General

The General Preferences section features many important functions you can turn on and off for your clinic. When each of these is ticked, you must click Save at the bottom of the page in order for the setting to take effect. Let’s discuss each preference in detail.

Clinic Name

This is where your Clinic Name is established. Your clinic’s name populates on all sorts of documents, including but not limited to rabies certificate, invoices, the spay/neuter certificate, and email reminders.

Clinic Profile

Clinic Abbreviation

This abbreviation is what you will find in the upper left corner of the screen in HQ. If you click on it, it will lead to the Dashboard.

Clinic Main Phone

This is the phone number that will populate in various places and many documents, including but not limited to various certificates and invoices.

Clinic Email

This email is what is used to send confirmations and reminders. It also populates in many places across the system.

Logo

This is your clinic’s logo. A simple way to add the logo is to download it from your website by right-clicking on the logo and saving it, then uploading it to HQ.
In order to upload it into HQ, click Choose File, select the logo, and click Save. It will be uploaded, and you will be able to see it. If it needs to be resized, you can use a program like Microsoft Paint if needed.

Uploading your logo

Addresses

Clinic Address

The addresses can easily be taken from the website and put into the relevant fields of HQ in the Addresses Section. Usually, when you start with HQ, we pull this info from your website. But if your clinic moves, you can update your address here. This address populates on invoices, certificates, and other places in the system.
Here you can add your different clinic addresses, like physical, mailing, and billing.

Preferences

In the preferences tab, in Settings > Clinic Profile, you’ll find many key HQ functions. Let’s review what each of these functions accomplishes.

Clinic profile- preferences

Turning on time based spay/neuter scheduling

When you tick the “Use time-based spay/neuter scheduling” tick box it turns on another calendar where you assign times throughout the day for patients to come in for their spay/neuter appointments. This is a rare setting, as most clinics have bulk check-in time from 7:30 AM to 8:30 AM. If your clinic uses bulk check-in time, it’s handled via HQ’s normal calendar. There is no need to tick this setting.

Turning on time based wellness scheduling

This is an important preference choice, as it turns on a whole new wellness calendar to use in addition to the spay/neuter calendar. It’s common in spay/neuter clinics to offer “light wellness” meaning: basic exams, vaccines, heartworm treatment, and, sadly, even euthanasia for end-of-life care. These kinds of appointments can be scheduled for specific times using the Wellness Calendar. (see the chapter on wellness to better understand how this calendar works).

General Preferences

General clinic preferences

The General Preferences section features many important functions you can turn on and off for your clinic. When each of these is ticked, you must click Save at the bottom of the page in order for the setting to take effect. Let’s discuss each preference in detail.

Credit Cards as a Type of Payment

The tick box “Does this clinic accept credit cards?” adds credit cards as a tender type in the drop-down tender type list. If your clinic would like to begin accepting credit cards, please review the credit card section in detail. This tick box simply puts it in this drop-down.

Payment settings

Enable Mobile Locations

“Enable mobile locations’‘ is an important setting. It turns on a new section in Settings which enables you to set up all locations where your mobile unit offers services. This, in turn, makes these locations selectable on the general spay/neuter calendar. When this box is ticked and Save is clicked (down at the bottom of the page), a new setting inserts itself on the left navigation panel for use.

Enabling mobile locations

Enable Drug Log (Only for clinics without Patient Flow)

“Enable Drug Log” turns a new tab on in your checkout called “Drugs.” Here, your clinic can list which drugs were used in surgery.

Calendar Notes

When “Show Daily Notes in Calendar View” is ticked, it allows your clinic to type in daily notes on the calendar. Not all clinics like notes to appear on the calendar because it can appear cluttered. But many do, so this item is a preference.

Kilograms Instead of Pounds

When “Use kilograms instead of pounds” is selected, it will insert “kg” instead of “lb” in various places across the system.

Validating Client Addresses

HQ is connected to an external mapping program that validates addresses. Validating an address means every time you begin typing in an address, HQ looks it up in a database in Google maps. It then presents you with a beautifully formatted and legally correct address. However, in some places outside of the United States, the address look information is not awesome. In these rare cases, you can turn off the validator, so you simply type the address in. This means it cannot be geocoded later (see report section).

Overbooking Alert

This function, when turned on, will provide a pop-up box when your staff overbooks. Many clinics allow for internal overbooking. For some clinics, it’s so frequent that they would prefer not to be alerted.

Default Vet

Default vet can be set up so that when you begin an appointment, HQ auto-assigns the veterinarian in checkout, which is a time saver because your staff will not need to select who the veterinarian is for the day. This is very helpful if your clinic only has one vet, but equally helpful if you have multiple vets but only one works per day. In the morning, you can select this veterinarian as the default, and then all day long, when staff check patients in via the Check-in/Checkout menu, this vet is auto-assigned.

Closed Days

By ticking days here, you will be closing these days on the spay/neuter calendar. For example, if your clinic is closed every Monday, this is a quick way to close all Mondays. If you decide to open on a random Monday, you can open that specific Monday by clicking the “Mark day as Open” link on the calendar.

Indicating when your clinic is open

Label Size

There’s an entire chapter on setting up prescription labels, but this is where you input what label size you are using in your Dymo LabelWriter. Without this, label printing will display errors.

Invoice CC Email 1 & 2

This field cc’s copies of all the invoices your clinic generates to a person of your choosing. This comes in handy for the accounting staff. Simply input one email per line in these fields.

Setting Up Species

Enabling species for your clinic

You can add the species (one or more than one) for which you perform surgeries. In general, dogs and cats would be enabled. However, if your clinic only serves cats, you would not turn dogs on. If your clinic also serves rabbits and guinea pigs, here’s where you turn those species on.
Then go to Settings > Services & Products > Add New Item button > Surgeries and add in the surgical types. For example, if you enabled Goats as a new species, you would find the Goat Spay and Goat Neuter and turn those surgical types on and input a price.

Setting Up Colors

Enabling colors for your clinic

Here you will indicate Animal key colors for your clinic. You can always enable or disable any colors you like in the color section. By default, all colors are enabled in HQ.

Setting Up A Custom Text

Setting up custom text

The custom text section allows you to type a standardized message that you would like to appear on every rabies certificate, receipt, and/or spay/neuter certificate. Perhaps this is a message thanking clients for their business or providing them with some information about your rabies vaccines.