The kennel wants proof of vaccination by Friday, and you are fairly sure there is a photo of the card somewhere in your camera roll.

You find it. The date on it is from a visit you remember as “spring”, which turns out to have been nineteen months ago, and the booster you were confident was annual was nothing of the kind.

That Friday is what sends people looking for a pet vaccination reminder app. Most of the results are built on the same idea you had, which is that pet shots happen once a year.

They do not, and that is the entire reason this keeps happening.

One dog, four clocks

Here is what the American Animal Hospital Association actually publishes, from its 2022 canine vaccination table as updated in 2024. We checked it today, 24 September 2026, on AAHA’s own site rather than on anybody’s blog about it.

Read the right-hand column as a set of alarms rather than as veterinary advice. One of them repeats on a three-year cycle. Three repeat yearly. One is a legal date you have to go and look up. No single reminder can be all five, and a household that sets one has quietly decided which of them to get wrong.

You did not forget the shots. You were running one clock for an animal that has four.

Why a pet vaccination reminder app that fires once a year is wrong

Look at the bottom strip of the diagram. Across thirty-six months, a single annual reminder goes off three times, and on two of those three occasions the core vaccine is not due at all.

That is not a harmless extra. It is a false alarm from the one thing in the house that was supposed to be trustworthy, and the second year you ring the vet to be told the dog is fine until next spring is the year you stop believing the app. A fortnight after that the notifications are off, and now you have a complete vaccination database and no warnings, which is worse than the camera roll you started with.

Here is the same dog in Chirpy. Each shot goes into Health as its own record, with the vet’s name on it, the pet’s name in the “who it’s for” field, and its own next-due date. DAP is dated three years out. Leptospirosis and the kennel cough are dated twelve months out. Each of them then runs the same ladder on its own schedule: a month out, a week out, the evening before, the morning of, and it goes to every adult in the household rather than to whoever happened to book the appointment. Nothing in that is a paid feature. Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, with no card.

The three-year one sleeps for two years and eleven months and then wakes up. That is the part a yearly reminder cannot do.

Rabies is a legal date, not a medical one

AAHA gives four of the five vaccines a number. For rabies it gives four words: as required by law. The feline table adds that where local laws permit, a three-year interval with a three-year labelled vaccine is what the task force recommends.

So the interval is set in your state’s regulations, and states do not agree. California’s, at title 17 section 2606.4 of its code of regulations, defines primary immunisation as the first dose given at three months or older, then says dogs shall be revaccinated one year after that, and thereafter at least once every three years. Checked 24 September 2026.

Two consequences, and both of them are scheduling problems rather than medical ones. The first is that the gap between your dog’s second and third rabies shots may be three times the gap between the first and second, which no repeating calendar event expresses. The second is that a dog whose rabies date has lapsed is a legal problem as well as a health one, and that is the date a kennel checks first.

The deadline that catches you is the kennel’s

Every date above is a date your pet needs. The one that ruins a week is a date somebody else needs, and it lands earlier than you think.

The 2020 AAHA/AAFP feline guidelines are blunt about it. For cats going into boarding or other high-exposure, stressful situations, revaccination 7 to 10 days before boarding may be warranted, particularly if the animal has not been vaccinated in the preceding year. Checked on AAHA’s own site, 24 September 2026.

Work that backwards and the arithmetic is unkind.

1. The holiday. The date you have been thinking about.
2. Ten days before it, the shot has to have happened.
3. A week or two before that, the appointment you could actually get.
4. Which means about a month out, roughly when you were booking the flights and thinking about nothing else.

This is the same shape as every deadline a household misses, and it is why a warning on the day is a notification of failure rather than a reminder. We made the same argument about documents in the passport visa renewal reminder, and about cars in car service reminder apps.

In Chirpy those dates are not filed under “pet” somewhere separate. A record with a due date lands on the household calendar alongside everything else that has one, so the person booking the trip sees the booster sitting three weeks before the flights, in the same month view, without having opened a pet app at all.

Cats moved in 2020, and most reminders did not

If you have a cat, one interval in your head is probably out of date. The 2020 AAHA/AAFP table moved the first booster after the kitten series from around twelve months of age to approximately six months, to shorten the window where a kitten’s maternal antibodies have faded but the vaccine has not been topped up.

After that the parenteral FVRCP goes to a three-year interval. The intranasal version of the same vaccine is annual. FeLV is given twelve months after the last kitten dose and then annually for a cat at real risk of meeting other cats, with a two to three year interval considered for lower-risk adults where the product licence allows it. Same animal, same visit, three different rhythms.

One thing the dedicated pet apps do that we do not: Pet Parents, on its own App Store listing checked today, offers “doctor recommended vaccine schedules” so a new kitten gets a course of dates without you looking anything up. Chirpy asks you to type the dates once, off the card your vet has already written, and in exchange they sit on the same calendar as the vet appointment, the kennel booking and the holiday that collides with both, in an app the other adult is already in.

The warning is half of it. The paper is the other half

A reminder tells you to go. It does nothing on the Friday the kennel wants a document, and that request always arrives to the wrong person.

So the card goes in the Vault as a medical document, with the practice as the issuer and the next due date as its expiry. Now the file and the warning are the same object: it shows up in the expiry list, it shows up on the calendar, and either adult can send it on without ringing the other one from the car park. On Chirpy Plus you photograph the card and the camera reads the dates off it; on Basic you type them, which takes about a minute per pet.

The general version of this, including why the camera roll is the worst filing cabinet in the house, is in scan important documents to phone. The rest of the paperwork a household has to be able to produce in a hurry is in important household information, and a pet’s microchip number and the emergency vet belong on that list as much as anything.

Twenty minutes, once, with the card in front of you

1. Get the actual card, not your memory of it. The practice will email a copy if it is lost, and they would rather do that than have you guess.
2. Make one record per vaccine, not one per pet. This is the step that does all the work. A single “Bella: shots” entry recreates the problem you came here with.
3. Copy the next-due date the vet wrote. Not a date you worked out from the table above. Yours is the schedule your vet set for your animal.
4. Put the rabies one in separately, with the expiry the certificate shows, because that is the one with a legal clock on it.
5. Photograph the card into the Vault while you have it out. You will not come back to do this.
6. Add the microchip number and the out-of-hours vet to the same place. Five minutes now, and the one evening you need them you will not be searching.

Then leave it alone. Pet vaccination dates are like the annual bills in our monthly household admin checklist: they need setting up once and then they want nothing from you until the month they matter.

Common questions