Set up your clinic

Clinics that set up in the wrong order end up redoing work: prices before tax, templates before the address they print. This is the order that avoids that, and most clinics are booking real patients in under an hour.

How long this takes

A single-practitioner clinic can be ready to book and invoice real patients in under an hour. Most of that is reading the starter templates and typing in your own services and prices. A clinic with several practitioners and locations should allow a morning, mainly for working hours and user invitations. The steps below are in the order that avoids going back: each one is needed by the ones after it.

Everything here is done by an Administrator. Other roles can't open most of these pages.

Start with the dashboard checklist

Until the clinic has its first patient, an administrator's dashboard shows a Get started checklist in place of the usual figures. Each item opens the page where you do it, and is checked off on your next visit to the dashboard once it's done. The four items are the minimum for a bookable clinic.

1. Add a practitioner. Nobody can be booked until at least one user is a practitioner, and your own account isn't one yet. To make yourself bookable, open Users & Practitioners, open your own user, go to the practitioner settings and switch on Is <your name> a practitioner?. To add colleagues, see Invite your team.
2. Add your first patient. See Add a patient. The moment one patient exists, the checklist is replaced by the normal dashboard, so finish the other three items first if you want them checked off for you.
3. Book an appointment. See Book an appointment. The practitioner needs working hours first, or the calendar has no slots to book into; see step 2 below.
4. Top up SMS credit. SMS confirmations and reminders are already set up but can't send with a zero balance. Emails send without credit. See SMS settings.

The Get started checklist on a brand-new clinic's dashboard, with Add a practitioner already checked.

Before the first patient hears from you

These settings decide what patients see in messages, on the calendar and on invoices. Do them before the first real booking so the first confirmation that goes out is complete.

1. Business Information. Add the address and phone number for your location. They're printed in every confirmation and reminder, on invoices and on letters, and they're blank right now. If the clinic works from more than one place, add the other locations here too, each with its own address and time zone; everything else you set up below is clinic-wide and applies to all of them.
2. Working hours. Set each practitioner's weekly hours and breaks. The calendar only offers times inside them, and online booking only shows those times to patients.
3. Appointment types. Rename or replace the starter types with what you offer, for example Initial consultation – 60 min and Physio – 45 min, with the right duration for each. Keep the message templates linked when you edit a type; a type you add new needs them chosen.
4. Billable services, taxes and payment types. An invoice needs a price for each service and the tax you charge, so add your services with prices such as $85.00, check the starter tax rate, and remove payment types you don't accept.
5. Invoice settings. Set the numbering and due days before the first invoice is issued, so your numbering starts where you want it.
6. Message templates. Read the four starter templates, email and SMS, and change the wording to your clinic's voice. They're already linked to every starter appointment type, so this is editing text, not setting anything up.
7. Logo. Upload it once and choose which documents show it. Five minutes, and invoices look like yours.

Once the basics work

None of these are needed to see your first patient. Do them in the first week or two, once the calendar and invoicing feel normal.

1. Import your existing patients. If you're moving from another system, import patients before staff start adding them by hand, so you don't end up with duplicates to merge.
2. Online booking. Choose which locations, practitioners and appointment types patients can book, and whether a deposit is taken. Share the booking address only after this is done.
3. Security. Decide whether every user must set up two-factor authentication. Worth doing before you invite the wider team, so everyone sets it up on their first sign-in.
4. Accounting software, online payments and calendar sync. Connect them when the clinic is running and you know which invoices and payments you want sent across.