--- title: "Client management for dog walkers: keeping track without losing evenings" description: "What to record about every dog and owner, where to keep it, and why a notes app stops working at around fifteen clients." canonical_url: "https://woodle-app.com/guides/client-management-for-dog-walkers" last_updated: "2026-09-17T09:00:16.454Z" --- The first five clients live in your head. You know which dog hates the postman, whose key safe sticks, and which owner wants a message after every walk. Somewhere between ten and twenty clients, that stops working. Not gradually — you just find yourself standing outside a house trying to remember a code. ## What you need to know about every dog The test for whether a detail belongs on file is simple: **would you need it in a field with one bar of signal?** - **The vet.** Practice name and phone number. Not "the one on the high street". - **Emergency contact.** Someone other than the owner, who can actually get there. - **Medical.** Allergies, medication, what they must not eat, anything a vet would want to know. - **Behaviour.** Reactive to what. Recall, honestly assessed. Dogs it cannot meet. - **Access.** Key safe code, which door, where the lead lives, the alarm. - **Off-lead consent**, in writing. Your insurer may want to see it, and after an incident is the wrong time to discover you never got it. And about the owner: name, phone, address, how they want to be contacted, and what they have agreed to pay. ## Where it should live Not in your head, and not only in your phone's notes app — the failure mode there is not losing the data, it is not finding it. Six months of notes in one app, and the code for number 14 is somewhere between a shopping list and a parking reminder. Not in a shared cloud document either, if it needs signal to open. The moment you need a vet's number is the moment you are in a wood. What works is a record per dog, stored on the device, that you can reach in three taps. Whether that is an app, a card index in the car, or a printed sheet in the glovebox matters less than that it exists and is current. ## The onboarding conversation Most of the above gets collected once, when a client starts. Doing it properly then saves a year of small interruptions. Ask for it in writing rather than over the phone — a form, an email, anything you can keep. You will misremember a spoken postcode. You will not misremember a written one. Agree the practical things at the same time: which days, what time window, what happens when they cancel late, what happens when you are ill, how you will let them know the walk happened. That last one sounds minor and is not. A photo and one line after the walk is the cheapest loyalty in this trade, and it removes most of the evening messages asking how it went. ## Keeping it current Dogs change. A puppy that could not be let off lead at eight months can at eighteen. A vet practice moves. An owner's new partner is now the emergency contact. Nothing enforces this except a habit. The easiest one: whenever something surprises you on a walk, update the record before you drive off. If you tell yourself you will do it later, you will not. ## When a notes app stops being enough The signal is not the number of clients — it is the number of times a week you look something up and cannot find it quickly. Once that is more than once or twice, the system is costing you more than it saves. What you are looking for at that point is not "more features". It is: one record per dog, reachable offline, current, and connected to what you actually bill. When the walks you did and the client you did them for live in the same place, the end of the month stops being a reconstruction job — and that, rather than any individual feature, is what changes how the work feels. ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](/sitemap.md) for all pages.