Why Municipal Shelters Choose Pet Friend

Municipal shelters face unique challenges: high intake volumes, government reporting requirements, volunteer coordination, and tight budgets. Pet Friend's Shelter Plan provides everything you need without the enterprise price tag — and without requiring dedicated IT staff.

What's Included in the Shelter Plan ($50/month)

Everything in the Rescue Plan, plus:

• Task Management & Workflows — Assign and track daily tasks across your team. Build repeatable workflows for intake, cleaning, feeding, and medical rounds
• Volunteer Management — Track volunteer applications, schedule shifts, log hours, and generate reports for grants and board meetings
• People Management — Manage adopters, donors, volunteers, and offenders in one unified system
• Accounting & Donations — Track invoices, manage inventory, record donations, and monitor animal-specific expenses
• File Storage — Upload and share policies, procedures, medical records, and other documents accessible from anywhere
• E-Signatures — Paperless adoption contracts, surrender forms, and volunteer agreements
• All Rescue Features — Animal management, adoptions, care, Petfinder sync, calendar, reports, notifications

Built for Government Requirements

• Cloud-hosted on AWS — Enterprise-grade security and reliability, no on-premise servers to maintain
• Okta SSO Support — Integrate with your existing government identity management
• Detailed Reporting — Generate intake, outcome, length-of-stay, and euthanasia reports for council meetings and state compliance
• Multi-user Access Control — Set different permission levels for staff, volunteers, and administrators
• Yearly Billing Available — PO and check payment accepted for government procurement. View yearly pricing

Perfect For

• City and county animal shelters
• Humane societies
• Private shelters with paid staff
• Organizations processing 100+ animals per month
• Shelters replacing legacy or on-premise systems

What Makes Municipal Shelter Software Different

Government-run animal shelters answer to more stakeholders than a typical rescue: council members, county commissioners, state regulators, the public, and internal audit. A tool that works fine for a foster-based rescue will miss several requirements that municipal operations cannot compromise on.

Chain of custody and public records. Every animal that enters a municipal facility is a potential public records request. Intake reason, officer who brought it in, medical care provided, outcome, and any photos may need to be produced on short notice. Pet Friend's unified animal record keeps a complete, timestamped history that can be exported as a PDF for FOIA responses or legal requests.

State and federal reporting. Many states now require annual intake and outcome reports, and participation in Shelter Animals Count is increasingly standard. Pet Friend's pre-built reports cover total intakes, outcomes by type (adoption, transfer, RTO, euthanasia, died in care), length of stay, and live release rate — the numbers council and state agencies ask for.

Procurement-friendly billing. Municipal purchasing departments need POs, W-9s, check or ACH payment, and often prefer yearly billing over monthly subscriptions. Pet Friend supports all of these out of the box. No sales calls required to negotiate terms.

Board and council presentations. Month-end, quarterly, and fiscal year reports are part of the job. Pet Friend generates dashboards showing intake trends, outcome rates, and kennel capacity that can be screenshared at council meetings without exporting to a spreadsheet first.

Multi-user access with real permissions. Paid staff, part-time kennel attendants, volunteers, and contracted veterinarians all need different levels of access. Pet Friend's role-based permissions mean a kennel attendant can record feedings without seeing adopter payment details, and volunteers can walk dogs without being able to edit medical records.