Pet Sitting Client Forms: What to Collect Before the First Booking
Last updated: 03 October 2026
You don't need a filing cabinet. You need four documents and an order to use them in.
The four that cover most of it
- A client intake form — the facts. Owner contacts, an emergency contact who isn’t the owner, the animal’s details, access instructions, the vet, and the medication.
- A service agreement — the terms. What you do, when, what it costs, how cancellations work, who is responsible for what, and what happens when something goes wrong.
- A veterinary authorization — the emergency. Who decides, how much you can approve, and whether resuscitation is authorized.
- A daily report — the record. What happened on each visit and what the owner should know.
That’s the minimum for taking private clients. Everything else is an improvement on those four.
The order they actually get used in
- Inquiry — the intake form starts here. Some of it gets filled in on the phone.
- Meet and greet — you finish the intake, you walk the house, you decide.
- Before the first booking — agreement signed, authorization signed, access agreed in writing.
- Every visit — short report.
- Monthly — invoice.
Most problems trace back to a step that got skipped because everything was going well and it felt like paperwork for paperwork’s sake.
What’s usually missing
The four documents above are the obvious ones. These three are the ones people discover they needed afterward:
- A key release log — who has the key, when it came back. Boring until there’s a dispute about it.
- An incident report — something minor happened, you mentioned it verbally, nothing was written down, and three weeks later the story is different.
- A separate consent for anything outside the normal routine — off-leash walking, taking the animal in your car, using photos on your own social media. Those need their own signature rather than a paragraph buried in the agreement.
What you don’t need yet
An LLC, a custom CRM, a booking system with a monthly fee, a logo. None of those are why the first month is hard. Get the four documents, take two or three clients, and see what actually breaks before you buy anything.
What paperwork does not do
It doesn’t replace insurance, and it doesn’t stop things going wrong. What it does is make the conversation afterward shorter, because there’s a record of what was agreed and what happened. Two different jobs, and you need both.
If you’d rather start from a template
Our pack has all four, plus the key log, the incident report and the consents, as editable Word files and printable PDFs in A4 and US Letter. The incident report form is free if you want to look at one first.
This is general information for pet sitters, not legal or tax advice. Requirements differ by state and city — check with your own state or local authority, and have any agreement reviewed by a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.