Most boarding kennels and pet care businesses use a waiver. Fewer than half of those waivers are signed by every client, kept somewhere retrievable, and completed before the client walks through the door. If something goes wrong — an injury during group play, an allergic reaction, a dog that escapes — the waiver is your first line of legal documentation. A paper waiver that's unsigned, incomplete, misfiled or simply lost is no protection at all.
Digital waivers with electronic signatures solve this problem comprehensively. Here's why the switch is worth making.
The problem with paper waivers
Paper waivers have four failure modes, and most kennels experience all of them regularly:
They don't get signed. A client arrives during a busy check-in period. The member of staff handling intake is managing three dogs coming in at once. The waiver gets shunted to "sign before you go" and the client leaves without signing it. Now you have a boarding dog with no waiver on file.
They get lost. A paper waiver filed in a folder for 2024 might be in a cabinet, in a pile on a desk, or in a bin. When you need to produce it — because a client is threatening a complaint and you need to show they agreed to your terms — finding the specific signed form for their specific visit two years ago is an exercise in luck as much as organisation.
They're not re-signed when updated. Your waiver was last updated in 2022. Since then you've added a new activity (group play, swimming, training). Your paper-based clients still have 2022 waivers on file. The 2024 version was never collected.
They happen at the wrong moment. Handing someone a two-page legal document at check-in, while their dog is excited and pulling and they're running late, is not a recipe for careful reading. The client skims it, signs without reading, and leaves. The legal protection is thin if the client can credibly argue they never had a chance to properly review the terms.
What digital waivers fix
A digital waiver sent as part of your pre-arrival process — via PawCheck or your booking confirmation email — reaches the client when they're at home, unhurried, and actually in a position to read what they're signing. They sign it on their phone or laptop, with a proper electronic signature and timestamp, and the signed record is stored against their booking automatically.
This fixes every failure mode above. The waiver is signed before arrival, not at the desk. It's stored digitally with the booking reference, retrievable in seconds. When you update the waiver, returning clients are presented with the new version at their next pre-arrival flow and must sign it before proceeding. And the signature happens in a context where the client had time to read — which means the consent is more meaningful.
The legal standing of electronic signatures
In both the UK and the EU (under eIDAS regulations), electronic signatures are legally valid and can be used to execute contracts including service agreements and liability waivers. In the US, the ESIGN Act and UETA have made electronic signatures legally equivalent to wet signatures for most commercial purposes since 2000.
The key requirements are that the signatory is identifiable, that they clearly indicated agreement (not just passively received a document), and that the signed record is preserved. A digital waiver where a client enters a PIN to access their personal PawCheck page, reads the waiver and explicitly checks an agreement checkbox and signs with their finger meets all of these requirements with considerably more documentation than a paper signature — it records the IP address, timestamp and method of signature automatically.
"We had a complaint from a client whose dog was injured during group play. Because the waiver was digital and we had the exact timestamp, the IP address and the signed version with the relevant clauses highlighted, the complaint was resolved in 20 minutes rather than becoming a legal dispute."
— Doggy daycare owner, Leeds
What a good pet care waiver should cover
Your waiver should be written by or reviewed by a solicitor familiar with animal liability. The specifics vary by jurisdiction, but common elements include acknowledgement that pet care carries inherent risk (illness, injury, escape), consent to veterinary treatment if you can't reach the owner, limitation of your liability for injury or illness that occurs despite reasonable care, acknowledgement of your vaccination and health requirements, and your payment and cancellation terms.
Keep the language plain. A waiver written in dense legal jargon that a client can't read without a law degree is genuinely weaker in a dispute — a court is more likely to uphold terms that a client could reasonably have understood. Clear, plain-English waivers are both more legally defensible and more likely to actually be read.
Keeping waivers current
When you update your waiver — which you should do whenever your services change materially, or at minimum annually — existing clients should see and re-sign the updated version before their next booking. This is easy with a digital system: the platform detects that the current waiver version was signed before the update date, and presents the new version during the PawCheck flow for their next stay.
Keep older signed versions in your records even after updating. If a client has a complaint about a booking that occurred in 2024, the waiver they signed in 2024 is what matters — not the 2026 version. A digital system maintains this history automatically.
KennelBooker's PawCheck flow handles waiver presentation, electronic signature capture, and storage against each booking automatically. The signed waiver is retrievable from the booking record instantly, with full timestamp and signature data. If your current waiver process is a stack of paper, this is one of the easiest operational improvements you can make.