You’ve probably landed on this page because you run an animal shelter and you are researching about animal shelter software. Running an animal shelter is a hard work and can include a crazy load of paperwork. You need to keep track of each animal that comes through your door, those that get adopted and monitor the entire process in between. There has to be a better way than writing everything on a billion pieces of paper and trying to keep all those files together, right?
Yes, there is. Animal shelter management software isn’t all that new, but with cloud integration and proper network functionality, it just got a whole lot easier to manage things. No more tedious handwritten reports and hours searching for that one important piece of paper that got missing. If you use the right software, you will have everything you need right at your fingertips. Here’s how most of these software packages work.
What does Animal Shelter Management Software do?
When you receive an animal at your shelter, you need to log them on the system. This includes gender, age, medical condition and also where they came from. With most of these software packages, you can do this right on the computer or even the linked app. Next, you want to start either medical treatment or the adoption process. You can do this on the app as well, usually without actually having to type anything – you just select the correct status from a dropdown list.
Once an animal is placed in foster care or has been adopted, you note this on the software as well. If that specific animal returns to your shelter for any reason, the software will notify you – you don’t have to remember that you’ve seen this specific pooch before and you don’t have to dig through endless stacks of paperwork to remember when that was.
Foster parents can also manage the animals in their care on this system, uploading pets that are available for adoption and updating their status as the process progresses. It’s really easy and simple, streamlining the entire process. Now you’re free to do the work that really matters: caring for all those animals in need.
What about Reporting?
Another really cool feature, other than the live tracking of each animal’s status, is the reporting function. You can pull statistics to see trends: is there a yearly pattern for when you receive most of you animals? When most adoptions take place? If these don’t coincide, you can adapt your marketing strategy to encourage adoption at the time of year when you need it most. Or you could launch a campaign to prevent animals from inundating your shelters and instead, staying with loving families.
You could also track which people often return animals to your facility and which pet foster parents are slow with the adoption process. A graph indicating a trend is so much easier to understand and use insightfully than a stack of paperwork that you have to wrangle in order to get useful information from it.
List of Top Animal Shelter Management Software Programs
Now that you understand the basics of animal shelter management software, check out this list of top software packages.
- Adopt-a-friend
- Animal Shelter Manager
- AnimalShelterNet
- ARK Software
- BARRK
- Chameleon Software
- Companion Protect
- iShelters
- Paw Trax
- Pawlytics
- PetPoint
- Petstablished
- Rescue Connections
- RescueGroups.org
- Shelter Buddy
- ShelterLuv
- Multiple Options Shelter Management System
- Shelter Pro
- Sparkie
- RescueConnection Software
- Smart Pet Health
- The Pet Friend
- To Your Rescue
- Trackabeast
What do you think?
Which service does your shelter use? Have we missed any good ones?
