House Food

Some pet parents forget to pack food, and some prefer their pet eat the facility's own food for the length of a stay. House Food is a special kind of product that lets staff add "the facility's food" to a reservation once per pet, without recalculating the charge by hand every time a stay gets extended, shortened, or converted to a different service. Petsoft works out how many days to charge automatically, based on the stay's actual dates, at the moment the invoice is generated.

Because that automatic calculation has a few non-obvious rules, this article covers House Food on its own, separate from the general Products & Retail article.

Setting up a House Food product

Go to Products and either add a new product or edit an existing one, the same as any other retail product. Check House Food Option.

Checking House Food Option does two things:

• It sets Delivery Type to Daily Throughout Reservation and disables the dropdown — a House Food product is always billed per day, so there's nothing else to choose.
• It marks the product so Petsoft's automatic quantity calculation (described below) applies to it, and so the Add House Food shortcut described in the next section can find it.

warning

Mark only one product per facility as House Food Option at a time. Petsoft doesn't stop you from checking this box on more than one active product in the same rate set, but it also doesn't guarantee which one it will use when staff click Add House Food or when it looks up the food item for the Advanced Boarding Food column — the choice isn't defined and can differ between screens or after unrelated changes. If you need to change your house food product (say, a new supplier), turn the old one's House Food Option off before turning the new one's on.

You can still set Price, Taxable, and Department Type as usual — those work exactly like any other product. Whether Reservation Add-on is checked only controls whether pet parents can select the product themselves in online booking (see Products & Retail); it has no effect on any of the staff-side House Food behavior described below.

Where House Food shows up

The Add House Food shortcut and the automatic per-stay quantity only apply where Petsoft can look up a House Food product for the facility. That lookup checks the facility's currently active rate set as of the reservation's arrival (or actual check-in) date — if no product has House Food Option checked in that rate set, none of the House Food-specific UI described below appears, and staff won't see an error explaining why; the option simply isn't there.

• Book Reservations (the standard booking flow): House Food isn't offered as its own control here. If you add it through Add Product or Service like any other product, whatever quantity you pick in that picker is ignored — the House Food quantity is always calculated automatically for the whole stay, per the rules below.

• Book an Advanced Options Boarding Reservation: shows a Food checkbox in its own column, one per pet, when a House Food product is configured for the facility.

• Reservation Edit page (after the reservation is already booked): shows an Add House Food button among the Add-ons actions when a House Food product is configured. Clicking it opens a pet picker; select any combination of the reservation's pets and save. Petsoft adds one House Food line per selected pet, each with its quantity left for Petsoft to calculate automatically.

• Editing an existing add-on line: click the pencil next to any add-on on the Reservation Edit page (or Add a new Product to add one manually) to open the same form used for any product add-on. When the selected product is House Food, the Quantity field shows an Entire Stay placeholder and a note: "Leave blank to cover the entire stay. If you enter a quantity, it won't change automatically if the stay is later extended or shortened."

How the quantity is calculated at invoice time

Whichever way House Food was added, if its Quantity was left blank, Petsoft computes the actual quantity when it builds the invoice — not when the add-on was added. This is what lets you extend or shorten a stay without manually correcting the House Food charge:

• Boarding (a multi-day service): the quantity is the number of nights — the morning of checkout doesn't need a food charge. A one-night stay is floored at 1 night even if the arrival and departure dates happen to be the same calendar day.
• Every other service type (daycare, grooming, and other single-day or timeslot services): the quantity is the full number of days from arrival to departure, inclusive of both.

This same automatic calculation also applies to any other product whose Delivery Type is Daily Throughout Reservation, not only to the product marked House Food Option — so if you build your own "daily" product without the House Food checkbox, it bills the same way.

If you type a specific number into Quantity instead of leaving it blank, that number is what invoices — permanently, for that add-on line. Petsoft does not recalculate it later. If the stay is then extended or shortened, you need to edit that add-on line again and update (or re-blank) the quantity yourself.

You're not locked into the automatically calculated quantity, either. After checkout, once staff finalize the stay into a bill, the House Food line's Quantity and unit price are still editable directly on the invoice — the same as any other line — for as long as the invoice remains Pending (not yet posted or paid). Use this if a pet's food amount needs a one-off correction that shouldn't change how future stays calculate.

note

House Food is added per pet, once, regardless of stay length — not once per pet per day. The day count only affects the quantity billed on that one line, which is what determines the total charge.

Seeing House Food on a report

The Addons On Date report, under Reports, lists every House Food line (along with facility services and medications) scheduled for a given day at the current facility, alongside each pet's dietary and feeding instruction notes. Run it to see which pets are due for house food on a given day without opening each reservation individually.

House Food setup checklist

Step	Task
1	On the Products page, add or edit the product you want to use as house food.
2	Check House Food Option. Confirm Delivery Type shows Daily Throughout Reservation and is locked.
3	Confirm no other active product in the same rate set also has House Food Option checked.
4	Set Price, Taxable, and Department Type as usual.
5	Verify the Add House Food button appears on a reservation for that facility.

Quantity left blank vs. a typed quantity

	Left blank ("Entire Stay")	Typed quantity
Recalculates if the stay is extended or shortened	Yes, automatically at invoice time	No — stays fixed at the number you typed
Boarding quantity	Nights (departure morning excluded)	Whatever you typed
Daycare / other services quantity	Full day count, inclusive	Whatever you typed
Where you can choose this	Add House Food, or the Quantity field on the add-on form	The Quantity field on the add-on form only