Weekend & after-hours rates

Set it up once - Saturday +20%, Sunday +40%, public holiday +50%, weeknights after 6pm +20% - and a visit falling in one of those windows opens with the loading already applied.

Off by default and completely blank. A clinic that never opens this screen is unaffected by any of it. Settings → Clinic Settings → Rate loading.

How it works, in one line

Price × loading × quantity = charged. A $120 consultation on a Sunday with a 40% loading is charged at $168.

Three things follow, and they're worth knowing:

• Changing the price never changes the loading, and vice versa. Only the charged figure moves.
• Quantity keeps meaning quantity. The loading goes into the price, never the amount dispensed - so stock counts and your controlled-drug register stay exactly right. Three millilitres is still three millilitres.
• Loadings never stack. A Sunday evening is 40%, not 40% and 20%. Where two rules overlap the higher one wins. There's no ordering to configure.

Setting it up

1. Switch on Charge weekend and after-hours loadings.
2. Choose percentages (+40%) or factors (×1.4). Most practices think in percentages, so that's the default. Every box and badge follows your choice, and always shows its unit.
3. Add loading for each rule: a label (what staff and the invoice call it), the value, the days including Public holidays, and an optional time window. Leave both time boxes blank for all day. A window ending earlier than it starts runs past midnight, so 18:00 to 07:00 covers the night.
4. Tick the kinds of item that should be loaded.
5. Add the dates for any public-holiday rule.

Everything saves itself.

What gets loaded

Loading pays for your time, not for goods. A vial of maropitant costs your practice the same on a Sunday as on a Tuesday.

Service covers everything that is your time - consults, procedures, imaging, hospitalisation, dentals. You used to have to tick five boxes for that and hope you hadn't missed one.

Euthanasia is its own kind and is loaded, because an after-hours euthanasia is your time like any other visit. Untick it if your practice would rather not.

You can change any of that with the tick boxes, with one exception.

Discounts can never be loaded. A discount is a negative amount, so multiplying it would make the discount bigger, not the bill. The tick box is locked off and Wattle refuses it behind the scenes too.

Dispensing and injection fees are loaded, and they follow the item they belong to. An injection fee is your hands, not the drug - it is the most labour-like thing on the line, and loading exists to pay for labour at an unsocial hour. There is no separate setting: a fee inherits whatever you ticked for the item it sits on. So if you load Service only, a Sunday drug line and its fee both stay at list price; if you also load Medication, the drug and its fee load together.

Accounts that shouldn't be loaded

Some accounts pay a price list you don't set. If you do subcontract work for a home-euthanasia network, or bill a rescue on agreed rates, that price list usually already includes an after-hours premium. Loading it again charges the premium twice.

Ticking a kind off can't solve this, because it's the same kind either way - your own after-hours euthanasia and a contracted one are both Euthanasia. The thing that differs is who pays.

So it's set per account. Open the client, and under the billing options you'll find Rate loading:

• Ticked (the default, and every existing account) - loading applies as normal.
• Unticked - nothing this account pays for is ever loaded, whatever the kinds say.

It follows the payer, not the pet's owner. On third-party work the owner is a private individual and the organisation is footing the bill, so untick it on the organisation's record. Charges billed to that account stop being loaded no matter whose pet they were for.

Public holidays

A list of dates you keep yourself, under Public holidays on the same screen.

Wattle nudges you in November and December if next year's dates are missing. Forgetting a date means you charge the ordinary rate - you'll never accidentally overcharge someone because a date was wrong.

Billing a loaded visit

All of this happens on its own:

• The billing card shows a chip - Sunday +40% - with a ⋯ beside it for reviewing, changing or removing the loading for the whole visit at once.
• Each loaded line carries a small +40% badge. Hover it to see which loading and why.
• Under the total: includes $224.00 Sunday loading.

To change one line, click it. All four numbers are on one screen:

Price      120.00
Loading    40 %   (Sunday)   Remove
Quantity   1
──────────────────
Charged    $168.00

Charged is always the answer, never something you type. Remove takes the loading off this line only.

To review the whole visit, choose Review items… from the ⋯. Tick items on and off and the totals move as you go. Anything already on an issued invoice is greyed out.

If you change the visit's date or time, Wattle re-checks the clock and asks - it never reprices silently:

• moving into a window: "This visit is now Sunday 2:15pm. Apply the Sunday loading (+40%) to 3 items?"
• moving out of one: "…no longer applies. Remove it from 3 items?"
• moving between two: "…Change the loading from +20% to +40% on 3 items?"

If the answer didn't change, you aren't asked anything.

Walk-ins and over-the-counter sales

With no visit behind it - a nail clip, a bandage change billed straight onto an invoice - the invoice and estimate forms carry the same Rate loading picker at the top of the Charges section. Choose one and eligible lines re-price before you save.

(A pure product sale loads nothing anyway. This is for nurse time billed without a consult.)

What the client sees

Prices, and one sentence under the totals:

Some items on this invoice include a 40% Sunday loading.

No multiplier is ever printed and no extra column appears - nothing on the document competes with the quantity column. Rewrite that sentence, or switch it off, in Note on invoices.

Gotchas

• A consult is $168 and you expected $120. Click the line - price, loading, quantity and charged are all there, and Remove takes it off.
• A medication didn't get loaded. Deliberate - goods aren't marked up. Tick Medication under Applies to if your practice wants it.
• A public holiday charged at the normal rate means the date isn't in your Public holidays list.
• You renamed a loading and old invoices still say the old name. Correct - every charge keeps the name it was billed under, so history never rewrites itself.
• An issued invoice didn't change. Also correct. Issued invoices are never repriced - raise a credit note instead.
• One account never gets loaded and you can't see why. Check Rate loading on that client - and if the charges are billed to somebody else, check it on their record instead, because the tick follows whoever pays.