Grooming

Run the grooming side of the practice: a queue of its own, a record of what was done, and an invoice at the end.

Grooming has its own queue and its own staff role, so groomers see their work without wading through clinical screens. If your practice does not offer grooming, an administrator can hide it entirely under Features & Modules.

The grooming queue#

Home›Grooming Queue

Patients arrive here in two ways: reception sends them from the client record with the purpose set to Grooming, or they come from a grooming booking.

Recording a groom#

A grooming record: what was done, and what it comes to.

Open the patient from the grooming queue.
Add what was done — clip, bath, nails, de-matting — using Add, exactly as items are added anywhere else.
Note anything worth remembering for next time: coat condition, temperament, what worked.
Press Save as you go, and Done to finish the groom and raise the invoice.

Adding what you did. Add opens your price list filtered to the grooming lane, so a groomer sees grooming services and not the clinical catalogue. Nails and ear cleans show up too, because those belong to a groom as much as to a consultation — which lane an item appears in is set per item, not by its category, under Update Prices.

Pressing Add shows only the categories a groomer sells from.

Inside a category: the services themselves, with their prices.

Writing it up. The Notes bar at the top of the record opens two boxes. Doctor's Notes is your own record of the groom; Client Notes is what the owner sees on their paperwork.

The groomer’s write-up: what was done, and what to tell the owner.

Tip

Notes about temperament and handling are worth their weight here — “needs two people for nails”, “hates the dryer”. They make the next appointment safer and quicker.

Note

Finishing a groom posts the charge to the client's account, earns them loyalty points, and sends them to the payment queue, just like a consultation.

Charged the wrong thing? Reverse is on the grooming record itself, and also on the charge in the client's account. Unlike other reversals, groomers can do this one as well as vets.

Careful

If you finish a groom, then add or remove an item, finishing again is refused — the charge on the account no longer matches the record. Reverse the groom first, then finish it again, and the client is charged the new total.

Grooming packages#

A protocol is a package: one price on the invoice, with the things it includes recorded underneath. Grooming uses them the same way a consultation does — a "Full Groom" that covers the bath, clip, nails and ears bills as one line at the package price, and the individual items are listed beneath it without prices of their own.

Press Add, pick the package, adjust any quantities, then Add Protocol. The package price is what the client pays; changing a quantity inside it changes what was recorded and what comes off your stock, not the price — unless the package is set to calculate its total from its contents. How a protocol is priced covers the four options.

Note

Removing a package from a groom removes everything inside it too.

Discounting a groom#

Press Add and then Discount. Take a percentage off the whole groom, or a flat amount. Either way it lands as its own line at the foot of the record, so the client can see what they were given rather than wondering why a price looks odd.

The discount panel: what the groom comes to, what is coming off, and what the client will pay.

The summary at the top updates when you leave the amount box, not as you type — so if the figures still read zero, tab or tap out of the field.

Back on the record: the discount as its own line, and the total already adjusted.

A percentage discount follows the groom: add another service afterwards and the discount recalculates against the new total. A flat amount stays exactly what you typed.

Tip

Grooming totals are rounded down to the nearest 10c, the same as consultations and hospital stays. When the total does not already land on one, a Rounding Discount line appears at the foot of the record for the few cents — it is not a mistake, and it is always in the client's favour. A total that is already on a 10c boundary gets no such line.

Sending the owner home with instructions#

Aftercare for a medicated bath, what to watch for on a clipped coat, when to come back — press Add and then Information to attach an info sheet to the groom. Attached sheets are listed on the grooming record and go out with the client's paperwork.

Note

Info sheets can be added and removed until the groom is finished. After that, reverse it first.

What the client sees#

A finished groom appears in the client portal alongside their vet visits, and the client can open it to see what was done, what it cost, and the Client Notes you wrote. It also joins the patient's clinical history, so a vet looking at the record later sees the medicated bath or the flea treatment as part of the same timeline.