Pawfinity vs. Pet Manager: A Head-to-Head on Grooming and Kennel Management

Whether you’re a master groomer creating canine works of art or a kennel operator providing a safe and happy home-away-from-home, your business software is your silent partner. It works behind the scenes to keep you organized, profitable, and sane. Two of the most comprehensive partners out there are Pawfinity and Pet Manager. Both are powerful, cloud-based systems, but they come with different strengths and focuses.

Let’s put them on the grooming table for a side-by-side comparison to see which one gives your business the cleanest cut.

The Core Design: Specialization vs. Unification

Pawfinity has built a stellar reputation, particularly within the grooming community. It offers incredibly deep features for grooming salons, from detailed service tracking and commission calculations to mobile grooming optimization. It also provides robust functionality for kennels, daycares, and training, but its soul is arguably in the art of the groom.

Pet Manager, while also offering a feature-rich grooming module, is designed from the ground up as a unified, all-in-one platform for the entire pet care industry. The philosophy is to provide a single, central system where a business offering boarding, grooming, daycare, training, and even retail can operate seamlessly without feeling like they are juggling different programs. The grooming module is one powerful part of a much larger, interconnected whole.

Grooming Module Showdown

Since grooming is a key focus for both, let’s start there.

Pawfinity shines with its grooming-specific features. It handles complex commission structures, tracks tipped-out employees, and has powerful tools for managing recurring appointments. Its mobile grooming features are also top-notch, with route optimization and GPS integration.

Pet Manager also provides a robust grooming solution. You can create specific grooming services, allocating different times and prices based on pet size or breed. You can manage staff rosters to show groomer availability and assign specific services to specific groomers (e.g., junior staff can only be booked for a ‘Wash and Dry’). The grooming scheduler is a dedicated visual calendar, separate from your boarding or daycare views, preventing operational crossover and confusion. And because it’s part of a unified system, a grooming appointment can easily be linked to a boarding stay—for example, automatically scheduling a bath on the pet’s final day.

Beyond the Groom: Boarding and Daycare Management

What if your business is more than just a salon?

Pawfinity offers solid modules for kennel and daycare management, including kennel assignments and feeding schedules.

This is an area where Pet Manager’s all-in-one design philosophy shows its strength. The boarding management system is incredibly deep, featuring a powerful, rules-based pricing engine that can automate charges for seasons, stay duration, and more. It handles split bookings (moving a pet to a new pen mid-stay) with ease and can manage daycare with pre-paid packages and token-based attendance. The system generates detailed daily reports for staff, including feeding lists, medication schedules, and lists of all pets requiring a special walk or extra service.

The “Oops, I Forgot My Wallet!” Caper

A client is picking up their perfectly coiffed poodle, but their wallet is at home. It happens! In the past, this might have meant a promise to call back with card details, creating an accounts-receivable headache for you. Modern payment integrations solve this instantly. With Pet Manager’s Stripe integration, you can email them the PDF invoice right from the system. That invoice contains a “Pay Now” button they can click from their phone and settle up before they’ve even pulled out of your car park. It’s smooth, professional, and ensures you get paid on time. As a user noted in a Google review, “The online payment option has drastically reduced our outstanding invoices.”

Financial and Business Integration

A key differentiator for many businesses is how well their software “plays with others.”

Both platforms have strong internal reporting and financial tracking.

Pet Manager places a heavy emphasis on external integration to create a fully connected business workflow. The direct, two-way sync with Xero accounting software is a major drawcard for many businesses, automating a huge chunk of bookkeeping work. The integration with Mailchimp allows you to automatically add new clients to your newsletter lists, helping with marketing and retention. The inclusion of a full Retail POS module means you can sell food, toys, and other products using the same system that manages your bookings, keeping all your revenue streams in one place.

The Final Analysis

This is a close race between two excellent systems. Your decision will likely hinge on the primary focus of your business.

Pawfinity is an exceptional choice, especially for grooming-first businesses. If you are a dedicated grooming salon, a mobile groomer, or a facility where grooming is the star of the show, its specialized, deep feature set for that craft is hard to beat.

Pet Manager is the ideal solution for the multi-faceted pet care entrepreneur. If you offer a mix of services—boarding, grooming, daycare, training, retail—and want a single, powerful, and highly integrated platform to manage everything, Pet Manager’s unified, all-in-one approach provides unmatched synergy and scalability.

Ready to find the perfect partner for your pet care empire? Explore the possibilities by starting a free 30-day trial of Pet Manager today!