June 26, 2026
The Hunting Outfitter's Pre-Season Setup Checklist
The months between booking season and opening day go fast. By the time you're turning clients loose in camp, the window to catch a missing waiver, an unsigned agreement, or an outstanding balance has closed. Everything that can be locked down beforehand should be.
Work through this checklist in the weeks before season and you'll spend opening morning on the hunt, not on the phone.
1. Confirm your hunts, seasons, and dates
Pull up every hunt type in your system and verify the dates, areas, and prices match what you've confirmed with your guide areas and applicable licensing. Common places this goes wrong:
- Hunt dates that changed after initial setup and were never updated in the system
- Season regulations that shifted a date or bag limit — booking details still reflecting last year's rules
- A new hunt area added but the hunt types that should be available there weren't linked to it
Fix these before the system sends any confirmations or client prep info. A client who shows up with the wrong arrival date because your system said the wrong thing is a difficult conversation.
2. Update your agreements and waivers
Every year brings something that needs updating: a changed cancellation policy, a new liability clause, an updated guide area, a regulatory requirement that shifted. Review your booking agreement and liability waiver against anything that changed in the last twelve months.
Pay particular attention to:
- Cancellation and refund terms. Be specific about deposit forfeiture windows. Ambiguity here is where disputes start.
- Firearms requirements for non-resident hunters. If you guide Canadian hunts, the RCMP Non-Resident Firearm Declaration (form RCMP 5589) must be completed before the hunter arrives with their firearms. Make sure your intake flow collects firearm details — make, model, serial number, caliber, barrel length, action type — as part of the booking.
- Emergency contact and medical information. For remote operations, this is as important as the liability waiver.
Once updated, confirm the new version is what's being sent to clients — not a cached or previously-sent copy.
3. Lock in deposits and outstanding balances
Check every confirmed booking that hasn't collected a deposit. This is usually the result of bookings taken before a deposit policy was in place, or clients who confirmed verbally and were going to “send something later.”
Before season:
- Send a payment request to any client with an outstanding deposit
- Identify bookings where a client has not paid and has not responded — decide now whether to hold the spot or release it
- On Pro plans, set balance due dates and confirm automated payment reminders are configured — the accounts receivable view surfaces every open balance and which ones have already received a reminder
4. Send hunter prep information
Getting prep information out 30–45 days before the hunt gives clients time to act on any gaps — an unsigned waiver, an unpaid balance, missing firearm details — while you still have time to address them before opening day.
What a standard pre-hunt packet should cover:
- Travel instructions and check-in time
- What to bring (gear, licensing, required documentation)
- Outstanding document signatures if any
- Outstanding balance reminder if applicable
- Firearm declaration details for non-resident hunters in Canada (make, model, serial, caliber)
- Emergency contact instructions for the guide area
Hunt Outfitter's client portal gives each booked hunter a login where they see their countdown, travel notes, payment status, and documents waiting for their signature — the welcome message is sent automatically on booking and the portal always shows the current version of what you've set up. On Pro plans, packing lists per hunt type are also visible to clients in the portal.
5. Brief your guides
Guides need to know their schedule, their clients, and anything relevant to the hunts they're taking before they can do anything else. Assignments should be locked in, client notes visible in the booking record, and any guide-specific tasks that need to happen before the hunt added to their task list.
A guide portal scopes each guide's view to their assignments — the clients they're taking, the field notes for their bookings. When something changes after you've briefed them, the guide sees the update in the portal without you resending a schedule. For anything that needs a direct conversation, client notes in the booking record are the place to put what the guide needs to know.
6. Build your camp task list and shopping list
Camp prep follows the same pattern every year — supplies, equipment, food, bunk assignments. Get your camp task list and shopping list into the system early enough to work through them before you're running on opening-week adrenaline. Party sizes from your bookings feed into the quantities you need, so planning for consecutive weeks with different group sizes is straightforward from the booking data.
7. Run a test booking
Before the first real client goes through the system this season, walk through a test booking from the hunter's perspective: create a booking, pay a test deposit, sign an agreement, check what the client portal shows, and verify the confirmation email looks right.
This catches things like a form asking for the wrong information, a confirmation email with placeholder text, or an agreement referencing last year's cancellation terms. Find those on a test booking — not on the first live one of the season.
Hunt Outfitter has a free Starter plan and a 14-day free trial on paid tiers — no credit card required. The Help Center covers each of these setup steps in more detail, including guide onboarding, agreement templates, and firearms declaration setup.