As a practice manager, you care about maintaining a clean and orderly office so clients and patients have a comfortable experience and all practice records are accurate.
Your average day probably looks something like this: you greet clients and patients, take incoming phone calls, confirm and follow-up on appointments, process and file over-the-counter sales and patient records.
With any job, some tasks are preferred over others. We know that managing and filing transaction paperwork can be a major pain point. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be.
Take Your Veterinary Business Management Paperless
Instead of filing away every paper receipt, you can streamline and improve your veterinary business management by going paperless, upgrading your credit card processing terminal and using a Virtual Terminal.
Moving away from an old-school terminal that produces individual receipts for every transaction is the first step to going paperless. Upgrading to a Smart Terminal will allow you to capture digital signatures and give clients the option of requesting a copy of their receipt via email. A tangible receipt is no longer needed for either party (though a printed receipt is still possible if the client wants one).
Pairing your Smart Terminal with a Virtual Terminal allows you to digitally store all receipts for future reference. This means that instead of digging through a filing cabinet for a past transaction, you can search for a receipt with a few clicks. Searches in the Virtual Terminal can be made based on the client’s name, transaction date or even patient ID using a custom field.
A Virtual Terminal also gives you the ability to set recurring payments and take over-the-phone transactions without the need for paper receipts. Instead of running clients’ cards monthly for prescriptions or wellness plans — and printing and filing a receipt for each transaction — you can set a payment schedule and provide a single, digital receipt that details the entire schedule. Over-the-phone transactions can be keyed in and a digital receipt can be emailed to the client while she’s still on the phone. This eliminates both the need to fax a receipt to collect a signature and the need to file the receipt copy. Instead, the client can simply sign the receipt via email with her mouse or on her smartphone with her finger.
This virtual pair completely eliminates the need to store paper receipts in your front office, so you can say goodbye to managing and filing paper receipt copies for good. Going paperless allows you to meet your goal of a clean and orderly office and focus your efforts on more efficient and fun work (like saying hello to your favorite patients).
Not convinced you should go paperless?
Does your veterinary office still heavily rely on paper receipts? Tell us why, we’d love to learn about your practice and see how going paperless could change your front office.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.
