Preparing your sitter without handing over your account

Guðmundur and Ásta are going away for a week, and Móna is staying home. Someone still has to come in twice a day, and that person needs to know what to do without either of them in the room to ask. There are three usual ways households handle this, and none of them sit quite right.

A note on the counter, written in a hurry the night before a flight, that gets wet by the second day or slides behind the toaster. A screenshot of this week's schedule, sent the morning they leave, already wrong the moment an appointment moves or a dose gets pushed back a day. Or the fastest option of all: hand over your own login, which gives a near-stranger your medical records, your spending, and the ability to change something by accident, on top of the thing they actually came to do. Most households pick one of these, and most people feel a little uneasy about it the whole time they are away.

What a sitter actually needs

A four-day visit and a household's full history are two different things, and it is worth being sharp about the difference. What a sitter needs is small: what is due today, how much food and when, what the cat cannot have, and who to call if something goes wrong. What they do not need is everything else MoonCats keeps — every past dose, every journal entry, every household cost. That is not a privacy nicety on top of the useful set; it is a separate category of information a sitter has no reason to see, and handing it over anyway is exactly what makes the login option feel wrong. Sending the first without the second is the whole idea of a care-share link.

What the link shows

An owner or admin generates a link for Móna, and the page it opens shows today's medications and care tasks, feeding notes, allergies and known adverse reactions, and an emergency vet name and number. Nothing older, nothing else.

One detail matters more than it looks: if Móna has an as-needed medication, the link marks it as as-needed, with the minimum gap between doses. Someone who does not know Móna cannot tell a rescue dose from a routine one just by reading a name on a screen, so the link says it plainly instead of leaving them to guess.

Why it is read-only

The sitter can read the sheet. They cannot log a dose, tick off a task, or change anything on it. That is worth stating as a trade rather than a feature: you lose a record of exactly what the sitter did while you were away, and you gain certainty that nothing in your household's record can be edited by a link that anyone holding it can open. You will not come home to a log of what happened while you were gone, only to a household record no stranger could have touched. For most people, that is the trade they would make anyway — it is just easier to make it on purpose than by accident.

It is also worth being plain about what a link is. It has no login attached to it — whoever has the URL can open the sheet until it expires or you revoke it. That is not a flaw to work around; it is how the link is meant to work, and it is worth treating it accordingly. Send it the way you would hand over a spare key, not a password.

Setting it up before you leave

An owner or admin creates the link and picks how long it lasts, anywhere from one day to ninety. It is shown once, on screen, and cannot be recovered afterward — so send it to the sitter right then, rather than meaning to come back to it. Match the duration to the actual trip. A week away calls for a week, not the maximum; a shorter window is a smaller thing to have to think about once you are home.

The calendar feed

The link includes a calendar feed the sitter can subscribe to in their own calendar app. If Móna has a vet appointment during the stay, it shows up on their calendar the way any other event would, and it stays right if the appointment moves. Nobody has to remember to text about it.

Coming home

Revoke the link once you are back, and it stops working right away. Revoked and expired links stay listed in your household afterward, so you keep a plain record of who could see the care sheet, and for how long.

What the link does not replace

A page cannot cover a habit you know and a sitter does not — that Móna hides under the bed for the first hour, or that the food goes down before the medication, not after. It cannot make the call you would want if something looked off, either. Leave a phone number they can actually reach you on, walk through anything unusual before you leave, and let the link do the part it is good at. It removes the note on the counter, the guessing at a stale screenshot, and the account you would rather not hand over. It was never meant to replace the conversation, only the parts that used to stand in for one.