PetDesk 4+

I love this app! My local vet posted the app on their website and I decided to check it out. This app is exactly what I needed. I have several pets and trying to remember how much each of them weights, how old, or which brand works better for them was some times a challenge. I used to have all of it on a note stored to my phone. Sometimes I couldn’t find my note. This app really helps me keep track of everything. I schedule appointments, order monthly flea meds, set reminders to give monthly meds, and so on. It also keeps a history of all the visits. It allows family sharing which is nice. BUT... I wish it had a way to give access to others. Maybe like teams, or members kind of thing. That way I could add my husband, and daughter and they could also see or schedule appointments, or give meds when needed, check to see if meds have been given yet and so on. And basically have access to all the same information for easy communication when you have a special needs animal. Our furry additions are members of our family and our family is not just me.

I like that you can schedule appointments and have an easy place to organize most of your pet’s information. There is a fairly annoying bug in that you cannot delete old messages and continue to get reminders—even postcards!—for things already taken care of. For example, the practice forgot to save two of my pets’ records, even though they had them, and set a reminder for me to provide them again. I did. They had them. PetDesk had them. The reminders were deleted from the practice’s systems. But PetDesk continued to remind me about them and there’s no way for either myself or the practice to delete the message with reminder out of PetDesk. You also cannot add OTC medicines to the pet’s medicine list from the user’s side, creating an incomplete record. Finally, you can only add one note per pet, and that is limited to a certain number of characters. This is prohibitive and again leads to an incomplete record. As pets age, people need to be able to track weights, breathing records, and will have increasing questions for vets, all of which could be stored in the pet’s notes... if you could have multiple notes with unlimited character text boxes. Very close to being a great app. Fix the coding on these few things, and it will be ready.

This is a great app when you are able to sync with your Vet. We had trouble with this but the vet took care of sorting out. A couple of issues on the "to-do" list mostly related to syncing with your iCal. First this app doesn't seem to update dates if you miss a dose or off by a couple of days. You would figure it would recalculate the next due date for something like heart worm and update it in the calendar but it doesn't. Next because of this lack of updating dates when you try to manually edit the to-do it doesn't sync to iCal (even though sync is switched on). This provides a challenge because if you forget to change the calendar you now have 2 dates to figure out which is correct. Lastly in the completed section of the app it seems to not register that you checked the box off in a completely different date and marks the history as the scheduled date and not the actual dosed date. At least when checking the box it should ask when the dose was actually given. Too many holes in this app to actually make it worth using, better off using reminders.