The Care Sheet Every Pet Sitter Should Keep (and Why Vaccination Dates Belong on Your Calendar)

There's a specific bad moment in pet sitting. You're standing in someone's kitchen at 7am, the dog is looking at you, and you cannot remember whether the pill goes with food or after. The owner is on a plane. The instructions were in a text message in March.

Everything below exists to prevent that moment.

What goes on a care sheet

One sheet per pet, one per household for the things that are about the house rather than the animal. The split matters more than it sounds — access instructions belong to the address, feeding notes belong to the animal, and a household with three cats shouldn't make you read the alarm code three times.

Per household:

• Owner name and the best phone number, plus a second contact who is local and has a key
• Full address, and which door you actually use
• Access: lockbox location and code, alarm code and the sequence, which key opens what, whether the side gate latch sticks
• Emergency contact who is not the owner and not travelling with them
• Time windows: morning, midday, evening, and any hard limits ("not before 7", "not after 8")
• Who else might be in the house — a cleaner, a neighbor watering plants, a teenager home from college

Per pet:

• Name, species, breed, rough age or date of birth
• Feeding: amount, food type, where it's stored, times, and anything about how — separate bowls, elevated dish, slow feeder
• Medication: name, dose, timing, with or without food, where it's kept, and what to do if the animal refuses it
• Behavior and safety: bolts at the door, resource-guards toys, doesn't like men in hats, will hide under the bed and needs to be seen before you leave
• Vet name, clinic phone, and whether there's a card on file or a spending authorization
• Vaccination names and expiry dates

That last line is the one most sitters skip, and it's worth its own section.

Why vaccination dates belong on your calendar

Three reasons, in ascending order of how much they cost you.

Boarding and daycare gates. If a client ever needs a backup — you're sick, you're booked, you're on vacation — the fallback is often a boarding facility or daycare, and they will ask for current vaccination records. A client who discovers on the day that their dog's rabies vaccine expired two months ago has a problem, and it becomes your problem because you're the one who found out.

Your insurance and any facility you work with. Many pet-sitting insurance policies and most group-walk arrangements assume the animals are currently vaccinated. Worth reading your own policy on this rather than assuming.

Bite and injury situations. If a dog in your care bites someone — another dog, a passerby, you — the first question anyone asks is about rabies vaccination status. Having a date and a clinic name on file turns a frightening afternoon into a phone call.

So: record the vaccination name and its expiry, and put a reminder 30 days out. Not because you're responsible for the client's vet schedule, but because a short note — "heads up, Biscuit's rabies is due next month" — is the kind of thing that makes people keep you for years. It reads as care, and it costs you a text message.

Keep the access instructions private

Lockbox codes, alarm codes, and key locations are the most sensitive data a pet sitter holds. A spreadsheet of them, synced to a phone that lives in a jacket pocket, is a liability.

Reasonable practice:

• Keep access details separate from the information you'd ever share or print. If you send a care summary to a client, or hand a route to a backup sitter, the codes shouldn't travel with it by default.
• Don't put codes in visit titles or calendar event names, where they'll sync to anything connected to your calendar.
• When a client moves, changes a code, or ends service, delete the old code rather than leaving it in a row.
• If you use a backup sitter, share codes deliberately for the specific dates, not permanently.

None of this requires software. It requires deciding that access data is a different category from feeding notes, and storing it accordingly.

Intake: ask these at the meet-and-greet

The meet-and-greet is the only time you have the owner, the pet, and the house in the same place. Use it.

Beyond the obvious, the questions experienced sitters ask:

• "Show me where the food is, and show me the scoop." Ambiguity about "one cup" disappears when you've seen the container.
• "What happens if she won't take the pill?" There's always a trick — peanut butter, a pill pocket, pinning the jaw. Get the trick.
• "Who else has a key?" Useful if you get locked out, and important if someone unexpected walks in while you're there.
• "What's the vet's name, and is there a card on file?" You want to know before an emergency whether you can authorize treatment.
• "Is there anything she does that would worry me if I didn't know about it?" This open question surfaces more than any checklist — the seizure history, the loud noise at 3am from the pipes, the cat who screams.
• "Where does she hide?" For cats especially. A sitter who can't find the cat can't confirm the cat is fine.

Write it while you're standing there. Not in the car after.

Logging visits so the record is worth something

The care sheet is what you read going in. The visit log is what you write coming out, and it's the part that protects you.

Per visit, the minimum: arrival and departure time, the checklist ticked, and any note. Photos are nice for clients and also happen to be timestamped evidence that you were there and the animal was fine.

What makes a log genuinely useful is consistency about the unusual. "Ate half the breakfast" on Monday means nothing. "Ate half the breakfast" on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is information the owner and the vet need, and you're the only person positioned to see it. A sitter who can say "she's eaten less for three days, here are the dates" is providing real value and, incidentally, is the sitter people recommend.

When the records get too big for paper

The care sheet works beautifully as a binder for fifteen households. What breaks it:

• Updates. A client changes the lockbox code and now you have a binder page and a text message that disagree.
• Two sitters. Anything on paper in your car isn't available to the person covering for you.
• Vaccination dates. They need to be watched, not just recorded, and paper doesn't remind you.
• Finding the right page at 7am in a driveway. With thirty households, this is the actual failure mode.

The solution isn't necessarily software, it's a single source of truth that's with you at every visit and updated in one place. A well-maintained shared sheet on your phone does the job. So does a binder, if you're disciplined about updating it the day something changes.

Start here

The pet care info sheet and vaccination expiry tracker is built for exactly this: one row per pet with feeding, medication, behavior, and vet details, plus a separate vaccination tab with expiry dates and a proof-on-file column. The households and pets template is the version structured to import into Casedaisy, with the access instructions kept in their own private column.

Inside Casedaisy, the care details surface on the visit itself — so the feeding notes and the access instructions are on the screen in your hand when you're standing at the door, the checklist is per household, and vaccination expiry dates raise an alert 30 days out. Access notes stay private and are excluded from exports by default.