The handover sheet a pet sitter actually needs
You are going away and somebody else is looking after the animals — a sitter, a neighbour, a boarding kennel, a friend. Everything you know about those animals is in your head. The person taking over knows none of it, and will not know what to ask.
One sheet, not several
If there is more than one animal in the house, put them all on the same page. Two sheets get separated, and the one that goes missing is always the one that mattered. A printed page on the counter, written on by hand, also beats a file on a device the carer does not have.
Who the animal is, in enough detail for a stranger
Name, species and breed, age, sex and whether they are neutered. Then the part people skip: colour, markings and the microchip number.
The reason is narrow and worth stating plainly. If an animal is lost while you are away, that information has to exist without you. You may be on a plane, asleep in another time zone, or simply unreachable for the two hours that count. A carer who can describe the animal accurately and read a chip number to a practice, a warden or a rescue can act on it. A carer who can only say "a smallish brown dog" cannot. Leave a recent photograph with the sheet, and put a copy on the carer's phone.
Feeding, in your words
Write what they are given, when, where, and where the food is kept. Write it the way you want it followed, because what is written is what will be followed.
Then one line that only you can write: what this animal must never be given. Not a general list — the habits. The bin. The table. The compost heap. The neighbour who passes things over the fence.
Why there is no general list on the sheet
Readers expect one here, and it is the wrong thing to print. Any such list differs by species, and none of them is complete — there is always something else that belongs on it. A carer who reads a printed list takes it as the whole story, stops thinking, and ends up more confident and less careful than a carer who read one line you wrote about the animal in front of them.
The same reasoning rules out amounts. What an animal needs differs by species, breed, age and individual, and a figure printed by a piece of software gets believed over the owner's handwriting. Leave the amount to the label, the tub, or your own note beside it — and say on the sheet that it is not to be guessed.
The shape of the day, and the door
Exercise, toileting, sleeping, how long they can be left alone, where they like to be. Then behaviour, which owners find the hardest section because it is made of things they stopped noticing years ago: how the animal is with people it has never met, what noise empties the room, how it signals that it has had enough before it does anything about it, whether it can be picked up and by whom, how it is with other animals and with children, whether it comes when called.
Finish that section with escape routes — the door, the gate, the window, the flap. The door left open is the disaster that actually happens, and a carer has no way of guessing which door it is.
The field everybody forgets
Health goes on the sheet in your words: what is ongoing, where anything is kept, and the timing exactly as the label says. Then the emergency page — you, a second contact for when you cannot be reached, your usual practice, whatever you name as the out-of-hours option, the insurer and the policy number.
And then the field owners forget until they are standing in a waiting room: written authority for the carer to seek treatment, and a plain answer to who pays. Sign it before you go, have the carer sign it too, and give the practice a copy if they will take one. Somebody at a counter with a frightened animal, no written permission and no answer to the money question loses time trying to reach you, and that is the wrong moment to be discovering it. If you have no insurance, write that on the line along with what you want to happen instead: who pays, up to what, and what to do if you cannot be reached.
End with a tick sheet
A row per animal per job, a column per day, and a line for the carer's initials. It is reassuring in both directions. The carer can see what has been done rather than holding it in their head or guessing whether somebody else already did it, and you come home to a record instead of a shrug. If anything did go wrong, there is a written account of what was actually done and when.
Print it before you go
The free Pet Care Handover Sheet lays all of that out for every animal in the house on one printable page. It runs entirely on your device, and it records what you instruct while instructing nothing itself — no amounts, no foods, no medicine names and no guidance of its own.