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Templates & letterheads

The letterheads on every invoice, statement, reminder, referral and letter your practice sends — how to edit them, what the #CODES# do, how to preview one before a client sees it, and how to check what actually went out.

Everything FastVet sends on your behalf is your practice's document with your practice's heading on it. The body — the invoice lines, the statement, the reminder — is built by the system. The heading is yours: your name, address, banking details, practice number, and whatever else belongs at the top of the page. That heading is what these templates hold.

Do this before you send anything#

Careful

A new practice starts with the example letterhead — “Template Veterinary Clinic, 50 Some Road, Account Nr: 00000000000”. It is a placeholder, and it will go out on a real invoice to a real client if nobody replaces it. Editing the General Invoice Header is the first setup job worth doing after your practice details.

You will know it has not been done because the preview says so — it is the wrong practice name in the wrong font with a bank account of noughts.

The templates#

Who can do this

Administrators only.

Home›Settings›Manage Templates

Everything FastVet says to your clients is written here — the letterheads on documents and emails, and the wording of text messages. Seven letterheads and, if you use SMS, the reminder text.

Template	Goes on
General Invoice Header	Every printed and emailed invoice — consultations, sales, hospital and boarding stays, shop orders. The one that matters most.
Grooming Invoice Header	Grooming invoices. Leave it blank and grooming falls back to the General Invoice Header, which is usually what you want. Only shown if grooming is switched on.
Referral Header	Referral letters to other practices.
Customer Statement Header	Account statements.
Reminder Header	Reminder emails.
Sign-up Request Header	The invitation email that asks a client to fill in their own details.
Letter Header	One-off letters sent from Send Letter. Leave it blank and letters use your Referral Header.
Text Messages	Every text your practice sends — reminders, overdue accounts, appointments and more. These are whole messages, not letterheads, and they all sit on one screen. Needs SMS Portal. See what the texts say.

Tip

Two of the seven letterheads fall back to another when left empty, and that is the right way to run them unless you genuinely want a different one. One heading kept correct beats four that drift apart.

Note

The text messages are a different kind of thing from the seven letterheads, and open a different editor. A letterhead is decoration wrapped around a document; a text message is the message, and every character costs — so they are written as plain text with a credit counter rather than in the word processor, and all of them share one screen because each is only a line or two.

Editing one#

The invoice header in the editor, with its substitution codes listed above it.

Go to Settings → Manage Templates and tap the template.
Edit it in the word-processor area. It is a normal editor — bold, alignment, tables, and Insert → an image for your logo.
Drop in any substitution codes you want filled in automatically, typed exactly as they appear in the panel at the top, hashes and all.
Press Preview to see it as a client will.
Press Save.

Note

Most practices lay the heading out as a table — address on the left, banking in the middle, contact and invoice number on the right. That is what the supplied example does, and it is worth keeping: a table survives being rendered to PDF and emailed far more predictably than columns made with spaces.

Tip

Your logo goes in as an image. Size it before you upload rather than dragging it smaller in the editor — the PDF renderer uses the file you gave it, so a 3000-pixel logo makes every invoice a slow, heavy email.

Substitution codes#

A substitution code is a placeholder you type into the heading which FastVet swaps for real data at the moment the document is produced. Type #INVOICENUMBER# into the invoice header and every invoice carries its own number there.

The panel at the top of the editor lists exactly the codes that template replaces — and only those. That list is not the same for every template:

Code	Becomes	Available on
`#CUSTOMERFIRSTNAME#`	The client's first name.	Invoice, Grooming, Statement, Reminder, Sign-up
`#CUSTOMERLASTNAME#`	The client's surname.	Invoice, Grooming, Statement, Reminder, Sign-up
`#INVOICENUMBER#`	The invoice number.	Invoice, Grooming
`#INVOICEDATE#`	The date of the visit or sale being invoiced.	Invoice, Grooming
`#REFERENCE#`	The reference number — what you ask clients to use when they pay.	Invoice, Grooming, Statement
`#DOCUMENTTITLE#`	What the document is — “Tax Invoice”, “Statement”, “Reminder”.	Invoice, Grooming, Statement, Reminder
`#ADDITIONALINFO#`	Anything in the client's additional-info field — delivery instructions and the like.	Invoice, Grooming
`#DATE#`	Today's date, as the document goes out.	Statement, Letter

Careful

A code that is not on that template's list prints literally. Put #INVOICENUMBER# in the statement header and clients receive a statement with the word #INVOICENUMBER# on it, because a statement is not an invoice and has no number to fill in. Copy the codes from the panel on the template you are editing, not from another one.

Note

The Referral Header has no codes at all — it is rendered exactly as you wrote it. The Letter Header has only #DATE#: everything else on a letter is free text you type when you send it.

Note

Sign-up invites go to people who are barely on file yet, so its two codes are forgiving — #CUSTOMERFIRSTNAME# becomes “there” when no first name is known, so “Hi #CUSTOMERFIRSTNAME#” reads “Hi there” rather than “Hi ,”.

Previewing before a client sees it#

The preview: a whole sample invoice, with the codes filled in from sample data.

Preview renders a complete sample document — your heading, then a made-up invoice under it with a client, a patient, three lines and a total. The figures and the names are illustrative; the heading is real.

It is the only place you can check the three things that go wrong:

Whether your codes actually resolve. A code that prints as #SOMETHING# in the preview will print that way on the invoice.
Whether the heading fits. What looks right in the editor can wrap badly once it is rendered to a page.
Whether the logo comes through at a sensible size.

Back to edit returns to the editor with your changes intact. Nothing is saved until you press Save — previewing on its own changes nothing.

Tip

Preview after every edit, however small. The template is the one thing in FastVet where a mistake is only ever seen by a client.

What goes out automatically#

Who can do this

Administrators only, under Settings → Practice Settings → Email & Notifications.

The mailbox everything is sent from, and the four automatic sends.

The top half is the mailbox FastVet sends as — get it wrong and nothing goes out, invoices, reminders and statements alike. These come from your email provider; if you are not sure of them, ask whoever set up your mail.

The bottom half decides what is sent without anybody pressing a button:

Switch	Sends
Email invoices & receipts automatically	The invoice, the moment a consultation, sale, hospital or boarding stay or grooming is finished.
Email reminders	A reminder to the client when one falls due. See Reminders & letters.
Email overdue account statements	A statement to every client carrying an outstanding balance.
Email the client their statement when a payment is received	A statement on the back of each payment. Reception can override it per payment.
CC the alternative email address	Copies every email to the client's second address, where they have one.

Note

Turning one off only stops the automatic send. Staff can still email an invoice, a statement or a referral by hand from the screen it belongs to.

Careful

Every one of these needs the client to have a working email address on file. A wrong address is not a silent failure — it lands on the email history report as a failure, which is what that report is for.

Sending a one-off letter#

Home›Settings›Send Letter

For anything that is not an invoice, a statement or a referral — a note to a breeder, a practice announcement, a follow-up to a specialist — Send Letter puts your letterhead on top of whatever you type and emails it. You type the recipient's address, so it works for people who are not clients.

It uses the Letter Header, or your Referral Header if the letter header is blank. The body arrives already carrying today's date, “Dear Sir or Madam,” and a sign-off in your practice's name — all of it editable.

The full walkthrough is in Reminders & letters → Sending a letter.

Note

A letter sent from a client's account is recorded against that client, so it shows in the email history under their name.

Checking what actually went out#

Home›Reports›Email history

A month of email: what was sent, to whom, and whether it went.

Every message FastVet sends is logged, whether it succeeded or not. The report shows one month at a time, oldest first, with the address it went to, the subject, the status, the date and the type of document.

The status column is the point of the report:

Status	Means
sent	The mail server accepted the message. It left your practice.
failed: …	It did not. The rest of the line is what the mail server said, verbatim.

The failures are worth reading rather than ignoring, because they are usually one of two things and both are fixable:

The address is wrong. “Recipient not found”, “Mailbox unavailable” — a typo on the client record. Correct it there.
The mailbox settings are wrong. “Authentication required”, “sender domain has not been linked” — nothing will send until Email & Notifications is right.

Tip

“We never got the invoice” is answered here in about ten seconds: find the month, find the client, read the status. Either it went — and it is in their spam — or it did not, and the line says why.

Note

The report exports to a spreadsheet. See Exporting to a spreadsheet.