Guide
What vaccinations should my salon require?
Most of this is your decision. A small part of it is not, and knowing which is which is the difference between a policy you can defend and one you argue about at the door.
Three different things, often called one
“Do you require bordetella?” sounds like a yes-or-no question. It is three questions, and salons that answer it as one end up unable to explain their own rule to a customer.
Required by state rule
The law says so. You cannot switch it off, you cannot give it grace days, and an owner cannot sign it away. Rabies is the only one every US state mandates — which is why it is the only thing this product will ever label that way on your behalf.
Required by the salon
Your rule, and it blocks exactly as hard. A missing record stops the appointment. The difference is that it is yours: you set the grace period, you can change your mind, and you can explain it as a business decision rather than as the law.
Recommended, not required
You would rather they had it. If they have not, the owner signs a waiver accepting the risk and the dog gets groomed. This is where bordetella usually sits, and putting it here rather than in the row above is what stops a kennel cough policy turning into a lost customer.
A vet exemption is not an owner waiver
These get used interchangeably and they are not the same document, do not have the same signer, and would not be read the same way by an insurer.
An owner waiver
The owner declining a vaccine and accepting the consequence. It is a preference.
It cannot stand against a state-required vaccine. Nobody can sign away rabies, and this product refuses to let you allow it.
A vet exemption
A veterinarian stating in writing that this animal must not have the vaccine. It is a medical decision, on paper, signed by a professional.
It may be accepted on any vaccine, state-required ones included — because whether your jurisdiction honors a vet’s letter is a fact about your jurisdiction, not about software. That one is your call.
If you allow exemptions on a vaccine, PetVaxRecords will not let one be filed without a note saying what the vet actually wrote. An exemption nobody can produce the reasoning for is not evidence of anything.
What a new salon starts with
Five rows, which you can change on day one. They are a starting position, not a recommendation about your state:
| Vaccine | How it is treated | Grace |
|---|---|---|
| RabiesDogs | Required by state rule | None — fixed |
| Distemper/Parvo (DHPP)Dogs | Required by the salon | None |
| Bordetella (kennel cough)Dogs | Recommended, not required · owner may waive | 7 days |
| FVRCP (feline distemper)Cats | Required by the salon | None |
| Rabies (cat)Cats | Required by state rule | None — fixed |
This table is generated from the same list the product uses when it sets a salon up, so it cannot fall out of date with the software.
What you can change, and what you cannot
You can add vaccines the starter set never included — leptospirosis, canine influenza, whatever your area or your insurer expects — and decide for each whether a missing record blocks the appointment. Anything you add is salon policy.
What you cannot do is label something as state law. PetVaxRecords will not let a salon mark a vaccine “required by state rule”, and will not let one already marked that way be switched off — because unticking rabies would quietly make every animal in the book read as clear to groom, with no red anywhere on the screen. That is worse than the software not existing, because it looks like it is working.
One more safeguard worth knowing about: if you somehow end up with no required vaccine at all for a species, every animal of that species reads as blocked, not clear. Failing closed is the only honest direction for a compliance tool to fail in.
Related
The 1-year vs 3-year rabies trap — three dates on a certificate, and only one of them is the deadline.
Can I refuse to groom this dog? — what to do when the paperwork does not clear.