Your first patient

In about ten minutes you'll walk one patient from "booked in" to "paid". Follow the steps in order and you'll have done a complete day's-work loop by the end.

The app is hard to break, and nearly everything here can be changed or undone afterwards.

The whole journey in one line: Schedule → click a slot → pick patient → Create Appointment → Check in → Start consult → type notes (autosaves) → Billing Items + → Add to bill → Finalise → patient's Financials tab → open the visit's draft → Finalise → Take payment → Record Payment.

1. Book an appointment

1. Sidebar → Schedule. You'll see today's calendar - a grid of time slots with a column per vet or nurse.
2. Click once on an empty slot. A panel slides in with the date, time and column filled in.
3. In the Patient box, type the patient's name (or the owner's) and pick them. No record yet? The + creates one without leaving the panel.
4. Choose the appointment Type, for example Consult.
5. Optionally add a Reason - the chief complaint, like "limping on left hind".
6. Create Appointment.

A red "One of these required" on three fields just means you need at least one of patient, reason or notes. Picking the patient clears it. No column to choose is normal in a single-column clinic.

2. Check the patient in

Click the appointment tile → Check in. The status changes straight away. That's it - the patient is marked as here.

3. Open the consult

Open the appointment again. Because the patient is checked in, the button now reads Start consult. Click it.

Wattle creates the visit record and opens it. The appointment quietly moves to In Progress on its own.

You're now on the consultation page: clinical work on the left, vitals and billing on the right.

4. Add a note and a charge

The note. Click into the Clinical Notes box and type. There's no Save button - about two seconds after you stop typing it saves itself, and the indicator near the card title changes to Saved. Cmd+S saves instantly.

The charge.

1. On the right, find Billing Items and click +.
2. Search or browse the catalogue and click the service or product.
3. Set the Quantity - it defaults to 1, so bump it up for tablets and vials.
4. Add to bill.

The charge drops in with its line total and the running Total updates. Added the wrong one? While the visit is a draft, the trash icon on that row removes it.

5. Finalise the visit

At the top of the page, click Finalise. A message confirms Visit finalised - ready for payment.

Two things worth knowing:

• Your clinical notes stay editable afterwards.
• The trash icon now voids rather than deletes. Once finalised, charges are kept in the record and struck through, so there's always a trail.

Finalised by mistake? No harm done - the button has become Revert to draft.

6. Invoice and take payment

1. Open the patient - Patients in the sidebar, find them, open them.
2. Financials tab. You'll see Not yet billed - the visit's bill is already there, holding what you just added.
3. Invoice this visit and check the lines. It has no invoice number yet - that's normal until you finalise it.
4. Finalise in the header. The invoice number and date appear, and the invoice is now issued.
5. Click Take payment in the header.
6. Enter the Payment Amount, choose the method (cash, credit card, debit card, cheque, bank transfer or other), add a reference if you like.
7. Record Payment.

The balance drops to zero and the badge reads Paid.

The invoice still shows a balance after you paid? A payment has to be allocated to an invoice to reduce it. Taking payment from the invoice's own Take payment button does that for you; money recorded against the account without allocation sits as credit. More in Taking payments.

Issued it with a mistake? Unfinalise drops it back to an editable draft, keeping its number and date - as long as nothing has been paid against it. If you've already taken payment, unallocate the payment first or raise a credit note instead.

You did it

That's the full loop - booked, checked in, consulted, noted, charged, finalised, invoiced, paid.

Everything here has a fuller chapter when you want to go deeper: Schedule · Consultations · Patients · Invoices · Taking payments

New word? The Glossary has it. Can't see a button we mention? Usually permissions - ask whoever set up your clinic.