Changelog

This release is mostly about Lulu getting the details right. She will not draft an invoice line for zero or a fraction of a cent, and when a family skips visits on a subscription, her receipt says what actually happened to the money: a credit, a smaller upcoming charge, or no change.

Pet history import now fits around the care PayPaw already recorded. A stay that overlaps a PayPaw visit attaches its photos to that visit, daytime photos across several days become separate daily visits rather than one long boarding stay, a boarding stay and a walk on the same day stay separate, and Memories counts each kind of care exactly. A pet you leave out of a family's Memories story takes their photos with them.

Part of this release reaches Specialists through the iPhone app in private testing: the visit card now appears on the Lock Screen before a visit even if the app has not been opened, the start-visit button is larger, and the chat box offers predictions and autocorrect like a normal message.

Training plans used to be tied to how a family paid. Now a plan belongs to the pet, so a trainer can track goals and homework the same way for a package, a subscription or pay-as-you-go.

Some of what ships here reaches people through the coming iPhone app: a welcome story that shows a family their pet's history, which plays only after their Specialist has previewed and approved it, and a private place to write each visit's report with Lulu before the family sees it.

Most of this release is about money being exactly what it looks like. A pause used to stop the visits while the subscription could still bill, a bank that was not verified yet could look ready to charge, and in rare timing a paid invoice could be marked void. Each of those is fixed at the source.

A few smaller changes ride along. Initial Consult is now its own service and can be offered at no charge. Schedule pages no longer show a visit twice or drop one, and recurring visits are placed on the Specialist's own clock. Lulu's chat recovers after sitting idle instead of showing an error, explains problems in plain words, and can send a draft invoice the Specialist made by hand.

This release also carries the server side of the coming iPhone app: a chat for each visit, a written visit report, and a Lock Screen card that follows a visit while it happens. None of that appears on the website, and it reaches people only when the app does.

Both changes came from the same day of use. A visit that was delivered but never approved was two days from expiring with nothing in the email to act on, and Lulu kept finding a pet by name and then failing to do anything with it. Two small fixes, shipped the same day.

Two of these changes came straight from Specialists' days. A reminder for every visit had become noise, so it is now one summary in the morning. And a run of visits that were walked but never invoiced, some going back to July, showed that nothing noticed when billing was skipped. That gap is now checked every night. The final invoice it produces is always a draft: the Specialist reviews it, adds anything extra, and sends it. A handful of older reservations whose invoices had already been voided are not re-billed automatically; those are being reviewed one by one.

The drop-in length came from two tables that disagreed: the one the reservation form showed and a separate one the server used for recurring visits. There is now one source. Drop-ins already on the calendar from before this release keep their old 30-minute window until they are corrected, and completed visits are left exactly as they happened. Setting a different default length per Specialist is not available yet.

The stuck Lulu bar has been reported several times and has been hard to pin down, because it happens intermittently and nobody can recall exactly what came before it. This release does not claim to fix it. It makes the bug observable: the next time it happens on a phone in the signed-in app, PayPaw tries to recover the screen and reports the sequence of taps and screen changes that led there. The report contains no typed text and no message content.

This release changed only the PayPaw iPhone app, which is still in private testing and not yet in the App Store. Nothing changed on paypaw.app. It is listed here so the history of every release is complete.

The training program is the first thing in PayPaw priced for an outcome rather than a visit. A Specialist names the program, the result it is for, and the total. The Pet Parent accepts and pays the deposit, and the balance arrives on the schedule the Specialist chose, invoice by invoice, without anyone keeping a calendar of who owes what. Sessions and homework sit inside the program, so the question of what has been paid and the question of what has been done stay separate, which is how a trainer thinks about the work anyway.

The Lulu change addressed a keyboard that appeared when it was not wanted. It fixed the flash, but the stuck-bar symptom it was also meant to cure came back intermittently afterward, so it is not described here as fixed.

A fix for a mobile layout problem, shipped on September 22, quietly broke scrolling on the public site. Keyboard scrolling still worked, as did every screen inside the app, which is why it took a day and a half to surface — none of PayPaw's automated tests scrolled a page the way a person does. It is fixed, and a test that scrolls the way a person does is now part of the suite.

Three of these surfaced during real walks, and they share a theme: PayPaw had the right answer and displayed the wrong one. The agenda held the correct visit time and printed it in UTC. A note typed with paragraphs and lists rendered as one wall. A Pet Parent received a text about their pet with PayPaw's name in front instead of the Specialist's.

The last one matters more than its size suggests. A message to a Pet Parent comes from the Specialist — PayPaw is the plumbing, and plumbing does not introduce itself.

On phones, Lulu's chat has been rebuilt on a frame that holds steady as the keyboard opens and closes, and the dashboard no longer drags sideways during a downward scroll.

The dose reminder fix is the one worth knowing about. Reminder windows were being built in UTC rather than in the Specialist's own time zone, so for any Specialist working outside UTC a dose-due or dose-missed reminder could land hours late or never arrive. Reminders are now built against the pet's Specialist time zone.

Alongside it, a full pass over every notice PayPaw sends. More than thirty emails that used to go out as plain text now carry the Specialist's branding, subjects follow one consistent shape — pet, then when, then how much — and push titles say what happened rather than who is sending the notice.

Most of this release is about notifications Specialists were supposed to be getting and might not have been. Browsers and phones drop push subscriptions on their own — after an update, after a long stretch with the app closed — and until now nothing signaled that it had happened. PayPaw now notices and reconnects on its own, while leaving a deliberate opt-out alone.

The rest is Lulu, steadier in the places she was least steady: on a phone, and across a dropped connection.