Yes. Attach a contract to your grooming service and a vaccine record upload field to your client intake, and clients sign the contract and upload their vaccination records as part of booking online, both completed before the appointment is confirmed rather than chased down on the morning of the visit. PocketSuite powers 7,000+ service businesses, including 1,000+ pet service businesses, whose clients have collectively processed nearly $1 billion in income and scheduled over 9.2 million appointments. Multi-groomer salons are one of the core use cases behind PocketSuite’s grooming salon software. A folder of paperwork waiting to be matched up with the right dog at drop-off is exactly the kind of morning-of scramble this setup is meant to eliminate.
Two separate PocketSuite features work together here: Contracts & Forms handles the signed agreement, and Document Collection handles the vaccine record upload. Both live inside the same booking flow a client already uses to schedule and pay.
The Contract and the Vaccine Record Travel Through the Same Booking Flow
Setting up the contract side starts with turning on Contracts under Settings and Features, then building the agreement in Settings and Contracts, or sending in an existing contract the salon already uses to have it built into the account exactly as written. Attaching it to a specific service through the “Requires signature” field means a client is prompted to review and sign it during the online booking process, right alongside entering payment details, using a finger or a mouse rather than a pen.
Vaccine records work through a different mechanism built for exactly this purpose: a file upload client field, which accepts PDFs, Word documents, JPEGs, PNGs, and the HEIF photo format an iPhone saves. Marking it Required and toggling on the booking checkout option means a client can’t finish booking without the record attached. Adding an expiration date at the time of upload means the field reappears automatically on a future booking once that date passes, without the salon tracking renewal dates by hand.
Both pieces end up in the same place once completed: the client’s profile, attached to the specific appointment they belong to. A groomer checking a dog in at drop-off can pull up the signed contract and the current vaccine record from the same screen, rather than one living in a signed-paperwork binder and the other in a separate vaccination folder that may or may not be up to date.
Multi-dog households are handled the same way here as they are for any other document field. With the Sub-account feature on, each dog gets its own profile under the client, and a vaccine record attached at the pet level means a client with two dogs on two different vaccination schedules uploads and tracks each one separately, rather than one record standing in for a household that might include a puppy still finishing its initial series and an older dog on a multi-year schedule.
A new client’s very first booking is where this setup earns its keep most directly. Rather than a phone call to schedule followed by an email asking for paperwork, followed by a second email because the attachment didn’t come through, a client books online, signs the contract, uploads their dog’s vaccine record, and pays a deposit, all inside one continuous flow that takes a few minutes from a phone. The salon receives a complete, bookable appointment rather than a partial one that still needs follow-up before it can be confirmed.
Pawsitive Training ABQ owner Georgette Lombardo has built a steady rhythm of client touchpoints around keeping her business organized: "I call it Monthly Maintenance. I recommend it most to our puppy clients." That same instinct toward routine, predictable processes is what makes digital intake worth setting up once and then trusting it to run the same way for every new client afterward.
Here’s The Dog Wizard Woodlands owner Robert Norris on what it meant to move his business onto a system built to handle this kind of detail without extra manual work:
Keeping Track of What’s Outstanding Across an Entire Client List
A single Documents dashboard shows every file a client has uploaded, filterable by status, so a salon can see at a glance which clients have a current vaccine record on file, which are expiring soon, and which never completed the upload at all. Browsing document history pulls up expired files too, which matters for a salon that wants a record of what was on file at the time of a given appointment, not just what’s current today.
A salon doesn’t have to wait for a client’s next booking to chase down a missing or expiring document. A manual request sent directly from the Documents dashboard sends the client a text with a link to upload the latest version right then, which is useful for a client who hasn’t booked in a while but whose vaccine record the salon wants refreshed proactively, rather than only catching the gap the next time they happen to schedule.
Forms themselves can also be set to expire on their own schedule, separate from any individual file’s expiration date. A salon that wants every client to complete a fresh intake form once a year, regardless of what’s uploaded to any particular field, can set that expiration under the form’s own settings, and the form reappears automatically at the next booking once the year is up, attached to whichever service it was originally set to require. This matters for a salon whose intake questions themselves tend to change over time, even when the client’s individual documents haven’t expired, since a form-level expiration catches that kind of update on its own schedule rather than depending on someone remembering to push it out manually.
None of this changes what a client actually experiences booking an appointment. They still pick a time, enter payment information, and confirm, the same flow they’d go through at a salon with no digital intake at all. The contract and the vaccine record are simply additional steps inside that same flow, each one required or optional exactly as the salon configures it, rather than a separate process layered on top that a client has to navigate a second time.
A salon transitioning from paper to digital intake doesn’t need every existing client to redo their paperwork on day one. New bookings start using the digital flow immediately, while existing clients’ records can be entered into the account over time, whether that’s at their next visit or in a batch during a quieter week. The two can run side by side during that transition without creating confusion, since a client who’s already on file simply won’t see fields they’ve already completed, and a client coming in fresh goes through the full flow from the start. Even a salon with years of paper files sitting in a drawer can make that switch gradually, entering the clients who book most often first and letting the rest fill in naturally as they come back for their next appointment, rather than treating the whole conversion as a single all-or-nothing project that has to happen before anything else can change.
Front-desk staff benefit from this as much as the groomers do. Instead of a stack of clipboards to sort through before the first appointment of the day, a quick look at the day’s schedule shows exactly which clients have everything on file and which still have something outstanding, well before the first dog ever arrives. That visibility turns a morning that used to start with paperwork triage and phone calls into one that starts with the actual work of grooming dogs, which is where everyone’s time is better spent in the first place.
For the full picture of client intake for a grooming business, see PocketSuite’s guide to grooming client intake, vaccines, and release forms, covering documentation, waivers, and compliance together.
Yes. Both are set up independently, a contract through the service’s required-signature setting and a vaccine record through a required file upload field, and both can gate the same booking at once.
Yes. The Documents dashboard shows every client’s upload status, filterable so you can see at a glance who’s current, who’s expiring soon, and who hasn’t uploaded anything yet.
Yes. A manual request sent from the Documents dashboard texts the client a link to upload the latest version immediately, without waiting for their next scheduled appointment.
Yes. A form can be set to expire after a chosen period, such as one year, and it will automatically be required again at the client’s next booking once that period passes.
Yes. You can send in an editable copy of a contract you already use and have it built into your account exactly as written, rather than starting over from a template.
