Pet sitting software for visits clients can see happened.

Pet sitting software runs pet care that happens in the client's home. It holds the recurring schedule, which sitter covers each visit, the key or lockbox code for the house, the feeding and medication instructions for each pet, the GPS record and photos that prove the visit happened, the report card the owner reads, and the invoice built from completed visits. The point is that the day runs without the office holding it together from memory and text messages.

A kennel runs a facility: pets come to you, stay in runs or rooms, and check in and out on set dates. Pet sitting runs in the field: your sitters go to the client's home, often several homes in a row, and the proof problem is reversed. The kennel has to show what happened inside its building. You have to show that a sitter arrived at a house you do not control, stayed for the booked time, followed the care notes, and locked up. A business that does both can run them in connected systems, but the visit record is what makes pet sitting different. Our kennel management page covers the facility side.

Six things. Repeat rules for walks and sits that survive pauses, holidays, and a client changing days. A key record that says which sitter holds which key, with lockbox and alarm codes shown only to the assigned sitter. Care instructions per pet, not per household, so the second dog's medication is not buried in a general note. GPS check-in and check-out with the route and the time at the house. A report card with photos that goes to the owner without office work. And an invoice that builds itself from completed visits, including holiday surcharges. If a tool misses two of those, your office is keeping the difference in texts and spreadsheets.

Buy when a maintained product handles your visits, keys, care notes, proof, and billing with reasonable setup. Time To Pet is the name most pet care businesses start with, and its own pricing page, checked on 12 November 2026, lists Lite at $25 a month and Solo at $50 a month, with team pricing built on a base fee plus a charge per active sitter; confirm current pricing on the vendor site. Precise Petcare, Pet Sitter Plus, and Scout also serve sitters and walkers, and each fits a different size of team. Build custom when the way you work breaks the tool: sitters paid on rules the product cannot express, several service areas with their own cover rules, a client portal that must match a wider pet business, or reporting your office rebuilds by hand every week.

For a small, well-defined task with someone technical managing it, freelancers are often cheaper. The pattern that goes wrong is a non-technical buyer coordinating several freelancers becoming the project manager, the tester, and the person who discovers the pieces do not fit. A pet sitting software build earns its fee when the work needs coordination across the schedule, the sitter app, key custody, proof, report cards, and billing: one accountable party, one phase price, and checkpoints against the whole visit. If your need is one screen or one fix, hire the freelancer.

The first paid phase may cover a bounded audit, a proof of concept, a recovery plan, or a small first release, and first phases start at $10000. The final price depends on how deep the visit workflow goes, how many kinds of users it serves, what it needs to connect to, whether client and pet records need moving over, and how the sitter app must behave with no signal. The agreed phase is priced in writing before it starts.

Timing depends on scope: a bounded audit or proof of concept is a smaller engagement, while a platform with several service areas, sitter pay rules, and a client portal takes longer. The schedule is set once the first visit type and what 'done' looks like are clear.

Each household carries a repeat rule, not a list of separate bookings. A regular walk might be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at midday. When the client goes on holiday, the rule pauses and resumes on the date they return, so no visits are created and then cancelled one by one. A permanent change, from three days a week to two, recalculates the visits ahead and leaves the completed history alone. A one-off extra visit sits beside the rule without changing it. The rule is the record, so the schedule cannot drift away from what the client agreed.

The sitter checks in at the house and checks out when the visit ends. The record keeps the times, the place, and, for a walk, the route taken. That record is what the report card and the invoice stand on. GPS is not perfect: in a tower block or a basement flat the reading can land a street away, and in a dead zone there may be no signal at all. A sound system says how accurate the reading was instead of showing a confident wrong pin, and it records the whole visit on the phone with no signal, then sends it when the connection returns, keeping the time the sitter did each step rather than the time it uploaded. Test the worst route your sitters walk, not the office car park.

Every key gets a record: which house it opens, which sitter holds it now, and when custody last changed hands. The key itself carries a code, never the address, so a lost key cannot be matched to a house from the tag. Lockbox, alarm, and gate codes live on the visit, visible only to the sitter assigned to that visit, on that day. When a sitter leaves the team, the record shows every key and code they held, so nothing walks away unaccounted for. Access details never belong in a group text or a shared spreadsheet, where they stay readable long after the person has left.

The report card is the record the owner actually reads, so it is built from the visit itself, not written up later. It shows when the sitter arrived and left, the walk route where there was one, photos from the visit, and the care checklist as it was completed: food, water, medication, litter, and anything the owner asked to be checked. Notes from the sitter sit alongside, in plain words. Because it is assembled from the check-in, the checklist, and the photos as they happen, the office does not spend the evening turning texts into updates, and the owner is not left asking whether anyone came.

Instructions live on each pet's record: what food, how much, where it is kept, medication with dose and time, vet details, and the behaviour notes a stranger needs, such as a dog that cannot go off the lead or a cat that hides for the first ten minutes. The visit turns that record into a short checklist for that pet, in the order the work happens. When the owner changes an instruction, they change it once, on the record, and the next visit uses the new version. The cover sitter who has never met the pet works from the same brief as the regular sitter, not from a note on the fridge or a screenshot of an old text.

The visit moves, and everything the cover sitter needs moves with it: the pet's care checklist, the key or lockbox position, the alarm code, and the household notes. The office can see which sitters are free, nearby, and already known to that household, and reassign the visit in minutes. The client gets one clear message that a different sitter will come, and the report card still arrives as normal. The failure this prevents is the quiet one: a visit that stays assigned to someone who is at home ill, discovered only when the owner asks why nobody came.

A completed visit is a billable record. The invoice builds from the visits actually done, at the rate for that service type, with holiday surcharges applied on the dates you set and package or prepaid walks drawn down as they are used. A cancelled or missed visit does not bill. The owner can pay from the portal, and the office can see what is owed by household without rebuilding the week from a calendar. Sitter pay follows the same record, so the hours and visits behind a pay run can be checked against the proof of visit, not against memory.

You judge what you can see, not the code. Every checkpoint is working software you click through yourself, tested against the visit agreed at the start: a repeat rule that survives a holiday pause, a visit completed with no signal that still produces a correct report card, a key handed to a cover sitter with the custody record updated. Progress is reported in plain language: what changed, what's next, and what it costs. Because you own the code, the accounts, and the operating notes throughout, nothing about the work is locked inside our heads. Our job is to make the work checkable; your job is to check it against your business.

You own the code built for you and control where it lives, the cloud accounts, the data, analytics, and third-party subscriptions. Outside services and open-source pieces keep their own licence terms. The operating notes and handover material stay current so another capable team can take over.

Yes. Takeover is a common first engagement, and it always starts with an audit: where the code lives, how your data is organized, what is tested, which outside services it depends on, who can access what, and how updates go live. Code that is understandable and fit for the next release stays; only the parts blocking reliability get replaced. And if you already paid another vendor and have nothing working, the audit tells you which story you have before you spend more: the most expensive version is the product that looks finished, clean screens and clicking buttons, while underneath nothing is tested and the security checks run in the browser, where anyone can tamper with them, instead of on the server where they hold.