Your Scheduling Book Is Holding You Back. There’s a Better Way to Fill Your Day.

BarkBook's visual scheduling calendar gives you four ways to look at your day, your week, and your month — and every single one is designed for how grooming salons actually operate.

Day view lays out groomer-specific columns with 15-minute time slots. If you have three groomers working, you see three columns. Every appointment, every gap, every time-off block — visible at a glance. No flipping pages, no cross-referencing sticky notes. You look at the screen and you know exactly who's doing what, when, and where there's room.

Week view lets you zoom out and see the whole week with groomer filtering, so you can plan ahead instead of reacting to whatever today throws at you. Spot the light days. See where you have room for walk-ins. Notice that Thursday is stacked while Wednesday has gaps.

Month view shows daily appointment counts so you can see the big picture — which weeks are booked solid, which ones need filling, and when you should stop taking new bookings.

Agenda view is your power search. Filter by date range, groomer, or appointment status. Search for a specific client. Paginate through results. When a client calls and asks "when was Biscuit's last appointment?" you have the answer in seconds, not minutes of flipping through your scheduling book.

And here's where it gets good: drag-and-drop rescheduling. A client calls to move from Tuesday to Thursday? Grab the appointment, drag it to the new slot, done. Made a mistake? Undo it. No erasing, no crossing out, no rewriting. Just move it.

When you click an empty slot on the calendar, BarkBook starts a new booking pre-filled with the date, time, and groomer — because why would you type what you just clicked? And if a groomer has time off scheduled, you'll see it right on the day view, so you never accidentally book over someone's vacation day.

When the phone rings, every second counts. BarkBook's smart booking is grooming appointment scheduling stripped down to what actually matters and nothing that doesn't.

Start typing a client's name and autocomplete pulls up the match instantly — search by name and find the whole household. Select the client, and you immediately see their pets. Pick one pet or pick three — BarkBook handles multi-pet appointments.

Here's what you see while you're booking, right there on the same screen: the pet profile summary showing breed, size, coat type, temperament flags, and any special instructions the last groomer left. That mystery appointment? Gone. You know exactly what's walking through your door before they get there.

Select one or more services, and BarkBook automatically calculates the price and duration based on the pet's size, coat length, and season. That new client with the matted Labradoodle? The system adjusts for coat condition. A regular whose Poodle always takes an extra 15 minutes? Per-pet duration overrides are applied automatically. You're not guessing anymore.

While you're picking a time, the groomer availability indicator shows you who's available, who has a gap that could work, and who's busy. No more flipping between pages to check. And if you accidentally try to book into a conflict, real-time conflict warnings stop you before you make the mistake — not after a client shows up to a double-booked slot.

Before you hit confirm, an appointment summary sidebar shows you everything: client, pets, services, duration, price, groomer, and time. One final glance, one click, done. That's smart scheduling for dog grooming — not a six-click obstacle course.

An appointment isn't just "booked" or "done." In a grooming salon, it moves through stages, and everyone — you, your bather, your front desk — needs to know which stage it's in right now.

BarkBook tracks seven appointment statuses: Scheduled, Confirmed, In Progress, Completed, Checked Out, Cancelled, and No-Show. Each appointment has a visual progress tracker on its detail page so the status is obvious at a glance.

Update statuses directly from your dashboard with quick-action buttons — no digging through menus. And at each stage, automatic notifications go out to the client. Booking confirmed? They get a confirmation. Dog's ready? They get a ready-for-pickup message. Appointment cancelled? They're notified immediately. After checkout? A thank-you goes out.

You stop being the person who has to remember to text every client at every step. BarkBook does it. You groom dogs.

This is the one that changes your revenue. A regular cancels their Tuesday 10 AM — a 90-minute slot that's now dead time. With a paper planner, you'd start scrolling through your phone trying to remember who mentioned wanting an earlier appointment. With most dog grooming appointment software, you'd manually search through a list.

BarkBook's smart cancellation workflow gives you four options the moment a cancellation happens:

1. Reschedule to a system-suggested slot — BarkBook looks at your calendar and recommends the best available time based on your remaining availability
2. Manual reschedule with a custom date and time if the client has a preference
3. Cancel outright if the client is done
4. Cancel and auto-fill from your waitlist — this is the one that pays for itself

When you choose auto-fill, BarkBook matches waitlist entries against the cancelled slot and suggests the best fits. A client who wanted a Tuesday morning appointment for a medium-sized dog bath? They're at the top of the list. Ranked by preference match quality, so the best fit comes first.

You toggle whether the cancelling client gets a notification, confirm the waitlist fill, and your dead slot is someone else's appointment. The gap that would have cost you $80 or $120 is filled before you finish your coffee.

Most groomers keep a mental waitlist. Maybe a few names on a sticky note. BarkBook turns that into a real system that fills gaps without you having to think about it.

Add pets to the waitlist with their service, preferred days, time range, and notes. Filter your waitlist by service. Mark entries as contacted so you don't call the same person twice. Every waitlist entry moves through five clear statuses: Active, Contacted, Fulfilled, Cancelled, or Expired.

The part that saves you time: BarkBook's automatic slot finder continuously matches waitlist preferences against your availability. When a slot opens that matches someone's preferences, it's flagged. You're not scrolling through a list trying to remember who wanted what. The system does the matching, and you do the booking with one click.

You go from "I know someone wanted this slot but I can't remember who" to "here are three people ranked by how well this slot matches what they asked for." That's the difference between a sticky note and scheduling software for dog grooming that actually respects your time.

Double-booking isn't just embarrassing — it costs you trust, time, and money. BarkBook's conflict detection catches four types of scheduling problems before they become real problems:

• Overlap detection — two appointments in the same slot for the same groomer
• Time-off conflicts — trying to book over a groomer's vacation or day off
• Outside working hours — scheduling beyond your salon's operating hours
• Missing schedule definitions — a groomer whose weekly schedule hasn't been set up yet

BarkBook separates hard conflicts from warnings. A direct overlap is a hard conflict — it blocks the booking and tells you why. An appointment that runs close to closing time is a warning — you see it, you decide. And if you need to override in special circumstances, schedule override support lets you make the call.

This isn't a feature you think about. It runs in the background every time you book, reschedule, or drag an appointment to a new slot. It's the reason you stop saying "I'm so sorry, I double-booked you" and start saying "I'm booked solid, but let me check the waitlist."

Thanksgiving. Christmas. That week in February you finally take a vacation. Your groomer's kid's school play on a random Wednesday.

BarkBook's business closed days let you block entire days — or stretches of days with multi-day support — so nothing gets booked. Set annual recurrence for holidays you close for every year, and it's done once, forever. No more accidentally booking someone on New Year's Day because you forgot to block it in your paper planner.