Consultations
Writing up a visit - clinical notes, vitals and billing, then finalising and generating an invoice.
This is where you write up a visit. If you only learn one screen in Wattle, make it this one.
A visit, a consult and a consultation all mean the same thing: one record holding one visit's notes, vitals and charges. You almost never need to leave this page - notes, vitals and billing sit side by side on the Clinical tab, and the notes save themselves as you type.
Common tasks
| I want to... | Do this |
|---|---|
| Start a visit | On a checked-in appointment: Start consult. Or patient → Visit History → New Visit |
| Write notes | Clinical tab, left → Clinical Notes → type. Autosaves 2s after you stop; Cmd+S saves now |
| Record vitals | Clinical tab, right → Visit Vitals → type into the boxes. Each saves when you click away |
| Add a charge | Clinical tab, right → Billing Items → + → pick the item → set quantity → Add to bill |
| Delete a charge | Row's ⋯ → Delete on a draft visit, or Void once the visit is finalised |
| Add a photo or file | Attachments tab → Upload |
| Mark a patient deceased | Add the euthanasia to the bill - Wattle asks |
| Work out a dose | The calculator icon top-right, or ⌘K → Dose calculator |
| Finalise | Header → Finalise. Immediate, no confirmation |
| Undo that | Header → Revert to draft |
| Change the visit date | Click the date in the header subtitle → pick → Save |
| Use the booked date instead | If the appointment was on another day, Booked ‹date› → Use that date appears next to it |
| Reassign to another vet | Header → ⋯ → Change provider |
| Change the status | Header → the status box → pick one. Saves immediately |
| See the invoice | The Financial tab - the visit's invoice sits right on it |
| Delete a visit | Header → ⋯ → Delete consult → Discard. Permission-gated |
| Check and finalise the bill | Financial tab - the draft is there to edit and Finalise |
| Take a payment | Financial tab → Record payment, once the invoice is finalised |
| See estimates for this visit | Financial tab → Estimates, beside the billing summary |
| Write an estimate | Financial tab → New estimate. Pet, owner and visit pre-filled |
How the page is laid out
| Area | What's there |
|---|---|
| Header | Patient, visit number, date, provider, status pill, Finalise, and a ⋯ menu. An Alerts pill appears if the patient has any. Once the visit is finalised, a ✓ Finalised marker joins the visit number, date and vet on the details line; hover it and it reminds you the write-up is still editable and that changes are recorded against your name. The header sits above the tabs, so it stays with you whichever one you're on |
| Clinical tab | Everything you use while the animal is in front of you. Clinical Notes on the left; Patient context, Visit Vitals and Billing Items on the right |
| Financial tab | The visit's invoice - editable while it's a draft, payable once finalised - with Billing summary and Estimates side by side above it |
| Attachments tab | Photos, results, anything you've uploaded |
Billing is on the Clinical tab on purpose. Charging as you write is how a consult actually runs, so the bill sits beside the notes rather than behind a separate step. The Financial tab is the bill itself: the invoice those charges have been landing on, ready to check, finalise and take payment on without leaving the visit. Open full page on the invoice takes you to the same invoice as its own page if you prefer the bigger view.
Patient context is read-only - a mirror of the patient's active alerts and anything due or overdue. It only appears when there's something to show, so if you see it, it's worth a glance. To change an alert, go to the patient's Summary tab.
Visit Vitals is four boxes you type straight into - weight, temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate. There's no pencil and no dialog: each box saves on its own as you leave it, and the small Saved indicator at the top of the card is the same one the Clinical Notes use. Leaving a box untouched writes nothing.
Looking back at a visit, the weight carries a percentage - +17% means the animal is 17% heavier than the last time it was weighed, which may have been several visits ago rather than the previous one. Hover it for the kilograms and the date it's being compared with. Only weight gets this: a heart rate 20% above last time doesn't mean anything on its own, where 20% of body weight does.
The Total on Billing Items says whether GST is in it - (inc GST) or (excl GST), matching how your clinic prices. It's there because the same figure means two different things depending on that setting, and the consult has no GST line of its own to make it obvious.
Attachments has its own tab. It's the same set of files as the patient's Attachments tab, so you can pull up an earlier photo and compare. Anything you upload here is tagged to this visit, and you can select existing files to Link to this visit.
Walk-throughs
When two of you are on the same visit
Two people can have the same visit open - a vet writing notes on a laptop while a nurse adds charges on an iPad is normal. Wattle now handles that rather than letting the last save win.
You'll see who else is here. If a colleague has the visit open, their name appears in the line under the patient - "Dr Aris Thorne is also viewing this visit". It's there so most clashes get sorted by looking up and saying something, before either of you starts typing.
A save only writes what you changed. Editing the notes no longer rewrites the vitals, and editing a client's phone number no longer rewrites their address. Fields you didn't touch are left exactly as they are, whoever changed them.
If you both add a medicine, both are kept. Two people adding different prescriptions to the same visit isn't a clash - you're both right - so Wattle keeps both rather than asking you to choose. Your save removes only the ones you removed; anything a colleague added after you opened the visit is left alone.
If the visit changes while you have it open, a bar appears across the top offering Reload or Keep editing. Keep editing carries on with what you've typed.
Reload now genuinely fetches the latest version, so you no longer need to refresh the browser to see what changed. If you press Reload and the bar stays put, you're offline - the bar is deliberately left up rather than clearing a warning it couldn't act on. Try again once you're back in range.
If you both saved at once, your save is held back rather than landing on top of theirs, and you get a box showing both versions of the notes side by side:
- Keep both - both versions are kept, one after the other, each under the name of whoever wrote it. Nothing is lost, and you tidy it up afterwards.
- Keep mine - yours wins, theirs is replaced.
- Keep theirs - theirs wins, your typing is discarded.
Keep both is the suggested one, because it's the only choice that can't delete somebody's work. A note that needs tidying is visible and fixable; typing removed by a button press is neither.
There's no Cancel on that box, because there's no safe default: leaving it unanswered would mean the next autosave overwrites somebody. Nothing is merged automatically - Keep both simply stacks the two versions in order under their authors' names. Which version of a treatment note survives is a clinical decision, not one for software.
On the phone, notes written offline follow the same rule. If the visit changed while you were out of range, your note is held rather than overwritten, and the sync icon turns into a warning you can tap to send it anyway or discard it.
If the app closes before your notes save
Your write-up is kept on this device while it's unsaved, so it survives a crash, a force-quit, a flat battery, or an iPad dropping the tab in the background. None of those give the browser a chance to warn you.
Next time you open that visit, a bar offers Restore it or Discard it. Restoring puts the text back in the notes box - it doesn't save it for you, so read it over and save when you're happy.
It won't be there after you sign out. The kept copy is wiped on sign-out and is tied to the person who typed it, so a shared clinic laptop never offers one vet's unsaved notes to the next person. It's also cleared automatically once the visit saves normally, and after a day.
"Waiting for signal" next to the notes means your typing is safe. It's held and sent automatically as soon as you're back in range - you don't need to do anything, and you don't need to keep the page open on the same screen to make it happen. "Save failed" is different: your device thinks it has a connection, so something else stopped the save, and it's worth checking the visit hasn't been finalised or changed by somebody else.
Gotchas
- Vitals save one box at a time, when you leave the box - not while you type. Tab or click away and that reading is saved; Enter saves it there and then. Nothing is written if you didn't change anything, so tabbing through without editing is harmless.
- Delete and Void are different, and the menu now says which one you're about to do. On a draft visit the row menu says Delete and the charge goes for good. Once the visit is finalised the same menu says Void, and the charge stays struck through in the audit trail instead. It used to say "Remove" in both cases, which told you nothing about which you'd get. A void that won't disappear is the audit trail doing its job.
- Packages add everything at once and there's no single undo. Delete each unwanted charge from its row menu. Check the package before clicking it.
- The notes save indicator sits on "Saved" while you're typing. The 2-second timer restarts on every keystroke. Pause, or press Cmd+S, and you'll see it tick through Saving…. If you try to leave with unsaved work, an Unsaved Changes box appears - Keep Editing lets it save; Discard Changes throws the typing away.
- Changing the visit date changes the date of the visit, not the day you typed it up. Use it when writing up late. It sets the date everywhere the visit appears - the patient's history, the order it sorts in, and the patient's last visit date - and it re-checks weekend or after-hours rates against the new time. The picker accepts any date, so a mistyped year is easy - a visit dated years away is a typo, not a bug.
- A visit starts on today's date, even when you open it from a booking. That's deliberate: running late is the normal case, and a booking nobody moved after a reschedule shouldn't quietly become the clinical date. If the booking was on another day you'll see Booked ‹date› beside the visit date with a Use that date link - one click when you're writing up a day or two later, and it stays out of the way when you're not.
- Deleting a charge, or saving a client or patient, needs a connection on the phone. These say so up front now rather than failing with a message about the internet. Writing notes, recording vitals and charging from a job still queue offline and send themselves when you're back in range.
- Change provider lists all active staff, receptionists included. Take care to pick an actual clinician.
- The bill can be finalised and paid right on the consult page now. The visit's draft invoice (it appeared with the first charge) sits on the Financial tab - edit it, Finalise, then Record payment, all without leaving the visit. The front desk can still do the same from the patient's or owner's Financials tab; it's the same invoice wherever it's opened.
- New estimates start from the visit now. New estimate on the Financial tab's Estimates card opens the estimate form with the pet, the owner and the visit already filled in. Estimates made elsewhere still show here once linked to the visit; an empty card reads No estimates for this visit.
- "This visit was changed by…" doesn't mean you did anything wrong. It means a colleague saved while you had the visit open. Nothing of yours is lost - your typing is still on screen, waiting for you to choose.
- A red error mentioning Settings → Visit Statuses when starting a visit means your clinic hasn't set its visit statuses up yet. That's a one-time admin job, not something you did.
If your clinic uses weekend & after-hours rates and the visit falls in one of those windows, eligible lines arrive with the loading already applied - a +40% badge beside the price and a chip at the top of the card naming the loading.
Related
Schedule · Patients · Charges vs invoices · Invoices · Estimates · The catalogue