Plans change. Clients cancel, dates move, and sometimes money needs to go back. This release takes the pain from those moments, with clear policies that protect your time and self-serve options for your clients.

👉 Set up your policy now under Settings → Cancellations & Rescheduling.

Cancellation Policies

Set a cancellation policy per service with tiered windows, like free with 48+ hours notice, 50% within 48, 100% within 24. Cancel from the business side or let clients cancel visits themselves from the portal and see the fee before they confirm, so the policy does the talking.

You can adjust or waive any fee, cancelled visits come off your calendar and your staff's schedules automatically, and recurring services follow the same rule: stop anytime, only visits inside the window carry a fee.

Rescheduling Requests

Clients can now request to reschedule from the portal instead of texting you. The request lands in the new Requests inbox with the exact change laid out, and approving it updates your calendar, the client's view, and the invoice in one go.

They can also update pets on a booking or move a whole recurring week in one request, and if you turn on auto-approve, changes that fit your availability apply instantly.

Client Credits

Every client now has an account credit balance that Scritches tracks for you. Overpayments become credit automatically, goodwill credit takes two clicks, and it all applies itself to the client's next invoice.

Every movement is logged in plain language on the client's profile, and clients see their balance in the portal too.

Refunds

Refund any payment right from the invoice, full or partial, card or cash or Venmo. A guided flow picks the amount, reason, and destination (back to their card, or onto their account as credit), and can reduce the invoice in the same step with a live preview before you confirm.

Refunds made from your Stripe Express dashboard now sync back into Scritches automatically.

Also in this release

View your portal as a client. Preview your portal exactly as clients see it, or demo it with your test client.

Find my portal. Clients who lose their link can enter their email at app.scritches.io/portal and get it sent to them.

Faster pet & client profiles. Pet profiles rebuilt, and adding pets or clients now opens instantly from anywhere in the app.

Arrival & departure availability on your public calendar. Overnight bookings now display partial availability for arrival and departure days.

Vaccine batch upload. Drop in multiple vaccine documents at once and tag each file with one or more vaccines.

Intake form preview. Step through your intake form exactly as a client would, with nothing enforced and nothing submitted.

Performance and bug fixes across the calendar, invoicing, and booking flows.

This update rounds out a core part of running a pet care business: what happens when plans change. Policies, refunds, credits, and reschedules used to mean manual work. Now they're just part of Scritches, another step toward running your entire business in one place, with less of it on your plate.

As always, if you have feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Happy scritching! ✌️

The new Extended Care Surcharge automatically bills clients when they pick up later than their drop-off time of day on per-night stays. Set it once, and it applies to every booking going forward, showing up as a surcharge on bookings & invoices.

Set it up the way you charge:

• Single rate with a grace period. For example, $30 once a pickup runs more than 2 hours past drop-off time.

• Tiered by hours late, so a 3-hour-late pickup and an 8-hour-late pickup can carry different fees.

Charge a flat amount or a percentage of the nightly rate, whichever fits your pricing. It applies once per stay, and you can always adjust or remove it on an individual booking when you want to make an exception.

Turn it on under Settings → Surcharges & Holidays.

👉 Read the full guide

Also in this release

• Fill out intake forms for clients. A new flow for filling out an intake form for a new or existing client on their behalf

• Bookings without a pet. A new per-service toggle for services that don't require a pet on file.

• Business-address services. A per-service toggle to use your business address instead of the client's, for drop-off and on-site services.

• Surcharge preview before booking. See the full surcharge breakdown up front when creating a booking from the business side, no surprises at invoice time.

• Better holiday configuration. Redone holiday configuration page for easier setup, and common holidays split by country

• Smarter syncing from bookings to invoices: No more overwrites of manual line item edits, more warnings when a change to a booking will also affect the invoice.

• Performance and bug fixes across the calendar, invoicing, and booking flows.

If you've ever needed to charge a long-time client a different rate or raise your rates across the board, you can do it natively now. No more editing invoice line items every billing cycle.

👉 Try it on a client, or read the full guide in the Help Center.

🆕 Set a custom rate for any client

Open a client's profile, click the new Rates tab, type the price you want them to pay. Done.

The next booking and every booking after it uses the rate you set, even when you raise your defaults later. Clients will automatically see the updated price when booking online.

Read the full guide →

📈 Raise your prices, keep your long-timers happy

The annual rate raise is one of the most stressful parts of running a pet care business. You want to charge what your work is worth. You also don't want to lose the family who's been booking weekly walks for three years.

The new Update Prices tool does both at once. Set your new defaults, pick which existing clients keep their current rate, and apply. New clients sign up at the new rate. Your long-timers stay where they are.

Read the full guide →

Plus, bulk-manage your custom rates anytime

Once you've grandfathered a group of clients, you'll eventually want to bump them up too. The Manage custom rates tool lets you adjust any tier of custom-rate clients in one pass: update them, replace them, or remove the custom rate entirely.

Read the full guide →

Like with any big feature, I'd love to hear how it lands. If you raise prices with the new tool, or set up a custom rate for a specific client, drop me a note.

More coming soon. ✌️

- Lucas

👉 Try Custom Rates now, or read the Help Center guide.