1. Average pets per day
Your true throughput — not bookings on the calendar, but animals actually in your care each day. It's the base number almost everything else builds on, and it's surprisingly hard to pull from most systems.
Guide
The 6 numbers every kennel should track
Most kennel software is great at recording what happened and terrible at telling you what it means. You can have ten years of bookings in a system and still not know your occupancy last month. These six numbers are the ones that actually move your business — here's what each one is, why it matters, and how to think about it.
2. Average revenue per pet, per day
What each animal in your care is actually worth per day, add-ons included. Track it over time and you'll see whether your pricing and upsells are keeping pace — or quietly falling behind.
3. Occupancy rate
How full you are against your real capacity. Empty kennels are revenue you can't get back — a slow Tuesday gone is gone. You can't fix what you never see.
4. Vacancy rate
The flip side of occupancy, and the one that frames the opportunity. Knowing your typical vacancy tells you where there's room to fill — with the right promotion, the right week, the right reminder.
5. Customer churn (lapsed clients)
The regulars who quietly stopped coming. Nobody cancels — they just drift. The facilities that win retention are the ones that notice the drift early enough to do something about it.
6. No-shows & missed rebookings
Booked revenue that never materialized, and stays that should have been rebooked but weren't. Individually small, collectively a real leak — and almost always invisible in legacy software.
How to calculate occupancy rate
Occupancy rate = pet-nights used ÷ pet-nights available, over the same period. If you have 30 runs and the month has 30 days, that's 900 available pet-nights; sell 630 and your occupancy was 70%. Track it monthly and by day of week — the gap between your booked-solid Saturdays and your empty Tuesdays is where the recoverable revenue hides.
How to calculate revenue per pet, per day
Revenue per pet, per day = total revenue for the period ÷ total pet-days in that period. Count boarding, daycare, and every add-on (baths, extra play, meds). Watch it over time: if it's flat while your costs climb, your pricing or your upsells have quietly fallen behind.
Notice the pattern: these are the same numbers our cost-of-doing-nothing calculator asks you to estimate — and most operators can't fill them in, because their current software never surfaced them. That's not a knock on you; it's the gap. The point of tracking them isn't a prettier dashboard — it's catching the empty kennel, the lapsed regular, and the un-rebooked stay while you can still act on them.
Once you know these figures, they stop being a spreadsheet chore. BarkWhiz's Management KPIs dashboard computes occupancy, revenue per pet, and lapsed clients straight from your own records — and they're the very same numbers you use to price boarding and daycare from your data instead of copying the kennel down the road.
Want this kind of thinking built into your software?
That's the whole idea behind BarkWhiz. Become one of our first 10 founding facilities and help shape it.
We reply within two business days—or your first month is free. No credit card required.
Not ready for a founding spot? Just keep me posted