Setting up boarding and daycare

Sidebar: Business Settings → Facility Settings.

Nothing about boarding or daycare works until capacity exists. Your business type does not decide this — a business registered as a kennel with no capacity configured cannot take a single reservation, and a groomer who adds capacity starts offering boarding immediately.

Capacity groups

A capacity group is a set of spaces you can fill, and each one is marked as boarding, daycare or both.

Think in terms of what you actually sell:

• A kennel with 20 runs and a separate cat room has two groups.
• A daycare with one big playroom that holds 30 dogs has one.
• A business doing both overnight boarding and daytime daycare in the same runs has one group marked for both.

Each group has a limit. That limit is what stops you being overbooked, so it should be the number you can genuinely handle on a normal day, not the theoretical maximum.

Boarding rooms

Rooms are the individual named spaces inside a group — Run 1 to Run 20, Cat Condo A, and so on. These are what you assign a specific pet to on the Kennel Board.

Rooms are optional if you only care about totals. If you assign pets to particular spaces, or you need to know which run a dog is in when the owner rings, set them up.

Boarding and daycare together

Mark a group for both types when the same physical spaces serve both. Alaga then counts a daycare dog and a boarding dog against the same limit, which is what you want — a run holding an overnight guest is not available for daycare.

Use separate groups when the spaces genuinely are separate.

Rates

Rates are not here. Boarding and daycare pricing lives on the Pricing page with everything else you charge for, so all your money is in one place. Facility Settings is only about physical space.

Once capacity exists

• Clients can book boarding and daycare through your portal.
• The Occupancy Calendar starts showing how full you are.
• The Kennel Board has somewhere to put pets.
• Reservations can be created from the dashboard.

Checking it worked

Open your booking address in a private browsing window and confirm boarding or daycare now appears as an option. If it does not, the capacity group is either inactive or not marked for that type.

Getting the limit right

Start conservative. A group set to 20 when you comfortably handle 15 will let you take bookings you regret over a bank holiday, and turning work away later is harder than accepting more now. You can raise it any time.