How to keep track of pet sitting clients

The hard part of pet sitting is not the animals. It is the details: which cat gets the pill at night, where the spare key lives, which gate code changed last month. At five clients you can hold it in your head. Somewhere past ten, details start leaking, and the leaks land on someone's pet.

What you actually need to record

For every client, the household basics:

• Name, phone, email, and address, plus parking notes if they matter.
• How you get in: key, lockbox, gate code, alarm code, and what to do if it fails.
• An emergency contact who is not the owner, for when the owner is unreachable.

For every pet, its own sheet:

• Name, species and breed, age, and a photo, so there is never a question of which animal is which.
• Feeding: what, how much, when, and where the food is kept.
• Medications: dose, time of day, and how the animal actually takes them.
• Habits and quirks: hides under the bed, bolts at doors, hates thunder.
• The vet's name and number.
• What normal looks like for this animal, so you notice when something is off.
• Practical locations: leash, litter, treats, cleaning supplies.

A simple test of completeness: if a stranger walked in with only your notes, could they get the evening right? If yes, your notes are done.

The five places sitters keep this, and how each one fails

1. In your head

Free and instant, and it works right up until it does not. The failure mode is silent: you do not know you have forgotten the new medication until you are standing in the kitchen. Memory is the only system with no way to check it.

2. A paper notebook or binder

Fast to write and easy to trust, but there is one copy, and it is usually at home when you need it in someone else's hallway. Paper also goes stale quietly: the feeding change from March lives in a text, not on the page.

3. Text message threads

The information exists, which is the trap. It is spread across months of conversation, one thread per owner, mixed with scheduling chatter. Scrolling for "does Biscuit get the pill morning or night" at 6 a.m. while the dog waits is how most sitters discover they need a system.

4. A spreadsheet

Structured and searchable, and a real step up. But spreadsheets are unpleasant on a phone, they are not connected to your bookings or invoices, and every update is a chore you do later, which becomes never.

5. Dedicated software

Records tied to scheduling and billing, on your phone, updated the moment something changes. The tradeoff is a monthly cost. It earns its keep when the time you spend hunting for details, or the cost of one missed medication, outweighs the fee.

Two tests for any system you pick

• The door test. Standing at the client's door, can you find the gate code in ten seconds?
• The single-place test. When a feeding schedule changes, is there exactly one place to update, and does every future visit see the change?

Paper fails the door test. Texts fail the single-place test. Whatever you choose should pass both.

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