Best Practices For Visit Report Cards

Visit report cards are a great way to let your clients know what happened on their pet’s visit. Here are our tips for best practices for customizing your visit report cards so that they are simple to fill out and send to your clients.

Create Different Report Cards For Different Services

There are likely different tasks that you do for each different service that you offer. For example, cleaning the litter box might be a common thing you do on a pet sitting visit, but probably isn’t something you do on a dog walk. In these cases, it makes sense to have a separate report card for each different category of service.

Create A Blank Report Card For Services That Don’t Need A Report

You may have some services, like Meet & Greets or key pick-ups, that don’t require a report card. Creating a blank report card and linking these services to it or making a blank report card your default report card will prevent a report card from showing up when completing these types of services on the mobile app.

Use The “Once Per Event” Option For General Questions About The Visit

When creating report card questions, there are two options for where the question will be shown, “Once Per Pet” and “Once Per Event”. The “Once Per Pet” option is best used for questions specific to the pet, like if they were fed, walked, or given medication, while the “Once Per Event” option can be used for tasks like taking out the trash, bringing in the mail, or watering plants.

Ask Questions General Questions That Apply To All Pets When Possible

Every question you add as “Once Per Pet” will be listed on each pet’s report card regardless of what type of pet it is. To make your report cards easier to fill out, try and make most of your questions apply to all types of pets. For example, instead of having separate questions for “Was the dog fed?” and “Was the cat fed?”, have a single “Was the pet fed?” question.

Use The “Hide” Option For Questions That Don’t Apply To All Pets

There are some questions you may want on your report card that can’t apply to all pets. For these types of questions, you can use the “Hide” option so that when you skip this question when it doesn’t apply, that question isn’t included on the report card that is sent to the client. For example, questions about going for a walk are typically only going to apply to dogs; if you set questions about walks to be hidden when skipped when you fill out a report card for a cat, your client won’t see the question about walks on the report card they receive.

Only Create Questions For Things That Are Commonly Done

It can be tempting to create a report card question for every possible scenario that could happen at a visit, but doing this will create very long report cards that will be a lot to scroll through and fill out when completing a visit. It’s best to create questions for only the things that are commonly done at a visit. For example, if you primarily care for only dogs and cats, it may not be worthwhile to create questions that are specific to other types of animals, and in those rare instances when you do care for another type of pet, you can always type up the specifics of what you did with that pet in a note to the client.