Help Centre › Client portal

The client portal

What your clients see when they sign in: their animals, their appointments, their account and their visit history.

The client portal is a separate website for your clients, at client.fastvet.net. It shows them their own records — nothing else, and nothing belonging to anyone else. This page describes what they see so you can talk them through it on the phone.

Turning it on#

Two separate switches control the portal, under Features & Modules:

Switch	Effect
Client portal	Whether clients can sign in at all.
Client booking	Whether signed-in clients may also book their own appointments.

Careful

These are independent. Turning the portal on does not let clients book — many practices deliberately let clients view their records while keeping the diary under reception's control.

How a client gets access#

A client signs in with the email address on their record. If the address is missing or wrong they cannot get in — that is the first thing to check when somebody says the portal will not let them.

Make sure the client's email address is correct on their record.
They go to client.fastvet.net and create a password against that address.
FastVet matches them to their client record and walks them through a short first-run setup.

First sign-in: a two-step setup before the portal opens up.

Step one is Your details — they confirm how you can reach them, and the required fields are marked. Step two is Add your patient, which they can skip if their animals are already on file. It is worth knowing this exists, because a client ringing to say “it just keeps asking me to get started” has not finished step one — a required field such as their address is usually still blank.

Step one: the client confirms the details you hold for them.

Note

There are two portal links that need no login at all, both sent from the staff app. The signup link (Home → New Client → Send by email or Send by WhatsApp) lets a brand-new client register themselves. The update link (Send Update Link on a client record) lets an existing client correct their contact details. Both work whether or not the full portal is switched on.

Tip

If a client cannot sign in at all, open their record and check the email address character by character. It is almost always a typo or an old address.

Careful

One email address, one client. The email address on the client record is how the portal knows who is signing in — it is the client's identity, not just a way of contacting them. Two records sharing an address is therefore not something FastVet can support: it has no way to tell which of them the person at the keyboard is.

So a couple who share an inbox need one client record between them, with both animals on it, and the second person added as a second contact. If the same address is already on two records, merge them before anybody tries to register — the merge keeps both animals and all the history.

Tip

It follows that a work address shared by colleagues, or a practice's own address used as a placeholder on several records, will block portal sign-in for all of them. Give every client an address only they use.

The dashboard#

The first screen after signing in: their animals, upcoming appointments, account balance and recent visits.

Their animals#

Clients can see and correct their animals' details — name, species, breed, colour, date of birth. Changes they make come straight through to the patient record, which is a quiet but real saving on data entry.

Note

Where a colour is not on your practice's list, clients can type their own — so “merle with a white blaze” does not have to become “other”.

There is also an + Add patient button on this screen, so a client can add an animal at any time — not only during first-run setup. A new patient can therefore appear on a client record without anyone at the practice entering it.

The client fills in name, species, breed, colour, sex and date of birth — the same six fields they can correct on an existing patient.

Tip

Client-added patients are worth a glance before the animal is seen. Everything beyond those six fields is still blank, and the date of birth is only as good as the owner's memory. Fill in the rest on the patient record at the first visit.

Booking an appointment#

Animated A client booking their own appointment.

The client chooses Book appointment.
They pick the animal, the reason and — if your practice allows it — a preferred vet.
They choose from the free slots in your appointment book.
They confirm, and it appears on your booking list alongside reception's bookings.

Note

Clients can only see slots that are genuinely free, and only for the days you have opened. They cannot overbook.

Clients can move their own appointments#

Careful

This is the part of the portal reception most needs to know about. A client who opens an existing appointment can change it themselves — the date, the time, which patient it is for, the reason, and the vet. Your diary can move without anyone at the desk touching it.

It is the same booking rules as a new appointment: only genuinely free slots, only on days you have opened. So a client cannot create a clash — but they can vacate the 09:00 you were expecting them at and take a 15:00 instead.

A client can	A client cannot
Move the appointment to another free slot	Cancel it — there is no cancel button in the portal
Change the patient, reason or vet on it	Book into a slot that is taken, or a day you have not opened
Do all of this without telling you	Do any of it if Client booking is switched off

Note

A client wanting to cancel has to ring you — the portal has no way to do it. (There is a “Cancel” button on their appointment screen, but it only closes the form without saving. Expect the occasional client who believes they cancelled and did not.)

Tip

Check the booking list at the start of the day rather than working from what you remember of yesterday. With client booking on, the list is the only reliable account of the diary.

If this is not how you want to run the diary, turn Client booking off and leave the portal on — clients keep their records and their history, and the diary stays yours. See Turning it on.

Account and history#

The client's own contact details, which they can correct themselves.

Their balance and the transactions making it up.
Their visit history, with the items and costs of each visit.
Their own contact details, which they can correct.

On each visit they see the date, the patient, the type of visit and the weight, then every item with what it cost — and one piece of writing from the consultation, shown under the heading “Notes for you”.

Careful

That heading is the Client Notes box from the consultation. Whatever a vet types in it is published here, word for word. Doctor's Notes — the internal clinical record — is not shown, and neither is the diagnosis. The two boxes sit one above the other on the consultation and look identical, so it is worth making sure every vet in the practice knows which is which: see Clinical notes.

Note

This is the answer to “can the client see what I wrote?” — they can see Client Notes, and only Client Notes.

The shop#

If your practice runs the online shop, clients get a Shop section in the portal where they can buy food, parasite control and accessories, and pay for it online. The staff side of this — picking and handing over — is covered in The online shop. This is what the client does before it reaches you.

They browse the shop, or search it. Products are grouped by your catalogue categories.
They press Add to cart on what they want, and adjust quantities in the cart.
At Checkout they choose Collect in store or Deliver — if you offer delivery — and can leave a note.
They press Place order and pay online.
The order lands in Shop Dispatch for you to pick.

Note

Items already out of stock show an Out of stock badge and cannot be added to the cart, so clients do not order what you do not have. Stock counts come from your stock records — another reason to keep them honest.

Clients can see their own orders under My Orders, each with a status:

Status	Means
Awaiting payment	The order exists but has not been paid for. The client has a Pay now button to finish paying.
Processing	Paid, and with you to pick. This is what sits in Shop Dispatch.
Ready for collection	You marked it dispatched, and they chose to collect. Their cue to come in.
Dispatched	You marked it dispatched, and they chose delivery.
Cancelled	The order was cancelled.

Careful

Awaiting payment is the status that causes phone calls. The client believes they ordered; the order is real but unpaid, and it sits in the Unpaid Orders tab rather than your dispatch list. Point them at Pay now in My Orders — an abandoned card payment is the usual cause.

Whether the shop appears at all, whether you offer delivery, the delivery fee and any free-delivery threshold are all set under Features & Modules.

Common questions from clients#

The portal shows a full-page message rather than an error when something is wrong. If a client reads you the heading, you know exactly what happened:

They see	What it means	What to do
“Account Not Found”	They signed in successfully, but no client record carries that email address. This is the common one.	Ask which address they used — the screen shows it too. Then check it against their client record, and correct the record if it is out of date. They can sign in again straight away.
“Portal Unavailable”	The Client portal switch is off for your practice.	Either that is deliberate — tell them to ring for anything they need — or it was switched off by mistake. See Turning it on.
“Your session has expired”	They were signed out after a period of inactivity. Nothing is wrong.	They press Log in again. Worth saying out loud, because it looks like a fault.

Careful

“Account Not Found” after you have just registered somebody usually means a typo in the email address, or that they signed in with a different address from the one you hold — a work address instead of a personal one, for instance. It is never a password problem: they got past the password.

And the everyday questions:

They say	Check
“It will not let me sign in.”	The email address on their client record matches the one they are typing.
“I cannot see my dog.”	The patient is attached to the right client record — it may sit under a partner's record.
“There are no appointment times.”	Client booking is switched on, and your appointment slots cover the days they are looking at.
“My balance looks wrong.”	Their account in FastVet. The portal shows the same ledger you see.
“I cancelled my appointment.”	The booking list. The portal cannot cancel — see Clients can move their own appointments. Assume the appointment still stands.
“I ordered something and heard nothing.”	Shop Dispatch, and whether the order was ever paid for.