Website for veterinary practices, with booking against a vet and a room
Two consulting rooms and three vets is not the same arithmetic as six appointments an hour, and the only thing in the building that understands the difference is whoever is standing at the front desk. Then something walks in at ten past two that cannot wait, and the whole afternoon rearranges itself around it.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.
A week at a small practice, in three parts
All of this is about the diary and the desk, not about the work itself.
The Tuesday that emptied itself at two
Something urgent comes through the door and takes a vet and a room for the best part of an hour and a half. Everything booked behind it slides, and the four people already sitting in reception are told twenty minutes, then another twenty.
By four o'clock two of them have gone home to come back another day, and the person on the desk has spent the whole afternoon on the phone apologising instead of taking the bookings that were meant to fill Thursday.
Asking for the dog's date of birth. Again.
The same owner has been coming for six years and is still asked at the counter for the animal's name, breed, age and their own mobile number, because the last person to write it down wrote it on a card that is in a drawer somewhere behind them.
Meanwhile there is a queue forming, a cat carrier on the floor by the door, and a phone ringing that nobody can reach. None of that is a hard problem. It is just a problem nobody has the ten minutes to fix.
The booster that was due in March
Somebody meant to go through the list and send the reminders out. Then April happened. The owners who remember on their own get booked in; the ones who were relying on you to say something are simply not seen this year, and nobody notices they are gone.
It does not appear anywhere as a loss. It just looks like a quieter spring than last one, and a list that got a bit shorter for no reason anybody can name.
What actually helps a small practice
Four parts of it, chosen because they touch the desk rather than the consulting room.
Owners book the appointment type, not an hour of your day
A vaccination appointment and a longer consultation are different lengths, and the diary knows which is which before anybody picks a time. The owner chooses the reason for coming and is shown only the times that will genuinely take it.
Branch opening hours, the half day on Wednesday and the block you keep clear for urgent cases are all part of it, so what appears online is what the practice can honestly accept.
A vet and a room, both of them, or no booking
Staff and rooms go in as resources. Two consulting rooms is the ceiling on how many appointments can run at once, no matter how many people are on shift, and a vet who is not in on Fridays cannot be booked on a Friday.
Tie each appointment type to what it needs and the diary stops promising things the building cannot deliver. The hour you hold back for emergencies stays held back.
The animal's details taken once, at booking
Name, species, breed, age and the owner's number are asked for when the appointment is made, on a phone, at home, with the pet's paperwork in the other hand. By the time they arrive it is already on the record.
One owner can have several animals, and every visit attaches to the right one, so the front desk is reading a history rather than starting a card from scratch.
Boosters and check-ups that remind themselves
The confirmation goes out as soon as the appointment is made, and the reminder the day before, so fewer people simply forget they were coming at eleven.
Sending by e-mail comes with the plan. SMS can be topped up in advance for the owners who are far more likely to look at a phone than an inbox, which in practice is most of them.
How the appointment types are usually listed
The practice sets its own names and figures. What each line needs is a length and an honest pricing type.
Types can be grouped by species or by who takes them, so cat owners are not scrolling past a list of things that do not apply to them.
Questions vets ask us
Yes. Anything held in the diary is invisible to online booking, so the block you keep clear each afternoon stays clear. Owners are only ever shown what is left after the practice has taken what it needs.
It can. Each vet is a resource with their own working days, and an appointment type can be limited to the people qualified to take it. If an owner wants the vet who saw the animal last time, they can choose them and see only that person's availability.
Whatever you decide to ask for, which for most practices is the owner, the animal, the species and breed, and a note on why they are coming. It goes onto the record before the visit rather than onto a card at the counter.
Confirmations and reminders around each appointment are automatic and go by e-mail as standard. Text messages are available as prepaid credit, which is what most practices use for owners who never open e-mail.
It gets imported, so the pages and the wording you have come across into the new site and the builder adds the parts that are missing. Editing afterwards is done by clicking pencil icons on the page, without ringing anybody.
€49 to €199 a month plus VAT, across four plans. Hosting, SSL, nightly backups and support come with all of them, and the site runs on the practice's own domain. Text reminders are a prepaid add-on.
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Get the practice site started
Describe the practice, the rooms and who works which days, or import the website you run now. What comes back is a first version with the appointment types, the reminders and the client register already set up around them.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.