Pet Licensing Software for Cities and Counties

Built for the Licensing Counter

Most animal services departments license pets from a spreadsheet, an aging desktop program, or a book of carbon-copy receipts. Every renewal season means retyping the same households, hunting for last year's tag number, and reconciling the cash drawer against a list that never quite matches. Pet Friend keeps every license, owner, tag number, rabies certificate and fee in one searchable list, inside the same system your shelter and your officers already use.

Who It's For

• County animal control and dog wardens selling dog licenses on a fixed county license year
• City and town animal services licensing pets at the shelter front desk or the clerk's counter
• Humane societies and shelters that run pet licensing on behalf of their city or county

What the Licensing Module Does

• Issue a license in one form — Pet, owner and address, tag number, rabies tag, veterinarian and vaccination dates, fee, tax and payment type, with the grand total added up for you
• Owners saved automatically — Whoever you license is filed under People, so next year you type a few letters of a surname, phone number or street and their details fill in
• Search by tag number — Find any license by tag, pet name, owner or address, and filter by species or by active, expiring or expired
• Status at a glance — Counts of total, active, expiring within 30 days, and expired licenses across the top of the list
• Rabies tracking — Each row flags whether the rabies vaccination is current, expiring or expired, separately from the license itself
• 1-year and 3-year terms — Pick the term on the form and the expiration date fills itself in
• Owner signature and photo — The owner signs on screen at the counter, or you send the license for signature by email or text
• Printable receipts — A receipt with your organization's name and logo, the pet, the tag, the dates, the fee and the owner's signature
• Licensing reports — License Compliance (compliance rate by species and license type over any date range), Registrations Expiring with owner phone and email, Registrations by City, and monthly Registration Totals

License Years That Match Your Ordinance

Pet Friend supports both ways licensing is written into local law, chosen once in Settings. Anniversary licensing expires a license one term after the day it was issued. A fixed license year gives every license sold in the same window the same expiration date, no matter when it was bought.

A county that sells tags from December 1 through November 30, all good until the following December 31, sets the year to start December 1 and licenses to expire December 31. That one extra month is a grace period: renewals open while last year's tag is still valid. A calendar year or a July-to-June fiscal year works the same way, and a 3-year license lands on the same boundary two years further out.

The Renew button appears once a license has expired or is within 30 days of expiring, and renewals follow the same rule as new licenses. Issue and expiration dates stay editable on the form, so a transferred tag, a correction, or a license written on paper months ago can carry its real dates.

Take the Fee However You Take Money

Leave "Take the payment now" ticked when you issue a license and Pet Friend opens the charge screen with the fee and the owner already filled in. From there you can:

• Take a card at the counter on a Square Terminal or Stripe reader
• Take a card on screen through Stripe Checkout, Square or PayPal, paid into your own account
• Record cash, check or money order — or a card run on your own terminal, or a waived fee. Nothing has to be connected to record an offline payment.

The Fee column on the license list reads Paid with the amount, or Unpaid with what is still due, from your actual payment records rather than from what the form said you would take. A refunded fee reads as outstanding again, because that is what it is.

Bring Your Existing License Records

You don't have to re-key years of licensing history. Export it from your current system or spreadsheet as CSV and upload it under Admin > Import/Export. Pet Friend recognizes common column names like License Number, Dog Tag, Expires and Rabies Tag, gives you a column-mapping step for anything else, and shows how many rows are importable before anything is saved. Each license keeps the issue date it actually had, and a missing expiration date is filled in from your license year, so renewals and compliance reports read correctly from day one. Moving animals and people too? See our data migration guide.

One System for Licensing, the Shelter and the Field

Pet licensing comes in the same plan as Pet Friend's animal control software: the ordinance library, multi-ordinance citations, remote signatures, and bite and quarantine reports. The built-in Officer group has licensing access by default, so an officer can look up a tag number or an owner's address from the same login they write citations with. For how citations and ordinances fit together, read writing animal control citations that hold up, or take the screen-by-screen tour of the animal control module.

Pricing

Pet licensing is part of the Shelter Plus plan at $100/month, or $1,200 billed yearly, alongside the animal control officer module and everything in the Shelter plan. It is a flat subscription: Pet Friend charges no per-license fee. Card processing fees are between you and your own Stripe, Square or PayPal account. The Rescue ($25/month) and Shelter ($50/month) plans do not include licensing. City and county buyers can pay yearly by purchase order or check through yearly purchasing, and there is a 14-day free trial. Public agencies: see municipal shelter software.

Switching From Another Licensing System

Import your license history from CSV, set your license year, and issue your first license the same day. Our migration page covers moving animals and people from your current shelter software, and you can compare Pet Friend with other shelter software before you decide.

Try the Demo View Pricing