Help Centre › Appointments & queues

Queues

The live picture of who is waiting — for a vet, for payment, for a groom, or for a call back.

Queues are how work moves between people in FastVet. Reception puts a patient on a queue; a vet picks them up; finishing the visit moves them along to the next one. The counts on the home screen are these queues.

Putting a patient on a queue#

Animated Weighing a patient in and sending them to the consult queue.

From Home choose New Consultation.
Search for the client by cell number or surname and open them.
The patient record opens with a short weigh-in form. Enter the weight if you have it.
Choose why they are here — Consult, Callback, Dispense or Grooming.
Type the reason — “vomiting since yesterday”, “annual vaccination”. This is what the vet sees on the queue card.
Pick a vet, or leave Any Doctor, and press Go.

Note

If that patient is already waiting, FastVet says so rather than quietly creating a second entry, and offers to update the existing one instead. Take that option unless the animal genuinely needs two separate visits.

Tip

Recording the weight here saves the vet doing it later, and it feeds the patient's weight history — which is what makes weight trends useful over the years.

The consult queue#

Home›Consult Queue

Each card shows the patient, the owner, the reason for the visit, which vet they are waiting for, their position in the queue, and how long they have been waiting.

The buttons on a card depend on why the patient was queued — the card says which, under the owner's number:

Card says	Buttons
Consult	Consult opens the consultation and starts the visit. Admit sends them straight to a hospital admission instead. Cancel removes them from the queue without recording a visit.
Call Back	Call Back opens the record so you can log the outcome of the call, plus Cancel.
Drug Dispense	Dispense opens a dispense — a visit that charges medicines without a full consultation — plus Cancel.
Grooming	Grooming opens the grooming record, plus Cancel.

Who can do this

Everyone with a queue role sees the queue and can press Cancel. Consult, Admit, Call Back and Dispense need the Doctor role. If a colleague has a button you do not, that is why.

Note

The waiting time on each card is the single most useful number in a busy waiting room. It is measured from the moment the patient was queued, not from their appointment time. The list is ordered longest-wait-first, and anything left over from a previous day is highlighted and reads “Waiting since …” rather than just a duration.

The other queues#

Queue	Holds
Payment Queue	Visits that have been finished and invoiced but not yet paid. See Accounts & payments.
Hospital Patients	Animals currently admitted. See Hospital.
Boarding	Animals currently boarding. See Boarding.
Grooming Queue	Patients booked or waiting for grooming. See Grooming.
Lab Results Available	Results that have come back and not yet been reviewed. See Lab results.
Shop Dispatch	Online shop orders waiting to be handed over. See The online shop.

The payment queue#

Home›Payment Queue

When a vet finishes a consultation the charge lands on the client's account and the patient appears here. Reception takes payment, and the entry clears.

Tap an entry to open the client's account and take payment.
An entry that stays here overnight is usually somebody who left without paying — chase it from the account book.