Uncollected payments, multi-page printed client questionnaires, and 12 barking dogs.
How Jolt Co. heeled C.A.T.S.' siloed intake, bookings, and payments into one user-friendly dog boarding/training/daycare platform — six platforms scored.
The challenge
A clipboard is not a system — it just feels like one while you're small. The moment a business grows, the manual way of working stops being charming and starts being the ceiling. The fix is not "buy software." It is choosing the right software by scoring it against the way you work. Here is how Canine Advanced Training Services, or C.A.T.S., did it.
C.A.T.S. ran boarding, daycare, and training out of a facility in Euless — on pen, paper, and a notebook.
The real problem was not any one tool. Five places each held part of the truth: the notebook, the class scheduler, QuickBooks, the owner's personal calendar, and two email inboxes absorbing everything else. Payments went uncollected. New clients filled out multi-page printed questionnaires by hand. The owner could not answer a simple question about the business without checking four places — and even then it was a guess.
Scope of work
We didn't start by shopping for software. We started by mapping every service C.A.T.S. sold against the tools touching it, using Jolt Co.'s Product Matrix Assessment — our proprietary worksheet for scoring technology platforms against the criteria that actually matter.
We found four categories:
- Services (boarding, training, daycare, retail)
- Customer-Facing (online booking, payments, intake, reminders)
- Back-Office (employee management, reporting, QuickBooks), an
- Marketing (email, SMS, reviews, website).
Then we scored six booking platforms — Gingr, Goose, DaySmart Pet, Petsoft, Pawfinity, and ProPet — across forty-plus criteria, including total cost of ownership (with the card-processing fees nobody quotes you) and The Usability Test: could a two-person front desk actually run it after we left, and would customers find it useful?
The winner was not the one with the most checkmarks. Goose won on fit, total cost of ownership, and usability.
TL;DR
Before
After
What jolt Co. did
One platform, configured end to end. Online booking, payments and deposits, digital intake, vaccination records, automated reminders, and package credits that deduct themselves at check-in. Customer, pet, and vaccination data migrated in. All mobile optimized for easy customer control.
A new website on a new, shorter domain. canineadvancedtrainingservices.com — thirty characters nobody could spell over the phone — became dogdfw.com. Every page rewritten, SEO set up for a ten-city service area, and analytics and ad tracking rebuilt. Every old form submission and subscriber list moved over before the old site came down.
Decisions made where the data backed it. Half-day daycare was cut, because a $5 price gap cost more to track than it earned. A reconciliation rule ended double-counted income in QuickBooks. Private training became sell-first, schedule-second, so a sale never waited on the owner's calendar.
What platforms we used
The Results
Ten weeks after launch, bookings were running themselves. Package sales came through during the review call, from customers who had never spoken to anyone. Credits deducted automatically at check-in. Unpaid bookings got invoice numbers and a tracked list instead of living in someone's memory - now reconciled in minutes not days. For the first time, the owner could see the business — rosters, payments, referral sources, and vaccination expirations in one place.
When the owner retired in January 2026, her farewell reached every client through the email system we built. The last act of the business ran on it.
What the client says
The bookings and all that stuff, a lot of those are happening on their own. I now know payments are collected before anyone shows up for class.