Working Your Appointments

This page covers the schedule page at /employee/schedule: how to find an appointment, move it through check-in, start, and complete, record sub-steps, release a pet to the front desk, and add notes, photos, and product recommendations. Every action on this page writes to the real records: there is no undo for a careless tap.

Finding the appointment

Five views read your appointments feed, filtered to your assignments: Today, Tomorrow, This Week, This Month, and By Hour. Today is the default. By Hour is the useful view when the day is stacked and you need to see where the gaps are. Everything displays in the location's timezone. If a customer says "I booked for 2" and your schedule says 2, you are looking at the same clock; if they do not match, confirm the timezone before assuming an error.

The lifecycle: check-in, start, complete

Each appointment moves through statuses, and the server writes status history, so the record of when things happened exists whether you remember it or not.

1. Check-in: the pet has arrived. This stamps the arrival. Do not check in an appointment for a pet that is not in the building yet, because everything downstream: wait times, pickup notifications: keys off these timestamps.
2. Start: you begin work. The appointment becomes "in service" on your dashboard and your manager's view.
3. Complete: the groom is done. Complete only when it actually is; once completed, the appointment leaves your active queue.

Hold and resume sit alongside these steps. Hold is for legitimate pauses: the owner needs to approve a dematting charge, the pet needs a break, you are waiting on a dryer. Use hold instead of leaving an appointment sitting "in service" while nothing happens. Status history is how the business knows what a groom actually costs in time, and inaccurate timestamps corrupt that record.

Sub-steps: Wash, Trimming, Nails, Notes

Inside an in-service appointment there is a checklist: Wash, Trimming, Nails, Notes: recorded as sub-steps in the status history. This is the handoff surface: if you are pulled off a groom mid-way and someone else finishes it, the sub-steps tell them exactly where you stopped. Check them as you go, not from memory at the end. Notes is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters most weeks later when the same dog returns and nobody remembers the ear problem from last time.

Release to Front Desk

When the groom is complete and the pet is ready for pickup, Release to Front Desk stamps the pickup notification time. That stamp is the trigger the front desk works from.

Groomer notes

The notes action writes a groomer note against an appointment. The ownership rule is strict: the appointment must be assigned to you, or the write is refused. You cannot annotate someone else's appointment; if something needs recording on a coworker's groom, tell them or their manager.

What belongs in a note: behavior observations ("nervous with the dryer, did better with a happy hoodie"), skin and coat findings in plain observational language ("raised pink lump, about 1 cm, left flank: told owner at pickup"), and handling quirks for next time. What does not belong: diagnoses: the Pet Safety & Handling policy (Pet Safety and Handling) covers the boundary between observation and diagnosis: complaints about the customer, or anything you would not want read back in a dispute. Notes are business records, and customer and pet information in notes and photos is handled under the Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure policy (Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Policy). Record-keeping duties are set by the Employee Code of Conduct.

Photos

The photo upload sends before-and-after photos to the salon's photo storage and records them against the appointment. Before-and-after photos are the simplest dispute protection in the business: a matted shave-down documented with a photo ends the "you ruined my dog" conversation before it starts. Upload photos at the time; a photo taken but never uploaded might as well not exist.

Product recommendations

The recommendation action logs a product recommendation against the appointment, with catalog search behind it. When you tell an owner "you should be using this shampoo between grooms," log the recommendation. It ties your advice to the actual catalog item, which is what makes follow-up marketing honest: the business can see what was genuinely recommended rather than guess.

Problems worth knowing

• An action fails with "not found": the appointment is not assigned to you. Do not retry it repeatedly; check the assignment.
• The page shows yesterday's data: the page always fetches fresh data, so stale data means the request failed and you are looking at the last successful load. The error banner tells you. Do not work from it; refresh until it clears.
• You completed the wrong appointment: tell your manager immediately. Status history is append-only; it can be corrected, but only by someone with the access to do it, and the sooner the better.