What records should a breeder keep for their own files?
Keep one record per litter holding the parents, the whelp date, every puppy with its identifying marks and microchip number, the complete weighing grid, every health and worming event with the puppies it applied to, the socialization log, and which family each puppy went to. It is a different document from the packets you send home, because it is the only one allowed to contain all the puppies and all the buyers at once.
Your copy and their copy are not the same document
A go home packet is written for one family about one puppy, and it must never carry another buyer’s name, another puppy’s microchip number or the price anyone paid. Your own record is the opposite: its value is that everything is in one place, side by side.
So they are two documents with two readers, and trying to make one serve both ends badly — usually as a spreadsheet that gets printed for the family with a column hidden, which is one unhidden column away from an awkward phone call.
PuppyGoHomePacket produces both from the same litter. The packets go to the families; the litter record is yours, and it is the document that carries the events that applied to only some puppies, with those puppies named.
What belongs in the litter record
The litter itself — sire, dam, whelp date, your kennel details and your vet. A roster of every puppy with its collar colour or mark, sex, colour, microchip number, go-home date and which family took it. The complete weighing grid, every date and every puppy, with the day of the litter beside each date. Every health event and every socialization event, with the puppies each one applied to.
What you will reach for it for, years later, is almost always one of three things: a microchip number when a database query comes in, a worming or vaccination date when a buyer’s vet asks, or the weights when you are deciding whether to repeat a mating. All three are cheap to keep and impossible to reconstruct.
Keep it somewhere you will still have it in five years
The point of a litter record is the day you need it years later, which makes the storage question a practical one rather than a technical one. A spreadsheet on a laptop that gets replaced, or a notebook in the whelping shed, is a record you will not have on the day the microchip database calls.
PuppyGoHomePacket saves the litter in your browser on the machine you entered it on, and writes a backup file — photos and all — whenever you ask for one. It tells you when you have changes that are not yet in a backup. Keep that file wherever the rest of your kennel records live, and export the litter record PDF once the litter has gone home, because a PDF opens in anything.
A litter you cannot open in three years is not a record.
Related
Make this packet without retyping it eight times
PuppyGoHomePacket is a puppy go home packet maker for breeders: you enter the litter once — sire, dam, pedigree, weights, vaccinations, feeding plan — and it generates a finished packet for every puppy, a ZIP of the litter, and your own litter record. The editor is free and there is no account: build the whole thing and preview every page with your own dogs in it before deciding anything.
Last updated 2026-09-13.