There is a version of this post that is a shopping list, and it is useless. The stack is not a list, it is an order of operations, and almost everyone does it backwards.
People buy the shiny thing first. A card terminal, because a rep called. A tablet, because the old laptop was slow. A camera, because a customer asked. Two years later there are six systems, none of them talk to each other, and somebody spends Sunday night copying numbers between them.
Do it in this order instead.
1. The spine
Everything else plugs into one system: bookings, pet records, payments, and the messages that go out. Pick it first, because it determines what your hardware has to be compatible with.
We are going to recommend our own product here, so take it as an interested opinion. Petboost is ours. We make money if you use it. The alternatives are real and worth pricing, and we have written a whole comparison of pet business software that names them.
What the spine has to hold, whoever you buy it from:
- The diary, with capacity rules that understand a room, a run and a groomer, not just a time slot.
- The pet, not just the customer. Coat, blade, temperament, vaccination expiry, who is allowed to collect.
- Payments, connected to the diary rather than sitting beside it. This is the one people underestimate and we come back to it below.
- Messaging, from a number that belongs to your business.
- Report cards, because the photo you send after a groom is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
Payments. Petboost runs on Stripe. At the counter that means the Stripe WisePOS E, which does tap, chip, Apple Pay and Google Pay and pulls the amount straight off the booking. If you would rather not own hardware, Tap to Pay on iPhone turns the phone in your pocket into the reader, which is the right answer for a mobile groomer. The alternatives are Zeller, Tyro and Square, all decent, all standalone, and the thing you give up is the link to the diary. We wrote the front desk post about exactly that trade-off.
A number that is not your mobile. Get a dedicated business number with a local area code. Two reasons. Your personal phone stops ringing at nine on a Sunday, and the business becomes sellable, because a business whose phone number is the owner's mobile is not a business, it is a job. Petboost provides one; if you go elsewhere, get one anyway.
2. Money
Xero. It is the Australian default for good reason, your accountant already uses it, and the alternative is a shoebox.
Two things to set up on day one rather than in July. Connect the bank feed. And turn on receipt capture, so a photo of a fuel docket becomes a coded transaction instead of a faded curl of paper in the glovebox. Hubdoc comes with most Xero plans and nobody uses it.
Reconcile weekly, not annually. Fifteen minutes a week is a different activity from four days in October.
3. The identity layer
A domain. Buy it before you need it, and buy the .com.au. Registrars are commodities; GoDaddy is the one most people land on and it is fine. What matters is that you own it, in your own account, with your own credit card. Businesses lose their domain because a cousin who built the site five years ago registered it and has since stopped answering.
A website, and be honest about which stage you are at. If you are starting, you do not need a website, you need a page that ranks and takes bookings. Petboost gives you a Showcase Page with its own URL that does exactly that, and for a lot of small operators it is the only web presence they ever need. Ours again, so weigh it accordingly.
When you outgrow it, or when you want a brand that looks like a brand, Squarespace is the least painful way to a professional site without hiring anyone. Point your domain at it and keep taking bookings through the spine.
Google Workspace. Email on your own domain. hello@yoursalon.com.au, not a Gmail address with your surname and a number in it. It costs a few dollars a month and it changes how you are read. It also gets you Drive, shared calendars and, critically, an account you can hand to a new employee and take back when they leave.
Google Business Profile. Free, and worth more to a local pet business than any paid advertising. Claim it, put real photos on it, and answer the reviews.
4. Design
Canva. For price lists, kennel signage, social posts, a flyer for the vet's noticeboard, a graduation certificate for puppy school. Build one template per thing and reuse it forever, so your Tuesday post looks like your business rather than like a Tuesday.
The trick most people miss is the print side. Canva does print files, so the same brand does your Instagram and your window decal.
5. The hardware, in the order it earns its place
An iPad at the front desk. On a weighted stand that swivels. It is the diary facing you and the signature pad facing them. Buy the stand heavier than you think; a light one gets dragged off the counter by its own cable.
A desktop out the back. An iMac or any all-in-one. The front desk runs the day; the back office does the rostering, the accounts, the marketing and the thinking. Those are different jobs and doing them on the same device at the same counter means neither gets done.
A TV in the waiting room. Not for daytime television. Run your report card photos, your service list, your school graduation pictures. A cheap Google TV or Chromecast on any panel is enough. Customers who watch other people's dogs come out looking magnificent book the upgrade themselves.
Google Nest cameras. Start with two: the front door and the back of house. Owners ask for live viewing and it is becoming an expectation in boarding and daycare, but before that it is a staff safety and incident-record tool. Read our cameras post before you install anything, because Australian surveillance law treats audio very differently from video and most cameras ship with the microphone on.
A label printer. A Brother QL on the counter. Kennel runs, crates, bags of belongings, medication, take-home bottles. This is the cheapest thing on this list and it is the one people say they should have bought sooner.
A printer that costs nothing to run. More on this next, because it deserves its own section.
Mesh wifi. One router in the office does not cover a wet room behind a concrete wall. A two or three node mesh does. Your card terminal, your cameras and your iPad all live on it, so treat it as infrastructure rather than a convenience.
4G or 5G failover. If your internet is down, you cannot take a card payment. A failover router costs very little and turns a disaster into an inconvenience. In regional areas, Starlink business Australia plans are now a genuine primary connection.
A UPS. A small uninterruptible power supply under the desk. A brownout mid-transaction, mid-payment or mid-save is the kind of thing that happens twice a year and ruins an afternoon.
A password manager. 1Password or similar. The shared login written on a sticky note under the monitor is how a small business gets breached, and it is also how you fail to remove access from someone who left.
Rugged phone cases and mounts. Covered properly in the per-vertical posts, because a mobile groomer's rig and a front desk are different problems.
AirTags. On the van keys, the spare set, and the toolbox. Two dollars a week of peace.
6. Why paper still wins
This is the part of the stack people are embarrassed about, and they should not be.
A screen does not work on a wet bench with shampoo on your hands. It does not work when the wifi drops. It does not work when three people need to see the same list at once, and it cannot be scribbled on.
Paper does all of that. Which is why the best-run salons and kennels we walk into are not paperless. They are digital with a paper output layer.
Here is how that works properly:
- The run sheet. Print the day. It goes on the wall or the bench, everyone reads the same thing, and the notes go on it in pen.
- The kennel card. One per dog, on the run. Feeding, medication, quirks, who to call.
- The grooming card. Blade, style, what went wrong last time, what the owner asks for every time.
- The report card. The one that goes home, or goes to the owner's phone.
And the bit that makes it more than nostalgia: the QR code. Petboost prints a QR next to each appointment on the run sheet, and on the kennel card. Scan it with the phone in your apron and the full record opens: the whole history, the photos, the emergency contact, the notes that would not fit on the page.
So the paper is not a copy of the system that goes stale. It is an index into it. The wall gives you the shape of the day at a glance; the phone gives you the depth when you need it.
That is why the printer matters more than it looks.
7. The printer, specifically
Buy an ink tank printer, not a cartridge one. This is the single highest-return hardware decision on this page and it is boring, which is why people get it wrong.
Cartridge printers are sold cheap and monetised on ink. If you are printing a run sheet every morning, kennel cards for a full house and report cards on top, you will spend more on ink in a year than the printer cost, several times over.
An ink tank printer takes refill bottles. The Canon PIXMA G-series MegaTank is the range to look at in Australia. A wireless three-in-one like the G3675 prints, scans and copies, handles A4, A5 and A6, and the bottles run to roughly 6,000 black pages and 7,700 colour on a set that costs about a hundred dollars. That is well under a cent a page against ten to twenty cents on a cartridge machine. If you print more, or want a proper business build with a bigger paper tray, the MAXIFY GX range is the same idea a tier up.
Paper: plain 80gsm A4 for run sheets and kennel cards, which is what our templates are set at. Keep a small stock of 160 to 200gsm card for the things that go home, because a report card on card gets stuck on a fridge and a report card on copy paper goes in the bin.
Scanning matters too. A three-in-one means a vaccination certificate handed to you at the counter goes onto the pet's record in ten seconds instead of living in a folder.
(If you were about to buy a Canon MP: that range has been discontinued for years. The MegaTank line is where it went, and it is a much better deal.)
8. The bits nobody tells you
Music needs a licence. Playing music in a business, including radio or a streaming account, generally needs a public performance licence. In Australia that is OneMusic, the joint scheme from APRA AMCOS and PPCA. A domestic Spotify subscription does not cover a salon. Check your own situation, because the fee depends on the space and how you use it.
Rostering. Once you are more than two people, Deputy or similar pays for itself in the arguments it prevents.
Backups. Google Workspace covers your documents. Your photos, your logo files and your camera footage often live nowhere. Decide where the second copy is.
Smart plugs. A dryer or a heater on a schedule, and a way to check from home whether you left it on.
9. If you are starting tomorrow with almost nothing
In order, and you can stop wherever the money runs out:
- The spine, on the cheapest plan that holds pet records and takes a deposit.
- A dedicated business number.
- Xero and a bank feed.
- A domain and Google Workspace.
- A phone in a rugged case, and a card reader that works off it.
- The label printer.
- The ink tank printer.
- Everything else, when it starts hurting.
The mistake is doing five before one.
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Opens Australian shopping results on Google. Not affiliate links, and we earn nothing if you buy.
Where our interest lies, plainly. We have no affiliate arrangement with any brand or retailer named here and we earn nothing if you buy any of them. Petboost is different: it is our own product, we make money if you use it, and this post recommends it for the spine, the payments, the number and the printed run sheets. We have named the alternatives anyway. Price all of them.