How to choose pet grooming software in Australia
Most of the products you'll look at were built somewhere else and priced in someone else's currency. This is the list of things to check before any of them gets your client list. We make one of these products, and this guide says where ours fits and where it doesn't.
What you are actually buying
Strip the feature lists back and every grooming product is five things. A booking page clients use without ringing you. A calendar the groomers work from. A record of each client and, more importantly, each pet. A way to take money, including before the appointment. And the reminders that stop the money walking out the door.
Everything else is a feature on top of those five, and features are cheap to list. Judge the product on how well it does the five, on your phone, for the dog that is actually coming in.
The single most useful thing you can do on a demo is book yourself in as a client, on a phone, for a large long-coated dog, and see what happens. If the price is wrong, the slot is wrong, or it asks the client to pick a groomer they've never met, you've learned more than the feature list will ever tell you.
The Australian questions no demo covers
None of these is on the pricing page. All of them end up on the invoice.
Is the price in Australian dollars?
A surprising amount of grooming software is priced in US dollars and shows a converted figure, or no figure at all, to an Australian visitor. You pay the exchange rate, the card's foreign transaction fee, and whatever the rate does next year. Ask for the price in AUD, and ask whether GST is included or added.
What do reminders actually cost?
SMS is where quiet money goes. Most products include an allowance and charge per message segment after it, and a reminder plus a confirmation plus a payment link is three messages per booking. Get the per-segment price in writing and multiply by your monthly bookings.
Who takes the card payment, at what rate?
The processor and the rate for an Australian-issued card decide more of your margin than the subscription does. Find out who it is, whether the money lands in your account or in the platform's, and how long it takes to get there.
When do reminders go out, and in whose time zone?
A reminder sent at a sensible hour in Sydney is sent at 4am in a product whose defaults were set elsewhere. Small thing, until a client complains about it.
Who answers, and when?
Support that opens when your day ends is support you do not have. Ask where the team is and what hours a person, not a bot, responds.
Who owns your client list
Your clients, their pets, and every visit you've recorded are the business. The software is where they live for now. Before you put them anywhere, find out how they come out: on demand, in a file another system can read, with the pets and the history attached, without a support ticket. Then try it.
Check the other direction too. If you have clients in a spreadsheet, a paper book, or another product, a system that can import them with their history means you start with your business rather than a blank page. One that can't means retyping, and retyping is why so many salons never actually switch.
Read the terms for the words "our clients" or anything that lets the platform contact your clients on its own behalf. A directory that brings you new business is worth having. One that treats the relationship as its own is not.
Four ways the price on the page is not the price
Per location, per van, per staff seat
Some products charge for each shop, each van, or each bookable person. The plan that looks cheapest for one groomer becomes the dearest the day you hire. Price it for the business you'll have in a year, not the one you have today.
A cut of the clients who find you
Marketplace-style platforms list you in their directory and charge a commission on the bookings that come from it. That can be a fair trade for genuinely new clients. It is a bad one if it also applies to people who were always going to find you, or if the marketplace keeps the relationship.
Your client list, held hostage
The most expensive feature is the one that stops you leaving. If export is a support ticket, a paid add-on, or a PDF, assume it is designed that way.
Add-on modules for the basics
Deposits, reminders, online booking and reports are the product, not extras. A base plan that needs three modules to take a paid booking is not the price on the pricing page.
Does it price the way you quote?
This is the one that separates grooming software from everything else. You do not charge one price for a full groom. You charge by size, or by coat, or by breed, and the matted doodle is a different job from the short-haired Lab of the same weight. The software has to know that at the moment the client books, or you'll spend your life saying "that's not the price you were quoted" at the counter.
Look for price tiers you can define however you actually quote — weight bands, coat length, breed group, or just a name — add-ons the client can pick at booking, a deposit taken before the slot is held, and a no-show that keeps the deposit in one tap rather than a phone call.
- Price tiers by weight, coat or breed, on the same service
- Add-ons offered at booking, not remembered at the counter
- A deposit or full payment taken before the slot is confirmed
- A no-show flag on the owner, and one-tap deposit retention
- A profile for the pet — photos, matting notes, temperament — not just the owner
Ten questions to ask on the demo
Ask them of everyone, including us. A vendor who answers all ten plainly is one you can work with. A vendor who answers eight is telling you which two to worry about.
- 1Show me the booking page a client sees, on a phone. Can I try booking a large dog right now?
- 2Is the price in Australian dollars, and is GST shown or added?
- 3What does an SMS reminder cost me after the included ones run out?
- 4Who processes the card payment, and what is the rate on an Australian card?
- 5Can I export my full client list, with pets and history, today, without asking you?
- 6Can I bring my existing clients and their appointment history in, and see it before it's written?
- 7Can I price by weight, by coat, and by breed — on the same service?
- 8When a client no-shows, how many taps to keep the deposit?
- 9If I open a second location, or add a van, what changes on the bill?
- 10Where are you, what hours do you answer, and is it a person?
Where My Pet Groomer fits, and where it doesn't
We build grooming software in Melbourne, priced in Australian dollars with GST shown, for salons, mobile groomers and multi-location businesses. Bookings, breed-and-weight pricing, deposits, reminders, pet records, a public page per location, and an import that brings your clients and their history across with a preview first and an undo after. Our starting prices are on the pricing page, and the ten questions above are fair to ask us.
It does not do boarding or daycare, and it does not plan a mobile groomer's route. If either of those is the centre of your business, you want a different product, and we would rather say so here than on the demo.
Questions people ask before choosing
Roughly $20 to $250 a month, and the sticker price is the least useful number. Add what you'll actually pay: per-staff or per-location charges, SMS beyond the included allowance, card-processing rates, and any commission a platform takes on clients who find you through it. Two products at the same headline price can be $100 a month apart once a second groomer and a busy reminder schedule are on the bill.
Ask us the ten questions.
Book a demo, bring the list, and we'll set up your own menu while you watch.