Help Centre › Getting started

Getting started

Sign in, find your way around the home screen, and learn the handful of patterns that every other screen in FastVet reuses.

If you read one page before using FastVet, make it this one. Almost every screen is built from the same three parts — a header, a working area, and a footer of actions — so once those click, the rest of the system follows.

Signing in#

FastVet runs in your web browser. There is nothing to install, and it works the same on a desktop, a laptop or a tablet.

Go to app.fastvet.net (your practice may have this bookmarked or set as the browser home page).
Enter the email address your practice administrator registered for you, and your password.
You land on the Home screen, which is your starting point for everything.

Note

Your login is personal — everything you record is stamped with your name. If several people share a computer at the front desk, still sign in as yourself so the records are accurate.

Tip

Forgotten your password? Use the Forgot password link on the sign-in screen. If your email address itself is wrong or has changed, an administrator at your practice fixes that under Settings → Users.

If you cannot get in#

Three screens can meet you instead of Home. Each one means something specific, and none of them is a password problem — you got past the password to see them.

You see	It means	What to do
“Your free trial has ended”	Your practice was on a free trial and it has run out, so access is paused. Nothing has been deleted.	Get in touch with FastVet at [email protected] to turn the trial into a subscription. Your data is waiting.
“Not assigned to a practice”	Your login works but is not attached to any practice yet. Usually a half-finished new user.	An administrator at your practice finishes setting you up under Settings → Users. The screen shows the email address you signed in with — read it to them, because a typo there is the usual cause.
“Login Failed”	Sign-in did not complete.	Try once more, then check you are using the address your practice registered. If it persists, ask an administrator to confirm the address on your user record.

The home screen#

Home is a launchpad, grouped into four columns so you can find things by what you are trying to do rather than by remembering where they live.

Column	What it is for
Open Queues	Everything currently waiting for attention — patients to be seen, accounts to be paid, in-patients, lab results, boarders, grooming and shop orders. The number on each tile is a live count. Tiles for modules your practice has switched off do not appear at all.
Clients	Registering new clients, finding existing ones, and working with the appointment book and follow-up list.
Insights	Day-to-day numbers: the daily summary, the account book, a quick price lookup, this help centre, and — for vets and administrators — the full reports hub.
Admin	Stock, prices and practice settings. Only shown to staff with administrator rights.

Note

A tile only counts what is still open, not what happened today. A queue entry stays open until somebody closes it, so the numbers routinely include patients carried over from earlier days — which is deliberate, because that backlog is the thing worth seeing.

The four buttons across the top — New Consultation, Register Client, Search and Check Price — are the actions used most often during a busy day.

Tip

The counts on the queue tiles are the fastest health check of your day. If Payment Queue is climbing, invoices are being finished but not settled at the desk.

How every screen is laid out#

Once you have seen one screen you have largely seen them all:

The header carries the screen name, a client search box, a button to report a problem, and a home button. The back arrow on the left returns you to where you came from — on Home itself that same position is a sign-out button instead. On a narrow screen the search box collapses to a magnifying-glass icon that opens the search screen.
The working area in the middle is the screen itself — a list, a form, or a patient record.
The footer holds the actions for that screen. This is the single most important habit to learn: if you are looking for a button that does something, look at the footer. Save, Done, Add, Cancel and Back all live there.

Note

The footer is fixed to the bottom of the screen, so it stays visible even on long forms. On a phone or a narrow window it may hold fewer buttons — scroll the footer sideways if an action seems missing.

Finding a client from anywhere#

The search box in the header is available on every screen. Type a surname, a cell number, an ID number or a patient's name and it will find the client without you having to navigate anywhere first.

The client search screen. Recently viewed and pinned clients appear here as you build up history.

The dedicated search screen (Search Client on Home) adds a little more: it remembers the clients you have looked at recently, lets you pin the ones you deal with often, and offers a Browse clients option for when you are not sure of the spelling.

Tip

Searching by cell number is the most reliable way to land on exactly the right person — surnames are often shared between families and by the example clients your practice starts with.

Your first invoice#

FastVet has no Create Invoice button, and that catches out almost everybody on their first day. An invoice is not something you type up — it is raised automatically the moment you finish a piece of work: finishing a consultation, completing a counter sale, discharging a hospital or boarding stay, or finishing a groom. Record the work, and the invoice follows on its own.

The quickest way to see it happen is a counter sale — no patient record needed:

Find the client with the header search box and open them.
Press Sale, then Add, and search for the product or service.
Set the quantity, check the price, and press Add.
Press Done to finish the sale — that is the moment the invoice exists.

The charge is now on the client's account. Open it with Statement on the client record, press the … button on the entry, and print or email the invoice from there — or have FastVet email it automatically the moment work is finished, which is a practice setting (see Email & notifications).

The full walkthrough, with pictures, is in Counter sales.

Tip

If your search finds no products to sell, your price list does not have them yet — setting that up is the first admin job in a new practice. Start with Prices.

Coming from an accounting package?#

If you have been running the practice on Pastel, Sage or Xero, the bookkeeping ideas all exist in FastVet — they just happen as a side effect of recording the veterinary work, rather than as documents you capture. Here is the dictionary:

In your accounting package	In FastVet
Tax invoice	Raised automatically when work is finished — a consultation, sale, stay or groom. You never capture one directly. See Invoices.
Customer account / ledger	The client's account: every charge, payment and credit on one running list. Open it with the Statement button on the client record. See Reading a client's account.
Receipt	A payment, taken with Pay on the client's account — it posts a receipt entry and reduces the balance. See Taking a payment.
Credit note	A reversal. The original charge is marked reversed and a matching credit is written beside it — nothing is ever deleted. See Reversing a charge.
Statement	Print statement / Email statement on the client's account, or sent automatically. See Statements.
Inventory items	The price list is everything you can charge for — services and products alike; stock is the physical goods behind the products, drawn down as you sell.
Sundry charge / journal debit	A manual debit, added by hand on the client's account. See Adding a charge by hand.
Aged analysis	The account book ages every balance across current, 30, 60 and 90 days — and the 60/90-day badges follow the client onto every screen where money changes hands.

Note

One habit to unlearn: in an accounting package you would capture the invoice first and do the work second. In FastVet it is the other way round — record the visit or the sale, and the paperwork is the by-product. If you are ever hunting for where to type an invoice, ask instead: which piece of work am I finishing?

Who can see what#

What you see depends on the roles your administrator gave you. This is why a colleague may have a tile or a button that you do not.

Role	Typically given to	Unlocks
Doctor	Veterinarians	Consultations, hospital and boarding admissions, lab results, clinical records, reversing charges
Receptionist	Front-desk and nursing staff	Clients, patients, bookings, queues, sales and payments
Groomer	Grooming staff	The grooming queue and grooming records, plus bookings and the shop
Boarding Hand	Kennel and cattery staff	Boarding-tagged price items. A modifier — combine it with Doctor or Receptionist rather than giving it alone
Admin	Practice managers	Prices, stock, users, practice settings and the full report set

Note

Roles add together — most vets hold Doctor, Receptionist and often Admin. If a screen in this guide does not appear for you, ask your practice administrator which roles you hold.

Tip

A few clinical actions are reserved for Doctor even on screens everybody can open: the Consult, Admit and Dispense buttons on the consult queue, and reversing a charge on a client's account.

Light, dark and the two looks#

FastVet ships two visual themes — the modern Mint look shown throughout this guide, and the original Classic look. Your practice picks one for everybody under Practice Settings → Branding & Theme.

Home›Settings›Practice Settings›Branding & Theme

The screens work identically in both; only the styling differs. If your practice uses Classic, the buttons in these screenshots will be in the same places but will look squarer and more colourful.

If something goes wrong#

The Report a problem button in the header records exactly what you were doing and sends it to support. It is far more useful than an email describing the problem from memory, because it captures the screen and the steps that led there.

Press Report a problem as soon as you notice something wrong — you do not have to reproduce it first.
Carry on and show the problem happening. Recording keeps going for up to five minutes.
Type a line about what went wrong (optional) and press Send. Keep recording gives you longer; Discard throws it away.

Tip

FastVet is already keeping the last couple of minutes in your browser's memory before you press the button, so the moments before you noticed the problem are captured too. That is why pressing it straight away works even though you have not repeated the fault yet.

Note

Nothing leaves your device until you press Send, and everything you type into a field is masked before it is stored. Recordings can only be opened by FastVet system administrators.