Every animal's day, accounted for.
ShelterSync is one platform with three parts: an admin portal for staff, a mobile app for volunteers and fosters built for iPhone and Android, and a public user manual you can read before you ever sign up. Set a daily standard of care — then see it met, animal by animal, day by day.
Every trial is its own dedicated organization, provisioned for you by our team and pre-loaded with a complete sample shelter to explore.
Set the standard. Watch it get met.
Set a daily minutes target per species, per category — "dogs get 30 minutes of enrichment a day" — then raise or lower it for an individual animal with a recorded reason. The dashboard, the reports, and the volunteer's phone all show the same live picture of who's on track and who's been missed today.
- One definition of "met" — completed minutes against the target — and it reads the same on the director's dashboard, in the reports, and on the volunteer's phone
- Per-animal exceptions replace the species default and keep the reason on record — the senior dog who needs rest, the adolescent who needs more
- "Today" means your shelter's day — your timezone and your reporting-day start, not midnight somewhere else
- Animals with unmet goals surface on the dashboard, priority animals first, so the ones most easily missed are the hardest to miss
Illustrative example — you set your own species, categories, and targets.
One platform, two experiences
Volunteers and fosters get an app that makes logging effortless. Staff get a portal that shows the whole shelter at a glance. Both run on the same live data — and both give the same answer about today.
The admin portal
The whole shelter on one live screen, for the people answerable for all of it.
- A live dashboard: animal counts, activity minutes today, goal progress by category, pending surveys, and in-progress activities as they happen
- A full roster with two kinds of badge — lifecycle status and availability: available, in activity, at the vet, quarantine, medical or behavior hold — plus photos and printable QR kennel cards
- Structured behavioral assessments with scoring and a green/yellow/red handling tier — a signal for who can safely handle an animal, one input among many, not a validated predictive test — with audited overrides
- Five report types with date, location, and category filters — exported to CSV, PDF, or Excel
- CSV imports that show every row's warnings in a preview — nothing is written until you confirm
- Group activities for playgroups and group walks, plus adoption days and orientations that appear on volunteers' calendars in the app
The volunteer & foster app
Built for a phone in one hand and a leash in the other.
- Scan the QR code on a kennel card and that animal opens, ready to go
- Start an activity and a timer counts the minutes toward the animal's daily goals
- Goal pills on every animal — amber "Needs activities," green "Goals met" — with needs-activities and priority filters
- A short post-activity survey — the one your shelter built — wraps up every session
- Fosters can log a session after the fact and — with an observation form you set up — send structured reports from home
- Upcoming events, a weekly stats card, and a favorites heart keep every shift personal
- Multi-factor authentication, a six-digit PIN for shared tablets, and admin-approved devices
Fosters stay on the record, not off the radar
Animals in foster homes are still your animals. ShelterSync keeps their days visible — without making foster families feel policed.
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Quiet homes get flagged
A placement with no logged activity for seven days gets a red badge on the foster program page — a nudge to check in before weeks slip by.
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Observations from the living room
If your shelter sets up an observation form, fosters submit structured reports from home — and each one lands in the recent-observations feed and on the animal's behavioral record, the same timeline as shelter assessments.
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Logging that forgives real life
Fosters can record a session after it happened, with sensible guardrails: nothing in the future, nothing before the placement began, nothing over twelve hours, no overlaps.
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Goals follow the animal
Goal attainment for fostered animals sits right on the foster program page, next to active placements grouped by reason — so foster pets never fall out of the picture.
Build the forms your shelter actually needs
No developer, no support ticket. The survey builder and lookups put your shelter's standards — and your shelter's vocabulary — into the product.
Ask exactly what you need to know
A full-page editor — question palette, canvas, and live preview side by side — for activity surveys, assessment templates, and foster observation forms.
- Single and multiple choice, yes/no, 1–5 ratings, numbers, short and long text
- Show-when conditional logic driven by earlier answers or the animal's own properties and tags
- Scoring, dimensions, and tier thresholds for assessments — five assessment templates included to start from
- Merge fields like {{animal.name}}, previewed live with sample personas so questions read naturally
Your shelter's vocabulary, not ours
Species, activity categories and types, group types, foster placement reasons — you define them, and you drag them into the order your team thinks in.
- Activity types carry recommended minutes, so volunteers know what a good session looks like
- Care tags marked public or internal, so sensitive notes stay inside the team
- A priority flag that moves an animal up the volunteer's actual work list — not just a label, a reordering
- Foster placement reasons that match how your program really runs
Works beside the records you already keep
ShelterSync doesn't ask you to abandon your system of record. It syncs from it, imports alongside it, and exports whenever you need it to.
ShelterLuv sync
Sync your animals from ShelterLuv automatically, as often as every 15 minutes — or on demand with Sync now. Paste your API key once (it's stored encrypted and never shown again); animals, photos, and attributes arrive as tags, departed animals are offboarded for you, and a 90-day history shows every run. It's one-way into ShelterSync — we never write back to ShelterLuv.
CSV import wizard
Bring in animals, volunteers, fosters, and your location tree from any system that can export a CSV. Columns map automatically, every row is previewed with its warnings and errors, and nothing is saved until you confirm.
Reports that leave with you
Five report types — activity summary, animal daily activity, welfare indicators, compliance, and security — filtered by date, location, and category, and exported as CSV, PDF, or Excel. All of it on your reporting day, in your timezone.
Answers for your board, not just your volunteers
Directors sign off on the risk. Here's what ShelterSync does about it.
Your data is yours alone
Every organization's data is isolated, and that isolation is enforced server-side on every single request — one shelter can never see another's records.
Five roles, real boundaries
Role-based access for global admins, admins, staff, volunteers, and fosters — enforced at the API, in the interface, and down at the query layer.
One log for everything
A combined activity and security log: every record change with before-and-after detail, plus sign-ins and failed attempts — read-only, with a per-person view.
Restriction, never deletion
Animals are offboarded, people are restricted, events are deactivated — records are kept rather than deleted. When a person asks for their own data to be deleted, their details are anonymized in place, so the shelter's care history your board relies on stays intact.
Built for the shelter floor
An unapproved device gets a restricted session until an admin approves it, and shared front-desk tablets get a quick six-digit PIN per person.
Multi-factor sign-in
Authenticator-app MFA with backup codes and an opt-in SMS fallback, plus per-role MFA and sign-in policies you control in settings.
Encrypted, hosted in the US
Encrypted in transit and at rest, hosted in the United States, with your data staying in the US — and twice-daily backups behind a tested, timed restore exercise.
Minors, safeguarded
A 13-and-up age floor, under-18 volunteers private by default and kept out of shared lists, reports, and exports — and no user-to-user messaging, by design.
Controls built toward SOC 2 Common Criteria and CCPA/CPRA expectations.
Read the full user manual before you sign up
The complete ShelterSync manual is public — dozens of pages with screenshots, covering the admin portal and the mobile app, and kept in step with every release. See exactly how everything works before you start a trial.
Try it two ways
Get a dedicated trial organization pre-loaded with a complete sample shelter, or pilot ShelterSync with your own data. Either way, our team provisions your organization for you.
Your own trial organization
A fully working shelter, ready the moment you log in.
- Pre-loaded with a complete sample shelter — animals, activity history, and surveys to explore
- Sample staff and volunteer accounts, so you can see the admin's view and the volunteer's
- No payment details — ever
Pilot with your own data
ShelterSync running on your shelter's real animals, people, and programs.
- White-glove data migration handled by the Zoolytix team
- Free training and support for your staff and volunteers
- Invoiced directly — no payment details collected online
Know that no animal was missed today.
Start your trial organization today, or talk to us about piloting ShelterSync with your own data.
Trial environments are prepared for your organization by the Zoolytix team — no payment details collected online