How do you keep track of your pet sitting lifestyle?

Sitter Questions, Advice & Chat
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Sitters when it comes to administration are you a planner, data recorder, analyst or be honest, fly by the seat of your house sitting pants? (ONLY related to being organised/or not with your own admin of course:)) :wink:

We’d love to know also any ideas and suggestions for those “less organised” who would like some help in becoming “More Maryse”

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Wow! Keeping track like that seems like a full-time job to me! :joy: I use my Google calendar to remember the dates & keep track of the countries & number of cats/dogs/… but that’s about it. Your system does look fun though & a great way to look back at everything!

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Though we don’t have as many sits (we started in 2016 and, though we travel full time, we only house sit part time), we do keep track in a multitude of ways.

As full-time travelers, having all of our planning and notes online is important. I used to use Evernote for work, but have transitioned to OneNote since it is included in software we already pay for. The Housesitting section includes a page for every sit we do, each started from a template of questions that we fill out during our video call or from tidbits we glean from the HO post or other communications, and lists next steps. They are organized into Confirmed/Upcoming and Completed sections. There is also a template for questions to ask and a walk-through template, which I can modify as needed.

Google Calendar events (colour bars) help us to keep track of all of our booked accommodations so we know where we need to be and when and what gaps we need to fill.

Our Excel Record of Sits is a summary document with one row/record per sit. It includes location, dates, animals, contact details, source of the sit, status (upcoming, in progress, completed, or cancelled–a new addition last year!), our notes after the sit and the review that we received. From that, I can tell you that we have:

  • completed 34 sits
  • in 10 countries
  • cared for 89 animals
  • sat for a total of 611 nights = 1.7 years or 20 months or 87 weeks (had to add those last details after seeing Maryse’s!)

Our sits came from 6 sources: 70% from THS, 29% from 4 other platforms, and 1% from Facebook. Guess I’m also a bit of an Excel nerd!

We also keep a brief summary of past (with reviews), upcoming, and current sits on the housesitting page of our website.

Great question! Looking forward to reading about how others do it, too. I know from past discussions there are some pretty ingenious record-keepers out there.

Coral

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We have set up a calendar in a spreadsheet which we use to plan all the dates of our past and future housesits which is all colour coded depending on whether they are confirmed or we’ve just applied for them and awaiting the homeowners to respond.

Chris (being a web developer) has also set up something on our website where we can log every housesit and what animals they have. From this he has set it up so we can have an easy read out of our stats (the pet stats don’t include repeat sits):

  • 72 housesits
  • 88 dogs
  • 47 cats
  • 9 flocks of chickens
  • 4 tortoises
  • 3 tanks of fish
  • 2 donkeys
  • 1 guinea fowl
  • 5 horses
  • 1 pig
  • 2 flock of ducks
  • 1 herd of alpacas
  • 2 flock of sheep
  • 1 herd of cows
  • 1 bearded dragon
  • 1 gecko
  • 1 hamster
  • 1 parrot
  • 3 peacocks
  • 1 flock of doves
  • 1 flock quails
  • 2 rabbits
  • 2 cockatiels
  • 1 flock of geese

It’s a lot easier to keep tabs using some sort of log then trying to remember them all!

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