Animals
Shelter workspace
Open-admission and municipal shelters get a different layout to foster-based rescues. The work starts at the front door, so the shelter workspace leads with intake, kennel capacity, and the legal hold clock on every stray.
Turning it on
The layout follows your organisation type. Set it in Settings > Organization. Choosing the shelter type rearranges the left nav - it does not move, hide, or delete any of your records, and you can switch back at any time.
What changes
- Dashboard leads with kennel capacity, animals on site, stray holds, and today’s intakes and outcomes.
- Intake is pinned near the top, because it’s the busiest screen in the building.
- Stray holds becomes its own page.
- Kennels is always shown, since housing is central rather than optional.
Everything else - adoptions, fostering, lost and found, volunteers, reports - works exactly as it does for a rescue.
The stray-hold clock
A stray held for its owner has a date it can legally be made available. Record it as Stray hold until on the animal’s intake details - it’s a single date field, so use whatever your jurisdiction requires. You can also record the jurisdiction the animal came from, which matters when you take animals in for more than one municipality.
The Stray holds page then groups every held animal into three buckets:
- Expired - the hold has lapsed and the animal can move on.
- Clears today - the last day of the hold.
- Upcoming - with the number of days left.
Closing out a hold
- 1If the owner comes for the animal, use Reclaimed by owner. That records the outcome as returned to owner and takes the animal out of your care.
- 2If the hold lapses and nobody claims the animal, use Clear hold. The animal stays with you and can now move towards adoption or foster.
- 3Either action is written to the animal’s history with who did it and when.
- Can a rescue use the stray-hold field too?
- Yes. The field lives on the animal's intake details for every org. The dedicated Stray holds page is what comes with the shelter layout.
- Do owner reclaims count in our statistics?
- Yes. A reclaim is recorded as a return-to-owner outcome and counts as a live outcome in your reports and live-release rate.
- We take animals in for two towns. Can we tell them apart?
- Record the jurisdiction on intake. Your exports then let you split intakes and outcomes by jurisdiction.