PocketSuite manages staff at the location level: Team & Staffing features like unlimited team members, staff scheduling, permissions and roles, and payroll live inside each location’s own account. A person working shifts at more than one site is added as a team member to each location’s roster individually, since each location manages its own staff roster.
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. As pet care businesses add locations, it is common for a manager, a trainer, or a specialist groomer to split time across more than one site, which raises a real, practical question about how that person’s schedule, payroll, and permissions get handled across accounts that are otherwise kept separate.
How Staff Are Set Up at Each Location
On PocketSuite’s Team plan and up, a location can add unlimited team members, each with their own staff availability calendar, scheduling and assignments, permissions and roles, time-off and vacation blocks, and team payroll. All of that lives inside that specific location’s account, the same account structure the Account Switcher uses to separate one location from another.
That structure works cleanly for staff who work at a single location. For staff who split time across two or more sites, it means being added as a team member separately at each location where they actually work, since each location account manages its own staff roster independently.
What This Means for a Traveling Manager or Specialist
For an owner or regional manager who personally oversees more than one location, the practical path is using the Account Switcher to move between each location’s account, seeing that location’s own team schedule and performance from inside it, the same way a location manager would. That is a manual step compared to a single unified staff view across locations, but it is how PocketSuite handles it today.
For a staff member below the owner or manager level, working scheduled shifts at two different sites, being added to both locations’ team rosters is the standard setup. Each location tracks that person’s scheduling, availability, and payroll independently for the work performed there, rather than a single combined view of their hours across both sites.
“I have three trainers. I have a facility in Tomball, Texas, which we sublease from a veterinary clinic, and I have two trainers there. Then I have another trainer about 30 miles north, on the other side of my territory, and she does board and train and day train from her home.” said Robert Norris, owner, The Dog Wizard Woodlands, describing how his team is actually split today. That is a real, working example of the per-location setup described above: three trainers, added individually to the roster of whichever location or territory they actually work in, rather than a single shared profile trying to follow all three across sites.
Permissions and Roles, Set Per Location
Staff permissions and roles, part of the Team plan and up, are also set within each location’s account. A person can reasonably hold a different role at each site, a lead groomer at one location and a general team member covering shifts at another, since permissions are not shared automatically across separate accounts.
That per-location control is useful in its own right for a franchise or multi-location group: it means a corporate-level or regional role does not have to be all-or-nothing across every site a person happens to help out at.
Watch: The Dog Wizard Woodlands on Upgrading to PocketSuite for Board and Train
Seeing the Whole Team Picture as an Owner
For visibility above the individual location level, PocketSuite’s Multi-Location dashboard offers a custom report builder with 100+ metrics, which can be used to build system-wide staffing and performance views once each location’s team data exists. That reporting layer is where an owner gets a system-wide picture back, even though the underlying staff setup itself happens location by location.
That combination, staff managed per location for day-to-day scheduling and payroll accuracy, reporting rolled up at the system level for the owner’s visibility, is how PocketSuite currently supports staff working across multiple pet care locations.
A Practical Setup for a Multi-Site Specialist
For a franchise or multi-location group with a specialist, a trainer or groomer, say, who genuinely works scheduled shifts at more than one site, adding that person as a team member at each relevant location, with the role and permissions appropriate to that specific site, is the straightforward path today. It takes a bit more manual setup than a single unified profile would, but it keeps each location’s scheduling and payroll accurate to the work actually performed there.
Owners planning to lean heavily on shared staff across several sites should factor that per-location setup into how they plan a multi-location rollout, rather than assuming a single staff profile will automatically follow a person between accounts.
How Team Size Actually Scales Across a Multi-Location Group
The multi-location, franchise, and corporate-owned businesses already running on PocketSuite report team sizes anywhere from 5 to 150+ employees per location. At the smaller end of that range, a handful of staff splitting time across two nearby locations is a common, manageable case for the per-location team-member setup described above. At the larger end, with 100 or more employees at a single location alone, staff sharing across sites tends to become the exception rather than the norm, simply because each location already has enough of its own dedicated team.
That range is worth keeping in mind when planning how much cross-location staff sharing a rollout will actually need. A two-location group leaning on one or two people covering both sites has a very different setup burden than a fifteen-location franchise system, where cross-location staff sharing is realistically rare and most of the staffing complexity is about managing many separate, fully-staffed teams well, not about syncing a shared roster across accounts.
Time Off, Scheduling, and Messaging Stay Location-Specific Too
The same per-location scoping applies to the rest of the Team plan’s staffing tools: staff time-off, vacation, and personal event calendar blocks, team scheduling and assignments, and team messaging all live within a specific location’s account. A person working at two locations will have their availability, time-off requests, and schedule tracked separately at each one, which is worth communicating clearly to any staff member in that position so they know to request time off, or check their schedule, at both accounts rather than assuming one update covers both.
That is a real, if minor, coordination overhead compared to a single combined profile, and one worth naming plainly to a shared staff member up front rather than letting them discover it the first time a schedule conflict slips through.
Setting Expectations Before a Location Opens, Not After
The best time to decide how a shared staff member’s schedule, permissions, and payroll will work across two locations is before the second location opens, not after that person is already double-booked or confused about which account to check for their schedule. Adding them to the new location’s team roster, setting their role and permissions there, and walking through with them directly how their availability and time-off requests now need to be managed at both accounts takes a fraction of the time that untangling a scheduling conflict after the fact does.
That upfront conversation also gives the staff member themselves a clear, accurate picture of how their hours and pay will be tracked, which matters for their own trust in the process as much as it does for the business’s scheduling accuracy, and it gives a manager a specific, documented answer the next time a scheduling question about that person comes up.
Frequently Asked Questions
A single staff profile isn’t shared automatically across two separate location accounts; each location manages its own team roster. A person working at more than one location is typically added as a team member to each location’s roster individually.
Staff permissions and roles are set within each location’s own account, on the Team plan and up. A person can hold a different role at each location they work at.
Individual staff scheduling and payroll happen per location, but a Multi-Location dashboard with a custom report builder can be used to build a system-wide reporting view once each location’s data exists.
Unlimited team members, staff scheduling, permissions and roles, and team payroll are available starting on the Team plan.
Payroll is tracked per location’s account for the work performed there. One person’s payroll isn’t automatically combined across two separate location accounts; each location runs and reports its own payroll.
Staff who split time across more than one pet care location are a real, common scenario as a business grows past one site, and PocketSuite’s honest answer today is that staffing lives at the location level, with each account managing its own team’s scheduling, permissions, and payroll independently.
An owner using the Account Switcher to move between locations, and Multi-Location dashboard reporting to see the system-wide picture, is how to manage that today, and worth planning for explicitly before a multi-location rollout leans too heavily on staff being shared across sites.
