hero photo. You write the text on your Home, About, Services, Gallery, Reviews and Contact pages (plus the optional First Visit, Team and Webcams pages) yourself, with a toolbar for bold, links, lists, headings and photos, and you can add text above and below the content on each page. Your blog uses the same editor. The layouts are fixed, so it is not a drag-and-drop page builder, and you cannot add extra custom pages.

You can import your customers and dogs from a spreadsheet, so you do not start from scratch. Upload it from the Customers page (Import from a spreadsheet) as an Excel file (.xlsx) or a CSV file; only the first sheet is read. Column names like Owner, E-mail, Cell, Pet Name, Breed and Rabies Expiry are understood in any order, you see a preview before anything is saved, and importing twice never makes duplicates. It handles up to 5,000 rows, and booking history is not imported.

Signing up creates your account and a working site address straight away, with sample dogs and customers you can explore and clear in one click. How long the rest takes depends on how much you set up, such as your services, prices and payments.

Yes. The demo is a real, working kennel dashboard with sample data, and you do not need to sign up. It asks for a shared password, which is shown on the page, and its data resets several times a day.

Yes. Customers create an account (email and password, or Google), add their dogs, book online and pay by card. They sign your liability waiver once, and they sign again whenever you issue a new version. Customers can also pay by e-Transfer or in person if you allow it, and your staff mark those as paid.

No. The site works in any browser, and staff or customers can add it to their phone or tablet home screen so it opens like an app. It is a web app, so there is nothing to publish to an app store and it does not work offline.

All three. Boarding is priced per night, daycare per day (full or half), and grooming is one price per appointment with time slots you set. Boarding and daycare share your nightly capacity unless you switch on separate capacity pools, for example for large and small runs. If you also offer training or pet-sitting, switch on Training & Pet-Sitting Services in Features. Training is booked like grooming: the customer picks a day and one of the times you set, at a price per session. Pet-sitting is booked as a first and last day at a price per day, and it does not use your boarding spots.

Book and pay, add their dogs, repeat a booking weekly, every 2 weeks or monthly (if you switch on Recurring Bookings), save a card for next time (Stripe only, if you switch that on), join a waitlist for a full date, cancel within the window you set (48 hours by default), start a new booking from a past stay, message you, and leave a review that you approve before it shows.

Yes, for boarding and daycare. Customers join the waitlist for a full date and are emailed automatically when space opens up. We check every 30 minutes. Nothing is held for them, and the oldest request is told first.

Yes. You can add holiday prices that repeat every year, extra charges for bigger dogs, long-stay and second-dog discounts, packages (like a 10-day pass), and deposits. Packages and deposits are off until you switch them on. Deposits are taken on card bookings. Add-ons are a flat price per booking, and they work on grooming appointments too.

In part. You can run several locations under one account, one login and one price, with no per-location charge. Each service can belong to one location or all of them, and customers can filter by location when they book. In your dashboard you can look at Today, the calendar, bookings and reports one location at a time. Capacity is shared across all locations, and there is one website.

Each dog has a vaccination expiry date, notes and an optional uploaded record. By default, a booking is blocked if the date is missing or expired, and you can turn that off. We send one reminder email (and a text, if you use texting) about 14 days before it expires.

Temperament notes with a red, yellow or green flag, feeding and medication details, vet and emergency contacts, and your own staff notes. You can print run cards, pet cards, and day and week schedules, and keep a daily care checklist for each stay.

There are owner and staff accounts. The owner chooses, for each staff member, which actions they can do: take payments, cancel bookings, change opening hours and closed dates, see reports, export data, delete customers, issue refunds, edit the gallery, blog, newsletter and birthday messages, and manage reviews.

It tracks hours, it does not do payroll. Staff Time Tracking is an optional module you switch on in Settings, Features. Staff clock in and out, and the owner can set an hourly rate per person and a weekly overtime rule, then see hours, overtime hours and estimated gross wages for a pay period and download a CSV for an accountant or payroll service. There is no tax, CPP or EI, vacation pay or other deduction, nothing is paid out, and the wages are estimates only. Staff see only their own hours.

You connect your own Stripe or Square account, so money goes to you and your payouts follow your own account. Customers pay on a secure Stripe or Square checkout page that carries your logo and colours, and card wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay work on Stripe. Prices can be in Canadian or US dollars. On Stripe, if you switch it on, a customer can keep a card on file; the card is held by Stripe, never by Dogly or you. Square kennels do not get saved cards, so those customers enter their details each time.

Yes. Turn on e-Transfer or pay-in-person and customers see your instructions when they book. Your staff mark those bookings as paid when the money arrives. Dogly does not match e-Transfers automatically.

You can refund a booking in full or in part from the booking. Card refunds go back through Stripe or Square, and offline payments are recorded. You set how late customers can cancel for free and whether a late fee applies, which is a percentage of what was paid. Automatic refunds when a customer cancels are optional.

Yes. On the Reports page, the owner picks a start and end date and downloads a CSV with one row for each paid booking: booking number, date paid, customer, service, amount before tax, tax, deposit, balance, refunds, net, payment method and the card payment ID. Dates are in year-month-day form and amounts are plain numbers, so it opens in Excel and can be imported into QuickBooks or Xero. Bookings paid with a package credit and the sale of the packages themselves are not in it.

Partly, and by hand. On the Reports page the owner can download a file laid out for QuickBooks Online's sales receipt import, with one receipt per paid booking, a row for the service and one for each add-on, amounts before tax, the tax, the payment method and the booking number. You import it yourself in QuickBooks, there is no live connection or automatic sync, and refunds are noted in the Memo column rather than subtracted. Bookings paid with a package credit are left out.

You set one tax name, rate and registration number. Prices can include the tax or have it added on top. Receipts and invoices are produced as PDFs and show the tax line.

Welcome, booking confirmation, booking reminder, vaccination expiring, stay updates with photos, payment links, refunds and cancellations, waitlist openings, repeat booking confirmations, card receipts, failed card charge notices, newsletter sign-up confirmations, birthday greetings and password resets. An optional review request after a stay is available and off by default. You also get an alert when someone books. You can rewrite every email your customers receive in Settings, Customer emails, and send yourself a test first. The alerts that come to you, like a new booking, are fixed. Booking reminders go out for boarding, daycare, grooming, training and pet-sitting. See the sample emails.

Yes, if you turn it on. It is off by default. A few days after a stay ends (you choose how many, starting at 2), each customer gets one email with a link to the review form on your site, and a link to your Google review page if you add one. A booking is asked once, a customer is asked at most once every 30 days, and cancelled bookings and customers without an email address are skipped. You can rewrite the email in Settings, Customer emails.

Yes, through your own Twilio account, so you pay Twilio directly and Dogly adds no charge. You can turn on automatic texts for booking reminders, vaccination reminders and birthdays. Two-way texting and pay-by-text links are optional extras you switch on, and they need a little more Twilio setup.

Yes. Switch on Newsletter under Settings, then Features. Your site gets a sign-up form, and people confirm their subscription by email. Write a newsletter in the admin area, send yourself a test, then send it to everyone who confirmed. It goes out in small batches, comes from your kennel name, shows your address and contact details, and has an unsubscribe link on every email. It is meant for plain news and updates, not for very large lists.

Each kennel's data is kept separate from every other kennel's. The database is encrypted and copied off-site every hour and kept for 14 days, and photos and uploaded files are copied nightly. The servers are in Montreal, Canada. Owners and staff can turn on two-step sign-in with an authenticator app.

We would rather tell you now. Repeat bookings and saved cards are optional and stay off until you switch them on. A repeat booking covers up to 12 visits at a time for one dog, and saved cards work only with Stripe, not Square. There is no booking history import, and one tax rate per kennel. Pet-sitting has no daily limit on how many bookings you take, and training is one dog per session. Texts and screens are English only, prices are in Canadian or US dollars, and there is no App Store app. Capacity is shared across locations.

Use the support form in your dashboard, email [email protected] or call 902-932-7427. Your messages go to the person who wrote the software.

Plenty of kennels come to us from other software. The comparison on the home page shows how the pricing lines up, and you can import your customers and dogs from a spreadsheet so you do not start from scratch.