Does Pet Boarding Software Surface a Pet’s Emergency Vet Contact and Medical Authorization for Staff?

Yes — PocketSuite’s Sub-accounts let a business build custom pet fields for emergency vet contacts and medical authorizations, and toggle each field to show directly on the booking record, so staff see it on the calendar or dashboard during an active stay without opening a separate document. 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. That’s the difference between information staff have to go looking for and information that’s already in front of them the moment they need it.

Sub-accounts Are Built for Exactly This

Sub-accounts give every pet its own record nested under the client’s profile, separate from the pet parent’s own contact and payment information. A pet’s profile can carry its own custom fields, forms, contracts, notes, and assigned bookings — which is exactly the structure an emergency vet contact and a medical authorization need, tied to the specific animal rather than buried in a client’s general notes.

Custom Fields Put the Right Information on the Booking Itself

Setting up a field for something like “Emergency vet name and phone” or “Medical treatment authorization on file” happens once, under pet field setup. From there, a business chooses exactly where that field shows up: toggling “Booking record” on means the field appears directly on a booking when a team member views it from the calendar or the dashboard — not just buried three taps deep in the pet’s full profile.

Collecting It Once, Using It Every Stay

Because the field lives on the pet’s own record rather than being re-entered per booking, a pet parent completes it once — during online booking checkout, an intake form, or directly on the profile — and every future stay for that same pet carries the same emergency contact and authorization information forward automatically. Nobody on staff has to re-ask the question at every drop-off, and nothing depends on the same front-desk person being on shift who originally collected it.

Where This Matters Most: The Moment No One Plans For

An emergency vet contact and a signed medical authorization are the kind of information a business hopes never to need, which is exactly why it has to be easy to find in the moment it’s actually needed. A staff member managing an active situation with an anxious or injured pet doesn’t have time to search through paperwork or call the front desk for a client’s file — the calendar view they’re already looking at is where that information needs to already be.

An Owner’s Perspective on Having Information Ready in the Field

Robert Norris, owner of The Dog Wizard Woodlands, a dog training franchise location that also boards dogs overnight, compared PocketSuite favorably to his previous software specifically on how much faster he can get to a client’s information from his phone: “PocketSuite’s a little bit more fluid, you can navigate between things a little bit easier,” he said, describing the difference from his prior platform. That kind of quick, in-the-field access matters as much for an emergency contact as it does for any other client detail.

Documents and Fields Work Together

A medical authorization is often an actual signed document, not just a text field — and Document Collection lets a business collect files and images directly from clients, attaching them to the pet’s own profile. Between a custom field showing the emergency contact on the booking view and an uploaded, signed authorization living on the pet’s record, staff get both the quick answer and the actual paperwork behind it, without needing two separate systems to check.

Setting This Up Doesn’t Require Redoing Everything

A business already using Sub-accounts doesn’t need a system overhaul to add this — it’s a matter of creating the specific fields (emergency vet name, emergency vet phone, medical authorization status) once under pet field setup, then deciding where each one should show. The same setup pattern that already surfaces a vaccination record or a feeding note applies equally well to emergency and authorization information.

Custom Fields Aren’t Just for Emergency Contacts

The same field-and-toggle mechanism that surfaces an emergency vet contact works for any pet-specific detail a business wants visible during a stay — known allergies, behavioral notes, a preferred feeding schedule, or a specific handling instruction for an anxious dog. A business building out its Sub-account fields for emergency and medical information often ends up using the same setup pattern for several other categories of information at the same time, since the effort of deciding what should show on the booking view is the same regardless of which specific detail is involved.

Setting This Up in Practice

Creating a new pet field takes place under Settings > Client fields, where a business names the field, chooses its type — text, date, file upload, or a set of selectable options — and decides whether it belongs on the pet record, the booking record, or both. For something like an emergency vet contact, most businesses choose both: the pet record so it’s part of the pet’s permanent file, and the booking record so it’s visible the moment a staff member opens that day’s reservation from the calendar.

Why Staff Turnover Makes This More Important, Not Less

A business with long-tenured staff can sometimes get by on institutional memory — the same few people have handled a particular pet’s stays for years and simply remember the details. That approach breaks down the moment staff turns over, a new location opens, or a part-time employee covers an unfamiliar shift. Custom fields on the booking record remove that dependency entirely: the information is right there for whoever’s working that shift, regardless of how long they’ve been with the business or how familiar they are with that specific pet.

Keeping Emergency Information Current

An emergency vet contact or a medical authorization isn’t necessarily permanent — a client might switch veterinarians, a pet’s medication regimen might change, or an authorization might need updating after a new diagnosis. Because the field lives directly on the pet’s own profile, a pet parent or a staff member can update it any time circumstances change, and that update carries forward to every future booking immediately, rather than requiring a business to track down and correct old paperwork sitting somewhere in a physical file.

A Small Setup Investment With an Outsized Payoff

Creating a handful of custom pet fields takes a business perhaps twenty or thirty minutes of setup time, done once. Weighed against even a single moment where a staff member needs an emergency vet’s number immediately and can’t find it, that setup time is a genuinely small investment for the payoff — reliable, current, visible emergency information for every pet in a facility’s care, checked from the same screen staff already use to manage the day’s bookings.

A Multi-Location Business Gets the Same Consistency Everywhere

For a business running more than one location, custom pet fields configured once apply the same way across every location a pet might visit — a client boarding at one location on a trip and a different one closer to home sees the same intake experience, and staff at either location see the same emergency information laid out the same way. That consistency matters just as much for a growing multi-location operation as it does for a single facility.

The Difference Between Having Information and Having It Accessible

Plenty of businesses already collect emergency vet contacts and medical authorizations somewhere — an intake packet, a shared spreadsheet, a filing cabinet. The gap this solves isn’t collection, it’s accessibility in the specific moment staff actually need it: mid-shift, from the calendar, without stopping to search a separate system. Information a business already has stops being useful the moment retrieving it takes longer than the situation allows. A filing cabinet a few steps away might as well be a mile away when a staff member is standing in the middle of an active situation with both hands full.

Emergency information that’s actually visible when it’s needed, not just filed somewhere, is what Sub-accounts and Document Collection are built to give your team. Start your 30-day FREE trial of PocketSuite and see it on your own account.