I have a client for whom I dog-sit in my home regularly. Client drops off/picks up her dog. Is there a number of hours that is considered "standard" for day care? I routinely watch her dog for 12 hours and lately the times have been getting longer and more erratic. I've continued to charge her just the daily dog sitting fee but I wonder if i'm short changing myself? How should I approach this? Suggestions welcomed!
Generally daycare should cover about an 8-10 hour period. Since people typically want doggy daycare to cover while they are at work, you have to have operating hours that will accommodate dropoffs before work and pickups after, allowing for commutes. You set your own window but Rover gives some suggestions here:
https://support.rover.com/hc/en-us/arti…
7-9am for dropoffs and 4-6pm for pickups.
Put your daycare hours in your profile and you may want to consider a late fee for anything outside of it.
With respect to this client, you may want to tell her that you are standardizing the service because you have other commitments. People do tend to think they can breeze in anytime you work from home. You want to minimize disruptions and hopefully she can understand that.
In addition to Karen's advice, (instead of setting it up as drop offs between this time and pick ups between this time, which may give some clients the tendency to be at the longest length time frame offered), you can let her and other clients know that your day care rate includes x number of hours and the care is pro-rated for any hours beyond that.
For example, you could say generally your $21 day care rate is for 8-10 hours and any hours beyond that will be additional $2 per hour. You may want to reconsider increasing your boarding rate, because it's only $5 more at $26 for 24 hours of care, and someone may say okay, let's book it as boarding and then pick up rover early.
You know your local market best, but both your day care and boarding rates look very low and you may very well be short changing yourself.
We offer daycare from 7am to 7pm. That’s it. We’ve never run into problems in the years we’ve been doing this because we are up front that this is a business. We close at 7pm. No other businesses stay open by request.
We do work with boarding clients somewhat on pickups due to things like evening flights. But even in that case the latest we’ll allow a pickup is usually 9pm. If they are going to be later than that they need to book an extra night and pickup the following day.