Sereno

1 · First things first

Three steps, and the app starts genuinely working for you. The second one is the one almost everybody skips, and it's the one that matters most.

1. Create your pet. A name and a species are enough to start; photo, breed, date of birth and weight can come later.
2. Declare their chronic conditions, from the pet profile. This isn't paperwork: it's how the app works out what to show you — with kidney disease you get SC fluids and blood values, with epilepsy you get the seizure timer.
3. Add the medications they're on, with the real times. From that moment the reminders arm themselves, without you setting anything up.

2 · How the app is laid out

There are five tabs along the bottom of the screen. They are the app's five drawers: nearly everything you're looking for lives in one of them.

The Home screen, top to bottom

• The pet selector. If you have more than one, this is where you say who you're talking about: everything below changes to match. Tapping the name or the photo opens the profile.
• The Emergency Card, the panel right below it. Chapter 13.
• Today for… with the day's doses, and a Next 7 days tab for looking ahead.
• The quick actions, the grid of tiles. Chapter 4.
• Recent activity: what was recorded, by you or by a family member. "You gave Metacam", "Marco skipped the insulin", "You logged a symptom: limping". This is where you see what the other person did while you weren't there.

3 · The pet profile

Pet profile opens when you tap the name or the photo at the top of the Home screen. It's the most important screen after the Home, and it's the one almost nobody opens — even though it's where you decide what the app will show you.

What's inside, from the top

• Weight. The current figure and how it has moved. You add a reading with + Log weight: it's the first thing a vet looks at, and two readings are enough for the app to start showing you the direction.
• Veterinarian. Name, phone and address. The number becomes callable with one tap.
• Chronic conditions. As many as you need, and if the one you're after isn't in the list you type it in under Other conditions. For each one you can say since when.  This is what switches the right features on by itself.
• Monitoring tools. The switches, one by one: the ones you turn on appear in the Home screen's quick actions. Chapter 10.
• Allergies and Important notes. Free text: this is where you write down the things you'd say out loud to whoever is looking after them instead of you.
• Health data. A summary for this pet — vaccines, medications, visits, symptoms, documents — with the latest entries in view and View all to open the full list.
• Family, to manage who else can see this pet. Chapter 14.
• At the bottom, Delete pet: removes the pet and all their records — vaccines, visits, symptoms, documents, medications. There is no going back.

The pencil icon at the top opens Edit pet: photo, name, species, breed, date of birth, weight and the vet's details.

4 · Quick actions

Scroll down the Home screen, below today's doses, and you'll find a grid of tiles: shortcuts to the things you do most. They always apply to the pet selected at the top — if you have more than one, check the name before you tap.

Below those, if you've switched them on, come the tiles for the nine monitoring tools: Glucose, Seizure timer, Temperature, Breathing rate, SC fluids, Quality of life, Lumps, Blood values, Stools.

5 · Medications and doses

This is the part of the app you'll use every day. It's worth spending five minutes setting a course up properly: everything else — reminders, the report, adherence — grows out of it.

Adding a medication

From Medications → Add medication. The fields, in order:

• Name and Form — pill, liquid, injection, topical, other.
• Dose (optional) with its unit: the prescribed one. You'll use it as the reference when you log the doses you actually give.
• Frequency. Once, twice or three times a day, every X hours, custom, or as needed.
• Times. With the fixed frequencies the app lays out the slots and you tap to correct them. With "every X hours" you only set the first dose and the app works out the rest. With "as needed" there is no schedule at all: you log a dose when you give one.
• Start date, then either ongoing therapy (no end, until you stop it yourself) or a duration in days — handy for a ten-day antibiotic, which then closes itself.
• For condition (optional). Linking a medication to a condition is what makes the report show which drug treats what.
• Doses per pack (optional). Fill it in and the app keeps count of what's left and warns you when you're down to two. When you open the new box you tap Refill pack and the counter starts again.
• Track injection site (injections only, Pro plan). At every dose it asks "where did you inject?" — left, right, other — so rotating sites becomes something that actually happens rather than something you're supposed to do.

When you save, if you haven't granted them yet, the app asks for notification permission. Say yes: without it the reminders can't fire.

Logging a dose

On the Home screen, under Today for…, you get the whole day's doses in time order. Each behaves differently depending on where you are in the day:

1. Doses that are due or overdue have a Mark as given button.
2. Doses that are still to come show a padlock: that's not a fault, it's the app telling you that hour hasn't arrived. If you need to give it early you can still tap it.
3. Doses already given stay marked, with the time. If you got it wrong, you undo it from the same row.

When you log one you can pick the status — Given, Skipped or Missed — change the dose actually given if it was different from the prescribed one that day, and correct the time if you're logging it late (Now or a time you type in).

Ending a course

Two different routes, and it's worth not mixing them up:

• End therapy moves the medication into the history. The reminders stop, but the dose log stays and still feeds the reports. This is almost always the right choice.
• Delete medication erases the medication and every dose you logged, for good. It's only for something you added by mistake.

Ended courses no longer count against your plan's limit.

6 · Symptoms

This is the diary of what you notice. Your vet sees the animal for twenty minutes every three months; you see them every day. This is the part nobody else can write for you.

Logging one

1. Add symptom, from the Home screen or from the Health tab.
2. Pick the symptom. They're grouped into eight categories — digestive, general, skin, respiratory, mobility, behaviour, head, urinary — and there's a search box. If what you want isn't there, you add it as a custom symptom and it stays available next time.
3. Give it an intensity, from very mild to critical.
4. Add more symptoms if they happened together: they save in one go, with the same date and time.
5. When: now, or the real date and time if you're writing it up later.

The two fields that make the difference

In what circumstances. Optional, and worth more than all the rest. After getting down off the sofa. Lying down at night. Water rather than food. White foam rather than food. Two regurgitations in different circumstances have different causes, and this is the one line that lets a vet tell them apart.

 The photo. A patch of redness, a swelling, a limp that words describe badly. You can take it there and then or pick it from your gallery. It saves your vet the question "what exactly did it look like?", which two weeks later nobody can answer.

What you get back

• Timeline: every episode in order, with a summary of the last 7 days — how many events, the average intensity, and whether the direction is improving, stable or getting worse.
•  Charts (Plus), over 30 or 90 days: episodes per week, the most frequent symptoms, a day-by-day intensity calendar, and the split by severity. Above the charts the app also counts the symptom-free days, which is often the number that really tells you whether a treatment is working.

7 · Food and water

You get here by flipping the Home screen to the Food side. For a lot of illnesses — megaesophagus, EPI, kidney disease, diabetes — what they eat and how they eat it is half the treatment.

A meal or a treat

Beyond what and how much, these are the fields that matter for a sick animal:

• Consistency: slurry, meatball, soaked kibble, pureed canned — or in your own words.
• How it was given: by spoon, in the chair, held upright. For a megaesophagus dog that's the main clinical detail.
• Enzymes in this meal: how much, in this bowl. They live here rather than with the medications because they belong to the meal — that's how you follow pancreatic insufficiency.
• How much did they eat: all, half, none. Three taps that become the appetite trend in the report.

Water

Log water doesn't ask for millilitres: it asks for normal, less than usual or more than usual. That's deliberate — excessive thirst is a signal that counts in kidney disease and diabetes, and spotting it takes consistency, not precision.

Meal times

Under Meal reminders you set the times you feed them. The alert goes to the whole family, not just to you: that's how you avoid a second dinner.

In the history, tap an entry to edit it and press and hold to delete it.

8 · Weight, vaccines, visits, documents

Four separate registers that together make the medical file. Each one answers a question you get asked at a reception desk sooner or later.

 Weight

Logged from the pet profile with + Log weight. The history shows the current figure, the change and the chart. Two readings are enough to see the direction, and in the report weight is the first thing a vet looks at.

 Vaccines

For each one: the name (with suggestions for dogs or cats), the date given and the validity — 6 months, 1, 2 or 3 years, no expiry, or a number of months you type in. From that the app works out the next due date, puts it at the top of the screen and warns you 30, 7 and 1 day before, at 9 in the morning.

 Vet visits

Date, reason, the vet's name, the cost, the outcome and notes (what happened, what was prescribed) and a follow-up date. The follow-up doesn't just sit there: it becomes an appointment in the calendar, so "see you in three months" doesn't get lost.

The most recent visit with a follow-up shows at the top as the next visit. And the cost, over the years, answers a very practical question: what is this illness actually costing me.

 Documents

Reports, test results, prescriptions, certificates, bills. You add them as a PDF, a photo from your gallery or by taking a picture on the spot, and they file into six categories: vaccine, test, prescription, visit, bill, other.

• There's a search by name, and a filter by category.
• You can give a document an expiry date: anything about to expire moves into an Expiring soon section at the top, with the days left. That's for certificates and passports, which always expire at the wrong moment.
•  Share sends the file by email or message without you having to go hunting for it in your gallery.

9 · Calendar and reminders

The calendar

It shows a month at a time, and days with something scheduled carry a dot in the pet's colour. Below the grid is the detail for whichever day you pick, and at the top two sections: Overdue and Upcoming. The red number on the Home screen tile counts the overdue ones.

Everything lands in here: vaccines falling due, visits, follow-ups, the start and end of a course, medication doses, meals, documents about to expire, the reminders you create — and their birthday. With more than one pet you can see them all together or one at a time.

Reminders

There are two kinds, and they behave differently.

Which alerts you can get

In More → Manage notifications they're all listed, grouped by type. Each one switches on and off on its own: if one annoys you, turn off that one and keep the rest.

10 · The monitoring tools

Nine tools that stay switched off until they're needed, and appear in the quick actions once you turn them on. You'll never see all of them at once: the app shows you the ones that have something to do with the illness you declared.

11 · Insights

The app reads what you've recorded and says out loud what the numbers are doing. It isn't a diagnosis: it's the sentence you'd say to your vet yourself, if you had time to re-read three months of notes.

They're sentences like these — all built on your data, never on averages from other animals:

• Weight is trending down over the last 8 weeks (from 5.2 to 4.7 kg).
• You logged more symptoms in the last 30 days (14) than in the 30 before (6).
• 3 of your last 8 seizures happened within 48 hours of another one.
• The symptoms you log fall most often at night (9 out of 14).
• Recent resting breaths (38/min) are above the range you usually record (22–30/min).
• On mornings after a skipped evening dose, average glucose was higher than after an evening dose given.
• The last stools are looser than usual: score 6, where you usually record around 3.

There's also a Since your last vet visit section: how many seizures, how many symptoms, how many skipped doses and how the weight moved from the day of that appointment to today. It's the summary you need when they ask you "so, how have the last three months gone?".

12 · The report for your vet

This is why all the rest exists: months of notes become a document your vet can read in two minutes.

You start from Generate report on the Home screen, and it's three steps.

1. Choose the period. Last 7, 14 or 30 days, three months, a year, All time, or two dates of your own. For a check-up the right period is usually since you were last there. Anything outside the range doesn't go into the PDF.
2. Choose the sections. Medications, symptoms, weight, food, stools, glucose, temperature, breathing, fluids, quality of life, seizures, lumps, blood values, vaccinations, visits, documents, pet info and notes, Insights and charts. Each one has a line underneath saying what goes in it. Leave out whatever this appointment doesn't need: a shorter report gets read better.
3. Preview and share. You see the summary — pet, period, how many sections — and tap Generate & share: out comes a PDF to email, message, save or print.

Generating it needs a connection: if you're offline the app says so rather than producing an incomplete file.

13 · The Emergency Card

It's for the worst moment: you're in a clinic that has never met your animal, and somebody asks you what they're on and what they're allergic to.

It opens from the panel at the top of the Home screen. On a single screen it gathers the chronic conditions, the active medications with doses and times, the allergies, the important notes, the most recent symptoms and your vet's contact, which you can call with one tap.

You fill it in from inside it

You don't have to go looking for these fields elsewhere: every empty panel is tappable and opens the field right there — Add vet contact, Add allergies, Add important notes, Add chronic conditions.

Take five minutes over it once, now, while you're calm. The moment you need it is not the moment to be filling it in.

To leave with the vet

Share with vet turns the card into a one-page PDF: send it, save it or print it. It's the sheet to leave with whoever has your animal while you're away, or with the clinic keeping them in.

14 · Family

A long illness is almost never handled by one person alone. That's what Family is for: two phones, the same data, and nobody giving the pill twice.

Inviting somebody

1. From Invite family, or from the pet profile under Family.
2. Type the person's email.
3. The app generates a link: copy it or share it on WhatsApp, by email, however you like. The link expires after 7 days.
4. Whoever opens it signs in with their own Sereno account and accepts. If they don't have one, they create it.

Who can do what

• The owner is whoever created the pet. Only they manage who comes in and goes out, and only they can rename or delete the pet.
• Members can see and update all the clinical data: mark doses, log symptoms, add vaccines and visits. They can't manage the family or delete the pet.

The Family screen shows the members, the pending invites with how long is left on them, and the controls to revoke an invite or remove a member. Somebody who was invited can also leave the family themselves.

15 · Account, data and subscription

Your account

You sign in with an email and password, or with Google or Apple. If you signed up with one of those two, always use that button to get back in: you don't have a password.

If you forget your password, Forgot password? on the sign-in screen sends you a code by email: you enter it, choose a new password and you're in. If you just want to change it, there's Change password under More.

Language

In More → Language. The app speaks English, Italian and Spanish, and by default follows your phone's language. The report comes out in the language you've chosen: if your vet reads another one, switch before you generate it.

Your data

• Export my data. Prepares a copy of everything you've written, to keep or to take elsewhere.
• Privacy policy and Terms of service, always available.
• Creator code. If you found Sereno because somebody who works with us told you about it, this is where you enter their code so they get the credit. It can only be done once.
• Delete account. Erases the account and everything in it — pets, medications, documents, reports and history. It's final: there's no bin to fish it out of.

The three plans

There's one idea behind it: recording is always free. You pay to see the trends over time, and for how much you can keep at once.

You pick a plan from More → Subscription, or from any padlock you run into. It's billed through your phone's store and cancelled there, from your App Store or Google Play account settings. If you change phone, Restore purchases puts the subscription back.

16 · Common questions