Help Centre › Stock & pricing

Prices & the catalogue

Maintain the catalogue everything is charged from: items, categories, price groups and VAT.

The price list is the single catalogue behind every charge in FastVet. A consultation, a sale, a hospital day and a groom all draw from it, so getting it right once fixes pricing everywhere.

Checking a price#

Anybody can look a price up without touching the catalogue.

Home›Check Price

Looking up prices, filtered by category.

Search by name or filter by category. Each line shows the stock on hand, the price including VAT and the price excluding it.

Tip

This is the screen to have open when a client asks “how much is …?” over the phone.

Note

Your practice can restrict this screen by role, under Billing & Payments. With the restriction on, vets and administrators see every price and everybody else sees only the items they can charge themselves.

Where the catalogue lives#

Who can do this

Administrators only.

Home›Stock & Prices

Two doors:

Tile	Leads to
Update Prices	The price list — every catalogue item, its category, price and VAT.
Manage Stock	The stock list — what you have on hand, and from there stock movements and adjustments.

Careful

Price groups and suppliers are not here — they live on the main Settings menu, alongside Users and Manage Templates.

Adding and editing items#

Go to Stock & Prices → Update Prices.
Search for the item, or press Add for a new one.
Choose the type of price — Treatment, Procedure, Lab or Materials. This sets the icon vets see and, for treatments and materials, unlocks the stock fields.
Set its description, category and subcategory.
Under This price will be visible to, tick where the item may be charged: Consultation, Hospitalization, Sales, Boarding, Grooming, Shop. An item ticked nowhere cannot be charged anywhere.
Set the price and the VAT rate.
Save.

Note

The visibility ticks are the usual reason an item “is missing” from the price picker. If a vet cannot find something, check Consultation is ticked on it before looking anywhere else.

Careful

Give every item a subcategory. The consultation price picker browses category → subcategory → item, so an item with no subcategory can only be found by searching, and a category where nothing has one appears completely empty.

Note

The item type and its category are what your vets use to find things. Do not reorganise them to suit a report — the categories belong to the people charging.

Price groups#

Home›Settings›Price Groups

A price group is a named alternative mark-up — a staff rate, a senior discount, a rescue rate. Whoever is charging picks it on the item, and the item is priced from its cost at that group's mark-up instead of at your usual one.

Normal is the everyday catalogue price, and the default.
Custom overrides the amount for one charge only.
A named group re-prices from cost: cost × (1 + the group's mark-up) + tax.

Careful

A group is only a description and a mark-up — there is no separate price list per group, and an item with no cost price is charged R0.00 at every group rate — FastVet warns you under the price when that is about to happen.

Price groups apply everywhere FastVet charges an item, and are not attached to clients — see Price groups for the full picture, including what that means for reception.

Note

If Prices Read Only is switched on under Billing & Payments, the Custom option stops working — staff can no longer type their own amount when charging an item. Named group chips keep working. That is usually what you want once the catalogue is trustworthy.

Protocols#

A protocol bundles several catalogue items under one heading — a vaccination course, a dental package, a spay — so the vet charges the lot in one tap.

Create a price-list item and set its Type to Protocol.
Give it a price. This is the Protocol Charge — what the client actually pays.
Add the component items, each with the default quantity that normally goes with the job.

Note

The client is billed one line, at the Protocol Charge — by default the protocol's own fixed price. Its components are recorded against the visit (stock comes off, the clinical record is complete) but are never billed separately, so their catalogue prices do not add to the bill.

Careful

If you want price groups to work on a protocol, give it a Cost and a Markup %. A price-group chip prices a protocol from its cost, not from its package price — and with the cost blank it charges zero.

Protocols have their own topic, covering the four charge modes, the quantities, and the pick-list pattern where every vaccine sits in one protocol at quantity zero: see Protocols.

Actions that fire when an item is charged#

A catalogue item can be told to do something when the visit it is on is finished — mark the patient deceased, cancel that patient's outstanding reminders, cancel their future bookings.

The ticks are on the price item itself, under When this item is billed. They are most often used on euthanasia and cremation items, so the practice stops sending reminders for an animal that has died.

Note

Nothing happens the moment the line is added — the actions fire when the invoice is finished. A line added by mistake can still be removed beforehand with no effect on the patient record.

VAT#

VAT rates are defined for the practice and applied per item, so zero-rated and standard-rated goods can sit side by side. Whether invoices break VAT out or show inclusive prices is a practice setting.