Handing over your round to someone else

There is a moment that tells you exactly how well-organised a pet-care business is, and it is not an audit. It is the morning you wake up with flu and have to get somebody else round eleven dogs.

In a business where everything is written down, that is a phone call and a shared schedule. In a business where it is not, it is forty minutes of dictation while feeling awful, and it will still go wrong, because nobody can dictate a round.

What a handover actually requires

The route and the order

Not just a list of jobs — the sequence, with times, and the constraints that make the sequence necessary. The dog who must be out before eleven. The house where the cleaner arrives at one. Somebody who does not know the round cannot infer any of that from a list.

Access, per property

How to get in, where the key is, which gate, whether to ring, what the alarm does. This is the category that generates the most emergency phone calls, and it is the easiest to write down in advance.

The animal, honestly

Recall, off lead or not, reactivity, handling notes, what they are like with other dogs, whether they can be walked in a group, medication and consent. Written down at the standard of "somebody who has never met this dog", not "reminder to myself".

Emergencies

Vet, emergency contact, what the stand-in may decide alone and what they must ring you about, and who pays. Agree this with owners in advance so it is a plan rather than an improvisation.

The clients, and the boundary

What to say, and what not to. A stand-in should have what they need for the jobs they are covering — and not the rest of your book. That is a permissions question, and it is much easier to answer if the system supports it than if the answer is "I sent them a spreadsheet".

Tell the owners yourself

Do not let clients discover a new person at the door. One message, early, naming who is covering and for how long, does an enormous amount of work — and it gives anyone uncomfortable the chance to say so, which is far better than finding out afterwards.

If the cover is planned rather than an emergency, a handover walk with both of you present is worth every minute it costs.

Write the record as you go, not for the handover

The real lesson of a bad handover is that it was not a handover problem. It was six months of information living in one person's head.

Records maintained continuously — the gate code updated the day it changed, the behaviour note added the week the dog started lunging at bikes — are accurate when they are needed. Records written specially for a handover are written under time pressure, from memory, on the worst day of the month.

The useful habit is to write for the stand-in all the time. When you add a note to a pet's record, write it as though somebody else will read it, because eventually somebody will.

Afterwards

Two things when you are back. Ask what was missing — the stand-in knows precisely which forty seconds of your round are undocumented, and they will forget within a week. And check what actually happened: every job should record who did it, so the history of the week you were ill is as complete as any other week.

In CorePaw Pro every client and pet record carries access instructions, handling and safety notes, feeding instructions, the vet and the emergency contact on the card you read at the door; cover walkers are added with limited access, assigned only the bookings they are covering, and every completed job records who did it — on the owner's report and in your own history.

See client and pet records, or team management.