Help Centre › Appointments & queues
Appointments & bookings
Work the appointment book: make, move and cancel bookings, and turn an arriving appointment into a waiting patient.
The appointment book is a grid of time slots across the next several days. Your practice defines the slots once, and reception fills them.
The day's bookings#
Home›Bookings
The booking list shows one day at a time — who is coming, at what time, with which animal, for what reason and with which vet. Use the date control at the top to move between days.
- Tap a booking to open it, change it, or mark the client as arrived.
- Bookings made by clients through the client portal appear here alongside the ones reception took.
- Walk Ins beside the grid lists everyone waiting without an appointment, longest wait first. It only appears when you are looking at today. Notes is a shared notepad for the day: whatever reception types there is visible to everybody and saves itself.
- Unlike the calendar, the walk-ins panel is not limited to one day — it shows every open queue entry. Each card carries how long that patient has been waiting, and anything carried over from an earlier day is highlighted, so a row from last week does not read as somebody who walked in this morning.
- Each panel has a Min button, so you can shrink the two you are not using and give the third the whole screen.
Making a booking#
- From Home choose Bookings, then Add Booking.
- Pick the booking type — Consult, Procedure, House Call, Note or Grooming. Consult and Grooming only appear if your practice has those modules switched on.
- Type the reason for the visit, or choose one from Standard Reason..., and pick the vet — or leave it as Any Doctor. A grooming booking asks for a grooming reason and grooming notes instead, and offers Any Groomer.
- Use Previous and Next to find the right week, then tap a free time slot.
- Press Create Booking. Find-a-client opens: search for the client and open them. If they are new, New Client takes you through Quick Signup and returns you here with the booking still in progress.
- Press Create Booking on the patient being seen. The booking now appears on the booking list for that day.
When the client arrives#
A booking is a plan; a queue entry is a patient in the building. When somebody arrives, move them from one to the other so the vets can see them waiting.
- Open the booking from the booking list. This opens Queue Details — the arrival form.
- Fill in what you have, and press Save.
The Queue Details screen is small but it is the last chance to get these right before the vet sees the patient:
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Weight (kg) | The weight you took on arrival. Decimals are fine — 12.4 is accepted. |
| Approximate Weight (kg) | For an animal you could not weigh properly. Better than leaving weight blank, and honest about what it is. |
| Crate Weight (kg) | Where you weighed the animal in its carrier, so the real weight can be worked out. |
| Reason | Why they are in. It carries onto the queue card and onto the consultation, so the vet reads it before they call the patient. Type freely or pick from your practice's consultation reasons. |
They now appear on the consult queue with their reason for visit, and the vet can pick them up.
Moving or cancelling#
Open the booking and either choose a different slot or cancel it outright. Cancelling frees the slot immediately for somebody else.
Defining your appointment slots#
The grid of times comes from Appointment Slots, which an administrator sets up once and then rarely touches.
Home›Settings›Appointment Slots
Each row is a day, a time, a capacity — how many patients may be booked into that slot — and a colour, which is what makes the grid readable at a glance. Different days can have completely different shapes: a short Saturday, a late evening clinic on Thursdays.
The follow-up list#
Home›Follow Up
A vet who wants to hear how a patient is getting on sets a reminder with a date, either during the consultation or on a hospital stay. The follow-up list is those reminders, gathered by the day they fall due — so it is the call list for the morning, not a second inbox to keep an eye on.
Each card carries the patient, the owner and their number, the reminder itself, and what it was raised against. Work down the list and clear each one as you deal with it:
- Open — jump to the consultation or hospital stay the reminder came from, to read the notes before you ring.
- Done — the call was made. FastVet asks what happened and keeps your answer on the reminder.
- Postpone — no answer, or too soon to tell. Pick a new date and it reappears on that day's list.
- Cancel — no longer needed.