I've often been tempted to look into dedicated software for dog walking/pet sitting, but my main worry has always been: what if I build up a reliance on this software, only to find that it stops being supported somewhere down the line? What then if I have problems with it? What if it has problems with a new operating system and there is nobody to offer a fix? And schedule/client info should also be available on my phone too, what if there is no corresponding phone app to go with it?

To be honest I know a dedicated system would save me time, but I have over the years developed a pretty good system. I would be interested to know how others do it, but mine is:

For the scheduling itself, I use Microsoft Outlook. I have one calendar per employee and all of the regular clients are set up as recurring appointments, to which I can make exceptions for cancellations etc. All other appointments are entered manually. I find Outlook makes it really easy to set up and edit schedules and I love the interface. For the price of the job, I enter a number into the "location" field of the appointment. A hack, yes, but it works very well for me.

For the accounts, I use Quickbooks. Don't get me started on the various problems and annoying bugs, but on the whole it serves me very well and I do my whole employee payroll on there too.

To process the information with which to create the invoices for Quickbooks, I wrote a program in C which parses a file containing exported calendar data for all of my employees, tallies up all of the walks for each dog by price, and displays a neat summary for each dog telling me how many of each price of walk they've had. From this display, it's a breeze to enter the invoice information into Quickbooks. I'm sure if I had more programming know-how I'd be able to automate this process too, but there you go. The invoices are emailed to the clients as PDF documents.

Exporting Outlook calendar data is a pain and often buggy, so what I do is I sync all of my Outlook calendars with Google calendars using their paid Google Apps sync tool (the free one doesn't work so well). Once it's synced with Google, I use an online app called GTimeReport in order to export the calendar data quickly and easily. Once I have this data in a file I can process it with my C program.

My calendars are synced to my Blackberry via a calendar app called Pocket Informant which is awesome and also available for iPhone. Using this, I can view and edit schedules on the fly wherever I am.

So there you have it...sounds ridiculously long winded I know but in practice it works great and the best thing is, the most important parts of it, Outlook and Quickbooks, are very well established programs with guaranteed ongoing support. I'd be interested to know how confident you are that any bespoke software would be guaranteed to be supported for the life of your business, because of course it's every dog walking company owner's dream to have an all-in-one solution, lol!

hey, thx for the post and here are some thoughts:

what if I build up a reliance on this software, only to find that it
stops being supported somewhere down the line? What then if I have
problems with it? What if it has problems with a new operating system
and there is nobody to offer a fix? And schedule/client info should also
be available on my phone too, what if there is no corresponding phone
app to go with it?

Good question. My idea is to make a software in a collaborative effort for our own benefit. But the added benefit is that we can then license the software to others ourselves to make a little money off it too. With that said there would always be a coder involved with the project who would keep it inline/fix problems but of course we would have a backup plan in case too if the system went down.

Regarding your system with outlook and quickbooks

That's awesome and impressive you're doing hacks yourself, nice one. I have online scheduling forms and a mobile web app that my clients submit schedules from. I confirm a schedule when I receive it and then don't look at it again until the date arrives (on August 22nd 2011 I search for "august 22 2011" in my email program and all schedule forms appear). I used to use iCal for text reminders to walkers phone re: scheduling events but I found it can be buggy and/or information arrives that takes precedence.

Quickbooks is awesome and I'm not sure I'd want to replace it but rather have something that processes billing/payroll easily and syncs with Quickbooks.

I'll post snapshots of my idea and I think you'll see it could be an amazing system for clients, employees and you the owner/office. It would literally be like having a part-time assistant without having to pay for one (^_^) and could provide as much reliability if not more than our present systems (email can go down too, etc)...

@Josh, how complex your software would be? I assume it must connect info on the mobile and the computer. I have somebody who can do a simple software and we have been talking about it for sometime, I just dont have a game plan and direction to give the person so its been very slow process. What we need is a great tool where the client fill out the short form about added or cancelled walk either on website or on the application, and it goes straight to the handler's schedule (after you confirm) and then to the invoice. Of course tracking employees would be great where they sign in as in 4square. Anything else you have in mind?

Hello,,new here and first post.

First, I was surprised to not find this subject covered more in your book.

Was just wondering how old this post is. There are several commercial web based applications floating around that I have found, just by searching the web.

Reply to @albert:

Welcome to the forum Albert. Well we've discussed in more detail in other posts what we feel is greatly lacking in existing software's out there and actually I still recommend individual options vs. an all in one pet industry specific software etc. That's why I recommend Quickbooks for accounting, Google Calendar or iCal for an online calendar, etc.

You can check out the following post to discuss things you and others might like to see in a software:

http://petsitterbible.com/forum/discussion/comment/297#Comment_297

thanks!