Run and kennel scheduling
A live capacity board across every run, kennel, suite, or cattery unit — arrivals, departures, and length-of-stay in one view instead of a paper board or a spreadsheet.
Boarding & Grooming service
Kennel management that talks to a real vet chart
Vivetra Boarding & Grooming runs the day-to-day of a boarding and grooming facility — runs, kennels, suites, or cattery units, arrivals and departures, vaccination checks, grooming appointments, and billing — on the same shared-core deployment as the rest of Vivetra, with a client portal your owners use themselves. For a facility that also does medical work, that shared foundation means a boarded pet's aftercare never has to start from a phone call or a hand-typed summary; it starts from the chart that's already there.
$200/mo as your first service — unlimited staff and fully managed hosting included, not a footnote. +$50/mo if added to an existing Vivetra deployment.
What it covers
Vaccination compliance warnings
Check-in flags a lapsed vaccination record with a clear warning staff can acknowledge and override — your team is never silently blocked at the door — using the same patient record the medical side of the deployment already keeps, so there's no second card system to keep in sync. The gate on an owner's own online booking is separately configurable, and there you can make a lapsed vaccine a hard stop if that's your policy.
Owner communication log
Every note, photo, and update sent to an owner during a stay lives on that pet's record permanently, so the next front-desk shift (or the next stay, months later) isn't starting from zero.
Multi-pet, multi-service billing
One invoice for a family boarding three dogs with add-on grooming and daycare days, itemized by pet and by service, without hand-assembling it from separate tickets.
Grooming, tracked as its own service
Grooming appointments, the style and preferences a groomer actually used last time, and a report card with photos at the end of the appointment — kept on the pet's record, so the next visit starts from what worked instead of from the owner's description of it.
Prepaid packages and account credit
Sell daycare packages and prepaid blocks up front, and the balance sits on the client's account as real credit — pooled across a household, expiring on the batch you set, and applied to the next bill by default (staff can opt a client out on their portal billing screen). Every grant, spend, and void is an append-only ledger entry, so "how many days do I have left?" has one answer your staff and the owner can both see.
Staff-wide visibility, unlimited seats
Front desk, kennel techs, and the practice's medical staff all work off the same deployment at no extra per-seat cost — add staff as you grow without a pricing conversation.
What your clients see
Owners get their own portal — which means the answer to “are her vaccines up to date, and can I get her in over the long weekend?” stops being a phone call your front desk takes for the fourth time that morning.
Online booking, your way — request-and-approve or real-time
By default an owner picks dates and services and submits a request: it lands in your queue and a staff member approves it before it becomes a booking, so nothing puts itself in one of your runs behind your back. Flip the switch on your booking-rules screen and the same owner can book in real time instead — against your live capacity, holding an actual slot for fifteen minutes (configurable per practice) until they confirm it by emailed link or code. Boarding and grooming are separate switches. Either way, regulars can set a stay to recur, so the Tuesday-and-Thursday daycare dog isn’t re-requested every single week.
Pet profiles and a vaccine gate you configure
Owners keep their own pets’ details current and can see exactly which vaccines are in date and which aren’t. You decide what a lapsed vaccine does to a booking request — hard block, or warn your staff and let them judge it. It’s your policy; we just enforce whichever one you picked.
Deposits, saved cards, and paying online
Connect your facility’s own Stripe account and owners can put down a deposit when they request a stay, settle the balance from the portal, and keep a card on file for next time. The Stripe account is yours — your facility keeps its own Stripe relationship and its own processing rates, with a small Vivetra platform fee on top of Stripe’s own rate.
Pre-arrival prep, so drop-off is just drop-off
Before the stay, an owner works through vaccine status, e-signs your boarding agreement and any forms you require, and confirms the belongings coming along. Arrival itself is still a staff act at your door — your team greets the pet and checks it in, the way it always has. This just means the paperwork isn’t happening at the counter with a leashed dog and a line behind it.
Stay updates the owner actually gets
Notes and photos sent during a stay show up in the owner’s portal and stay on the pet’s record afterward — not scattered across a staff member’s text messages.
Grooming report cards, with photos
A finished groom comes back to the owner as a report card with photos, alongside the style and preferences the groomer used. The next appointment starts from what actually worked, not from “the same as last time, I think?”
The bridge Vivetra is built around
Boarding software in general is a crowded, mature market. Vivetra's angle on it is a boarding product built on the same record as a genuine veterinary chart. Boarding & Grooming's aftercare bridge means a pet recovering from surgery, on a medication schedule, or flagged for a recheck is tracked by the same shared-core patient record your practice's medical staff already use, not a second system that has to be manually reconciled with the first. That combination — real kennel operations plus a real medical record underneath it — is the sharpest differentiator across everything Vivetra builds.
Worth knowing before you sign up
- Real-time booking is off until you turn it on. Out of the box, online booking is request-and-approve: every submission lands in a staff queue and someone at your facility says yes before it becomes a real booking. Most operators we've talked to want exactly that, so it's the default. If you'd rather let owners book themselves — the way PetExec's Owner Portal lets clients book boarding themselves — that's a switch on your own Online Booking Rules screen, separately for boarding and for grooming. It's genuinely off by default, and it needs email sending configured on your deployment before it will serve anyone, because a self-booked slot is only held for fifteen minutes (configurable per practice) until the owner confirms it.
- You bring your own Stripe account. Online deposits and payments run through your facility's own Stripe account, which you connect yourself — so your Stripe relationship and your processing rates stay yours, with a small Vivetra platform fee on top of Stripe's own rate. Vivetra never becomes your processor. If you'd rather not use Stripe at all, the rest of the portal still works fine; the payment pieces just stay switched off.
For context on where the category currently sits: Gingr's own published pricing page puts its Stay (boarding) plan at $154–209/mo, depending on annual vs. monthly billing and whether you use its integrated payments; Kennel Connection offers two real deployment options by its own FAQ — an on-prem "Desktop" product and a fully-hosted "Cloud" product; Revelation Pets publishes two flat plans, Silver at $60/mo and Gold at $77/mo (or $605 and $770 a year); and PetExec announced in November 2024 that it had been acquired by Togetherwork, joining Gingr and Revelation Pets in Togetherwork's Pet Care Product Group.
See the full boarding comparison for every sourced figure and how Vivetra stacks up feature by feature.
Ready to see it against your own facility?
Tell us your country, your current unit count, and whether you're also running a medical service, and we'll walk through the exact monthly number.
Boarding & Grooming questions, answered
How does the medical-aftercare bridge actually work?
A pet checked in for boarding shares the same patient record your practice's medical services use. If that pet needs aftercare — a post-surgical stay, medication given on a schedule, a wound recheck — the boarding side and the chart are already looking at the same history, the same current medications, and the same notes. Nobody re-types a summary over the phone or re-enters a medication list by hand.
Can owners book online through Vivetra Boarding & Grooming?
Yes, and you decide how. The default is request-and-approve: an owner picks dates and services in the client portal and submits a booking request, it arrives in your queue, and a staff member approves it before it becomes a real booking — nothing books itself into one of your runs. If you'd rather let owners book in real time, that's a switch on your own Online Booking Rules screen, with separate toggles for boarding stays and grooming appointments. With it on, the owner books against your live capacity and holds an actual slot for fifteen minutes (configurable per practice) until they confirm it by emailed link or typed code. Vaccine status is checked either way, and you decide whether a lapsed vaccine blocks the booking outright or just warns your staff — that's a setting on your side, not our opinion about your policy.
Does Vivetra Boarding & Grooming handle payments from my clients?
Yes, through your own Stripe account. You connect it yourself, and then owners can pay a deposit when they request a stay, settle the balance from the portal, and keep a card on file for next time. The Stripe account is yours — your facility keeps its own Stripe relationship and its own processing rates, with a small Vivetra platform fee on top of Stripe's own rate. Vivetra never becomes your processor and never stands between you and your money. (That's separate from the checkout on this site, which is how you pay your own Vivetra subscription.)
Do I need the Vet Practice service too, or does Boarding & Grooming stand alone?
Boarding & Grooming runs on the same shared-core deployment as every other service, so it works whether or not you've also turned on Vet Practice or Hospital. The aftercare bridge described above only becomes a genuine day-to-day advantage once a medical service is active on the same deployment — a pure boarding-and-grooming operation still gets the full feature set, client portal included, on its own.
How does the price work if Boarding & Grooming is my first service?
Boarding & Grooming at $200/mo covers shared-core plus the service itself, unlimited staff, and fully managed hosting — the whole thing, not a starting price. Adding it to a deployment that already has another service running costs +$50/mo instead, on the same bill.