You're standing in the hallway with your bag already on your shoulder, running through everything your sitter needs to know, and you can feel yourself forgetting half of it in real time. This is the list for that moment — and for the week before it, so you're not making it up on the spot.
The short answer
A proper handover covers five things: routine, medical and emergency info, behaviour and quirks, house logistics, and how to reach you. Miss any one of them and you're the person getting a 9pm text asking something you definitely would have mentioned if you'd remembered.
1. Routine
- Feeding times, amounts, and exactly what ("half a cup" means nothing without knowing whose cup)
- Water — where the bowl lives, and if it needs refreshing more than once a day
- Walks or outdoor time — how long, how often, on or off lead
- Toileting — where, how often, any signs something's off
- Sleep — where they sleep, and anything that disrupts it
2. Medical and emergency
- Your vet's name, number, and address
- After-hours emergency vet, if different
- Medications — what, how much, when, and how (some pets are escape artists when it comes to tablets)
- Allergies or conditions the sitter needs to know before they offer a treat or change anything
- Pet insurer details, if you have one
- Who's allowed to make a decision if you can't be reached
This is the section people forget under pressure, because it's the one you hope never gets used. It's also the one that matters most if it does.
3. Behaviour and quirks
- Commands they actually respond to — not the ones you wish they responded to
- Known triggers: other animals, specific sounds, certain visitors
- Anything that reads as "wrong" but is completely normal for them (hiding, ignoring people for the first hour, a bit of dramatic sulking)
- How they behave around strangers, kids, or other pets, if relevant
For dogs: walking routine, leash behaviour, recall reliability, any reactivity.
For cats: hiding spots when stressed, whether they're an indoor-only escape risk, how they take to new people in the space.
4. House logistics
- Where everything lives — food, leads, litter, medication
- Anything off-limits (rooms, furniture, the good couch)
- Access — keys, alarm codes, parking
- Anyone else who might pop by and should be expected
5. How to reach you
- Your number, and the best way to reach you if you're travelling
- How often you want updates, if at all
- What actually counts as an emergency worth interrupting your trip for
The part nobody plans for: keeping it current
Most handovers are accurate the day you write them and quietly wrong two months later — new medication, new vet, a habit that's changed. A note on the counter doesn't update itself, and neither does a group text from six sits ago.
This is the exact problem Quirks & All is built around: one link with all of this on it, that updates the moment anything changes, so the version your sitter sees is always the current one — not whatever was true when you first wrote it down.
→ Open the printable Pet Sitter Instructions template — everything above as a clean page you can print or save as a PDF.