AI Guides / Veterinary
A vet clinic's revenue calendar is already written in its patient records — vaccinations due, preventatives running out, seniors due back at six months — and the practice software ships a genuinely deep reminder system to run it, mostly unconfigured. The two rules underneath everything below: the machine handles the calendar, and clinical judgement never comes from a chat window.
Start at step one. Stop whenever you like — nothing below is needed for anything above it to work.
Prices checked by hand 27 July 2026 · nobody pays to be listed here
The whole page, in order
Configure the standard-of-care reminders in your PMS — vaccination cadences per species and age, with templates and the send-time set. This is the highest-value settings session in this playbook.
Software: ezyVet Standard of Care and communication tasks
Turn on appointment confirmations and day-before reminders, with a reply-to-confirm status the front desk can see — protecting the surgical and dental slots first.
Software: ezyVet appointment confirmations and reminders
Pull the lapsed list: every patient past fourteen months since their last visit gets one warm message from the practice, not a template blast.
Software: ezyVet patient list and communication tasks
Count reminders sent versus appointments booked, no-shows on confirmed versus unconfirmed slots, and lapsed patients recovered. Only then decide whether anything needs building.
Software: ezyVet reminder and appointment reports
Step one · start here
On ezyVet, Xero, these are settings, not another subscription — check your plan includes them. On something else, search its help centre for the same feature name.
Extra software cost
$0*
if included in your plan
Hours back per month
≈16
Why it matters
Care services defined by species, breed and age, with tasks that send vaccination and treatment reminders automatically. Cadence, filters, exclusions and templates are all configurable and all documented. Almost no practice moves them off the defaults.
What to do
Open the official guide below. In ezyVet, find “Standard-of-care reminders via communication tasks”. Follow the guide once, switch it on for one real job or customer first, and check that it did exactly what you expected before using it everywhere.
Open the official setup guide ↗1 day · $0 extra if included in your current plan
Why it matters
Reminders that fire on conditions — species, age, sex, presenting problem — so the senior-cat six-monthly and the puppy series run on different clocks without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
What to do
Open the official guide below. In ezyVet, find “Condition-based reminder logic”. Follow the guide once, switch it on for one real job or customer first, and check that it did exactly what you expected before using it everywhere.
Open the official setup guide ↗Half a day · $0 extra if included in your current plan
Why it matters
For the balances that don't settle at the desk — payment plans, insurance gap accounts, the occasional slow client. Built in, off by default, with hardship accounts excluded because those need a phone call.
What to do
Open the official guide below. In Xero, find “Invoice reminders”. Follow the guide once, switch it on for one real job or customer first, and check that it did exactly what you expected before using it everywhere.
Check the official pricing and plan details ↗20 minutes · $0 extra if included in your current plan
Different software? The same switch usually exists under another name.
Step two · first workflow to implement
Every due vaccine, health check and preventative refill is an appointment the reminder system can book — provided the cadences are configured and the templates carry a booking path. This is the practice's revenue engine and it runs on settings, not marketing.
Do this in order
Typical size
≈100+ due/mo
Setup
1 day
What to use
ezyVet Standard of Care reminders
Buy or build: Already paid for
How you know it worked
Count it in week one, then count the same thing again in week four. If the number did not move, stop spending.
Keep this implementation simple
Use the steps above with the software you already have. Test the workflow on your own phone before adding another product or paying someone to build around it.
Step three · keep going without adding complexity
One at a time. Finish it, test it on real work, then start the next.
A patient past fourteen months since the last visit has dropped off the reminder chain and will next appear as an emergency, or at another clinic. A quarterly warm message to that list — about the pet by name, not the invoice — is the cheapest new revenue in practice.
Setup effort: 1 week
A no-show on a dental or desexing slot is the day's margin gone. Confirmation at booking, reminder with fasting instructions the day before, and a deposit policy on the longest procedures — the same perishable-inventory logic as any operating theatre.
Setup effort: Half a day
A six-month flea-and-worm supply runs out on a knowable date. A reminder a fortnight before — with a pickup or posted option — keeps the refill revenue in your practice instead of the pet store's aisle.
Setup effort: Half a day
Step four · only once the first three are running
The first point where paying for a build makes sense — once the earlier steps are running.
After-hours calls split into genuine emergencies (straight to the emergency hospital's number, immediately) and everything else (booked for the morning). A phone flow that does that routing reliably protects animals and mornings alike — and never, ever gives clinical advice itself.
Setup effort: Half a day
Does this look familiar?
Let the vaccination calendar sell itself
Recover the pet that missed a year
Protect the surgical slots
Refill the preventatives before they run out
Route the 8pm chocolate call properly
Confirmations that cut the no-shows
After thirty days
Number one
Write down the current monthly number before you switch anything on. Compare it with the same number after thirty days.
Number two
Count it the same way in week one and week four. Do not change the definition halfway through.
Number three
Use the history inside your existing software to count how often the automation actually ran.
Number four
Ask the person doing the work now. They will know before a dashboard does.
Every other figure here is a typical size. These four are yours.
Reference
All 11 jobs for veterinary, in order of what they return.Open ↓Close ↑Wins work
01
02
03
04
05
Saves hours
06
Booking confirmation, day-before reminder, reply-to-confirm — from the PMS's own communication system, with procedure-specific templates carrying the fasting and admission instructions.
07
History, consents and contact details completed at home and filed to the record — the first consult starts with the animal, not the clipboard.
08
Templated discharge instructions filled from the visit record — medications, doses as prescribed, recheck date — with the clinical content written and checked by the vet, and the formatting done by the machine.
09
Clinic phones peak when the desk is thinnest. A missed call gets an instant text with the booking link — for the routine caller who wanted an appointment, while genuine worry still reaches a person.
10
Templated estimates per procedure with the consent captured before the animal is admitted — fewer discharge-desk surprises, fewer accounts that age, fewer reviews written in anger.
11
Boarding rules, prices, which vaccines the clinic stocks, admission times — one internal place to ask, loaded from your own documents, with anything clinical routed to a vet.
The stack
| Tool | What it is for | Price | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practice managementezyVet | Cloud PMS with the deepest documented reminder system in the category — standard of care, communication tasks, templates. | On quote ↗ | If you're on it, the reminder configuration above is the whole game — a day of settings before any new spend. If you're not, a PMS migration is a year of disruption; don't switch for a feature your incumbent likely half-has. |
| Practice managementYour incumbent PMS | Covetrus, Provet Cloud, VetLinkSQL and the rest — all carry reminder modules of varying depth. | Existing ↗ | The honest instruction: open your own PMS's reminder settings before reading further down this table. The pattern across this whole library is that the incumbent does more than anyone configured. |
| Phone & messagingOpenPhone | A clinic number with shared inbox and missed-call text-back. | $19/user ↗ | Solves the lunch-hour problem. Booking logistics only in texts — no dosing, no triage, no clinical anything. |
| AI answeringRosie | Overflow answering with strict routing: emergencies to the emergency hospital, everything else to the diary. | $49/mo ↗ | Deployable only with a hard script: it identifies emergency keywords and hands over the emergency number instantly, and it never advises on symptoms, toxins or doses. If that can't be locked down, a good voicemail with the emergency number beats it. |
| AccountingXero | The practice's books and the payment reminders nobody enables. | $35/mo ↗ | You almost certainly have this already. Reminders free, off by default, twenty minutes in settings. |
| AutomationMake.com | The lapsed-list sequences and refill nudges beyond the PMS's own cadences. | $9/mo ↗ | Client names and appointment logistics only — nothing clinical leaves the PMS. And check the PMS's own communication tasks first; a scenario duplicating a built-in reminder is a scenario to delete. |
| AssistantChatGPT Team | The team's operational questions from your own documents — prices, policies, stock, admission procedures. | $25/user ↗ | Loaded with your policies it earns its keep at the front desk. It never sees a patient record and never answers a clinical question — 'ask a vet' is the only correct output for those. |
| DocumentationCompanyCam | Photo trails outside the PMS. | $29/mo ↗ | Redundant — the PMS attaches images to the patient record, which is where clinical photos belong. Listed so you don't buy it. |
Do not bother
A tool that tells a worried owner the chocolate dose is 'probably fine' has practised veterinary medicine badly under your name. Phone flows route and book; they never assess. The emergency number and 'bring them in' are the only safe automated answers.
Consult-note tools want access to clinical records, and the practice's money problem is the unconfigured reminder system, not note-taking speed. Configure the calendar first; assess scribes properly later if the vets still want one.
The pets already in your records — overdue, lapsed, preventatives run out — return at a message's cost and full price. Discounting to strangers before reactivating friends buys worse clients at worse margin.
Sources
Nearby trades
Common problems this covers
How every other industry fixes the same thing, and what they pay.
Price rechecks only. Leave any time.
Do it yourself
Use the official links, do one card at a time, and count the result after thirty days.
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