Help Centre › Money

Commission

Decide what each vet earns on the work they do — by grouping your price list, grouping your vets, and filling in the table where the two meet.

Commission is set up once and then mostly left alone. You sort your price list into a handful of commission groups, sort your vets into vet groups, and fill in a small table saying what each combination earns.

The point of the groups is that you never have to touch individual items. A practice with six thousand items still only has a dozen or two categories, and it is the categories you assign.

Who can do this

Commission is Admin only — it is what your colleagues get paid, and nobody else can open these screens or see the rates.

Note

Setting this up does not change a single invoice. Commission is worked out from what has already been charged; it never alters what a client pays.

Starting from the standard setup#

Settings›Commission

The Commission menu. Before anything is set up it offers to build a standard arrangement for you.

If you have never set commission up, the menu offers to do most of it for you. Use the standard setup creates six commission groups — Consultations & procedures, Surgery, Medication & consumables, Laboratory & imaging, Food & retail and No commission — and points each of your price list categories at whichever one fits.

It does not put any rates in. That part is yours: a rate invented for you is a rate somebody would eventually be paid.

It recognises the category names FastVet ships with. If you have renamed your categories or added your own, those are left for you — the message afterwards says how many still need assigning, and they are listed under Price List Categories.

Tip

Take the standard setup even if it is not quite how you work. Renaming a group or moving a category is a couple of clicks, and starting from something is much faster than starting from nothing.

What the menu tells you#

Once something is configured, the Commission menu stops offering to build it and starts telling you whether it will actually pay anything. Three numbers matter:

Items in no commission group. Those items earn nothing at all. A handful is normal — cremation fees, deposits. Hundreds means a category has not been assigned.
Vets in no vet group. That vet earns nothing, no matter what they do.
Combinations with no rate. Every square of the rate table needs a number, so any still blank are work that will earn nothing.

Careful

These warnings are the whole safety net. Commission that is set up wrong does not look broken — it looks like a small number. If the menu is telling you something is unassigned, deal with it before you pay anybody.

Step 1 — commission groups#

Settings›Commission›Commission Groups

The commission groups. Just a name and a count — what each band pays is set later, on the rate table.

A commission group is a band of price list items that all earn commission the same way. This screen is only two columns, and deliberately so:

Column	What it means
Group	What you call it. It labels a row of the rate table.
Items	How many price list items currently land in this band. Follow it to check a band is not empty, or not quietly swallowing half the catalogue.

Group items by what they are — Medication, Surgery, Laboratory — rather than by what they pay. What they pay comes later, and a band named after a rate is a band you have to rename the first time the rate changes.

Tip

Make a band for the things nobody earns on — cremation, deposits, disposal fees. Calling it No commission and paying it 0 is much clearer six months later than leaving those items unassigned, which looks like something you forgot.

You cannot delete a group while individual price list items have been pinned to it — the message tells you how many. Its rates and category assignments are removed with it.

Step 2 — vet groups#

Settings›Commission›Vet Groups

Vet groups, with the list of who is in each underneath.

The same idea for people. If every vet in your practice earns the same, one group is all you need — call it whatever you like and put everybody in it.

Underneath the groups is the list of your vets with a dropdown each. Only users with the Doctor role appear: commission follows the vet recorded on the consultation, so somebody who never treats a patient has nothing to earn on.

Changes here save as you make them — there is no Save button for the assignment list.

Careful

A vet left on Not in a group earns nothing. The row is highlighted so it is hard to miss, and the Commission menu counts them for you.

Step 3 — the rate table#

Settings›Commission›Rates

The rate table. Item bands down the side, vet bands across the top, and a number in every box.

This is where the two halves meet. Your commission groups run down the side, your vet groups across the top, and each box is what a vet in that band earns on an item in that band.

Each row picks its own unit, in the row header: % of sale, or a fixed amount per item. That is a property of what was sold rather than of who sold it — medication might pay a percentage while food pays a flat fee — so it is chosen once for the whole row and every box in that row is then a plain number.

Careful

Every box needs a number, including the zeros. Nothing is assumed and nothing is inherited: a box left empty means nobody has said what that combination earns, so it earns nothing. The screen will not save while any box is blank, it tells you how many are left, and it highlights them so you can find them.

Where a combination genuinely earns no commission, type 0. It pays the same as leaving it blank would, but it records that you decided — which is the difference between a setup somebody can check and one they have to second-guess.

Note

Percentages are worked out on the line excluding VAT. VAT is collected for the revenue service, so paying a share of it would be paying a share of money that was never the practice's.

Tip

If every vet band earns the same on a row, type the same figure across it. That is quicker than it looks, and it leaves nothing implied for the next person to work out.

Step 4 — which items are in which band#

Settings›Commission›Price List Categories

Price list categories, each pointed at a commission group. Every item in a category follows it — including anything added later.

Items are not assigned one at a time. Each price list category points at a commission group, and every item in that category follows it — including items you add next year, which is the main reason it works this way. Nothing is quietly left out because somebody forgot to tag it.

A category with several subcategories can be expanded, and a subcategory pointed somewhere different from its parent. Anything left on Same as category just follows along, and the option says which group that is.

Note

A category with only one subcategory does not show it. Practices usually file a whole category under a single name like "General" to mean it has no subcategories at all, and a lone subcategory offers a choice that cannot mean anything — it can only agree with its parent or contradict it for no reason. Those items simply follow the category.

Rows are highlighted where items would still earn nothing, and the count at the top adds them all up.

Changes here are saved with the Save button.

When one item is different#

Price & Stock›Update Prices›Edit

Occasionally a single item does not belong with the rest of its category. Open it in the price list editor and there is a Commission card near the bottom.

It is set to follow the category by default, and that option names the group it will inherit, so you can see what you are overriding before you override it. Choosing a group here pins the item to it permanently — it will keep that group even if you later move it to a different category.

Note

The Commission card only appears once commission groups exist. If you have not set commission up, there is nothing to choose between and the card stays out of the way.

The option at the top of the list tells you what the item does if you leave it alone: Use the category setting names the band it inherits, or it reads No Commission if its category points nowhere and the item would earn nothing as things stand.

Tip

Use this sparingly. Every pinned item is one the category screens can no longer manage for you, and the category list shows a count of them per category so they do not get lost.

Protocols#

A protocol — a spay pack, a vaccination course — is billed as a single charge, and the items inside it are recorded on the patient's record and taken out of stock but are not charged for separately.

Commission follows the same rule. Put the protocol itself in a commission band, exactly as you would any other price list item, and it earns on the protocol charge. The items inside it never earn, even though most of them are ordinary catalogue items that do earn when sold on their own.

Note

This is not something you have to configure. It is how commission is worked out, and it is what stops one protocol paying twice — once for the charge and again for each item inside it.

If you rename a price list category#

Category assignments are matched on the category's name. Rename a category in the price list and its commission assignment no longer matches anything — the items move to whatever their new category says, which may be nothing at all.

The Price List Categories screen tells you when this has happened, in a section at the bottom listing the assignments that no longer match. Point the new category at the right group and remove the old rule.

Careful

This is the one thing here that can go wrong quietly. If you reorganise your price list categories, come back to this screen afterwards and check the bottom of it.

Setting it up, in order#

Open Settings › Commission and take the standard setup.
Commission Groups — check the bands it made are the ones you want, and rename or add any you need. Names only; nothing about money yet.
Vet Groups — rename the group it created if you like, add more if your vets earn differently, and put every vet in one.
Price List Categories — assign anything the standard setup left blank, and get the unassigned count at the top down to a number you are comfortable with.
Rates — pick % or fixed amount for each row, then put a number in every box. Use 0 for combinations that earn nothing. It will not let you save until none are left blank.
Back on the Commission menu, confirm it is no longer warning you about anything.

Tip

The four screens are numbered in the order above, and each one says at the top what it is for. If you come back to this in six months, following the numbers is enough.