Record keeping for a pet boarding business in India

Search for the rules on running a boarding kennel in India and you will find twenty articles about registration: which form, which fee, which board. Almost none of them tell you what you are supposed to have on file the following Tuesday, when someone walks in and asks.

Record keeping for a pet boarding business in India is the part that runs every day, and it is the part that decides whether an inspection, a vet emergency or an angry owner is a ten-minute conversation or a bad week. This is a working list of what to keep, why each item exists, and how to keep it so the answer takes seconds.

One caveat up front, and it matters. Animal welfare rules in India come from a mix of central rules, state boards and municipal licensing, and they are not uniform. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Pet Shop) Rules, 2018 sit over establishments trading in pet animals and require registration with the State Animal Welfare Board. How they and any state or municipal rule apply to a boarding-only kennel varies. [VERIFY: confirm your own registration position with your State Animal Welfare Board or a local lawyer. Nothing below is legal advice.]

What follows is the operational side, which is true regardless of which licence you hold.

The five questions you should be able to answer in under a minute

Everything worth keeping exists to answer one of these:

1. Who is in the building right now, and in which run?
2. Was this dog’s vaccination current when it arrived, and what proof do I have?
3. What medication has this dog had, when, and who gave it?
4. What happened in that incident, and who saw it?
5. What did the owner agree to, in writing, before they left?

If a record does not help answer one of those, it is filing for its own sake.

1. The intake form, signed once per pet

Not per stay. Per pet, updated when something changes.

It should carry: owner name and two contact numbers, an emergency contact who is not the owner, the vet’s name and number, feeding instructions in the owner’s own words, medication with dose and timing, behavioural notes (resource guarding, dislikes men in hats, escapes collars), and written authority to obtain veterinary treatment with a cost ceiling.

That last one is the item most kennels are missing when they need it. A Labrador at 11pm with a distended abdomen is not the moment to be ringing a number that goes unanswered, unsure whether you may authorise treatment. Write the ceiling into the form — “up to ₹15,000 without further contact” — and have it signed.

2. Vaccination proof, attached to the pet

Keep the certificate itself, or a photograph of it, showing the vaccine, the date given and the veterinarian. Then record your own derived field: the date it next falls due.

The derived date is the one that does work for you. A certificate in a folder tells you nothing until someone opens it; a due date can be checked at the moment of booking, weeks before arrival, when there is still time for the owner to go to the vet.

Protocols differ between vaccines, between manufacturers and between a puppy’s first course and an adult booster, so take the interval from the certificate and the vet, not from a rule of thumb. [VERIFY: confirm intervals against the product used and your own veterinary advice.]

The policy side of this — what to require, how many days before arrival, what to do when a dog arrives with a lapsed booster — is covered in a vaccination policy for boarding kennels. The records side is simply: proof attached to the pet, due date derived, both visible at check-in.

3. The daily register: who is in, in which run

A boarding register answers question one and is the backbone of an inspection. For each stay: pet, owner, run or pen, date and time in, expected out, actual out, and who handed the dog over at each end.

Two details most registers miss:

• Actual out, not expected out. The pickup that happened at 8pm on Sunday rather than 4pm is the one that gets billed wrong and disputed.
• Who handed over. “Collected by the owner’s brother-in-law” is a sentence you will one day be glad is written down.

Worked example. A 14-run kennel in Bengaluru keeps a paper day-book. During a Diwali fortnight it runs 12 to 14 dogs a night, with three or four arrivals and departures daily.

On the Thursday, a Beagle goes home a day early and a Spitz arrives into the same run. The day-book shows both. The invoice, written on Sunday from memory, charges the Beagle for eight nights instead of seven — ₹850 over — and the owner disputes it. Nobody can prove the pickup time because the day-book records the date but not the hour, and the run reallocation is a crossed-out line.

The ₹850 is not the loss. The forty minutes, and the customer who now thinks you overcharge, are the loss.

4. Medication and incident logs

Both are exception logs, which is why they get skipped: most days there is nothing to write.

Medication. Drug, dose, time, given by whom, and whether the dog took it. A dog on twice-daily thyroid medication for a nine-night stay is eighteen entries, and the one that matters is the evening somebody assumed the other person had done it.

Incidents. Any injury, escape, fight, refusal to eat for more than a day, vomiting, or unusual lethargy. Write what happened, when, who was present, what you did, and whether the owner was told and when. Write it the same day, in neutral language, without speculation about blame.

These two logs are what turn a bad incident into a defensible one. Nobody expects a kennel to have a year with no incidents; people expect the kennel to know exactly what happened.

5. Invoices, which have their own rules

Your animal records are yours to design. Your invoices are not. If you are GST registered, the format, numbering and retention are set by tax law, and the numbering in particular has to be gapless and sequential — you cannot delete an invoice you got wrong, only cancel or credit it.

The detail is in GST billing for pet shops in India, and it applies to boarding and grooming services just as much as to retail. [VERIFY: current GST rates and the record retention period before relying on any figure.]

Record keeping for a pet boarding business in India, without a filing cabinet

For a small kennel, honestly: a well-kept notebook and a phone camera beat badly-kept software. If you have six runs and one person, a day-book with columns and a folder of vaccination photographs will pass an inspection and settle a dispute. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise, and do not buy a system to solve a discipline problem.

The point where paper stops working is when the same fact has to be in two places. The vaccination date is needed at booking, at check-in, and when you decide whether to accept a stay in three weeks. The run allocation is needed by whoever cleans, whoever bills, and whoever answers the phone. Paper makes you write it three times, and three copies drift.

That is the only real argument for a system. In Fretso, the stay record is the same object that the kennel board shows, the invoice bills and the vaccination check reads — so the due date is checked when a booking is made, not discovered at the gate. The intake notes and medication entries hang off the pet, not off the stay, so they survive the dog’s fourth visit.

Two honest limits. Fretso does not hold your registration certificate or your municipal licence — those stay in a folder in your office, and should. And it does not decide your vaccination policy; it enforces the one you set.

Start here, if you start anywhere

If you keep nothing today, add these three this week, on paper:

1. A signed intake form per pet, with a treatment-cost ceiling.
2. A vaccination due date written on the pet’s page, not just a filed certificate.
3. A register with actual in and out times, and who handed over.

Those three cover most of what an inspector asks and nearly everything a dispute turns on. The rest can wait.

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Want the vaccination side handled before the dog arrives rather than at the gate? See how clinical records and due dates work.