Setting up your practice: services, visit types and fees

When a practice adopts software, attention naturally goes to the big features: the schedule, the records, the billing. Yet one step almost always slips by unnoticed, and it is the one that determines everything after it: the setup. Which procedures do you offer? How long does each take? At what fee? As long as those answers live in the practitioner's head, the front desk guesses, slots are approximate, and amounts have to be asked about at every payment. An hour spent setting up your practice properly saves hundreds of small daily hesitations.

Setup: the hour that saves you months

In a practice with no setup, every appointment is a micro-decision. The secretary has to remember that a full work-up needs forty-five minutes and not twenty, that a post-operative check isn't billed like a first consultation, that a given practitioner only takes certain procedures in the morning. Multiplied by forty appointments a day, that mental load becomes a source of errors — slots too short that push the afternoon over, fees quoted to the patient then corrected at the desk, procedures left off the invoice.

Setup simply means taking those rules out of people's memories and writing them into the tool. This isn't bureaucracy: it's what lets a new hire be operational in two days instead of two months, and lets the practice keep running properly when the usual secretary is away.

Start with your list of services

The starting point is the list of procedures you actually perform. Not the theoretical list for your specialty, but the one from last month's practice. Most practices discover they revolve around eight to fifteen procedures, no more.

• List each procedure using the name the patient and the front desk actually use on the phone, not its academic title.
• Separate what needs separating: a first consultation and a follow-up don't take the same time and aren't billed the same way.
• Group what doesn't need splitting: ten variants of the same procedure complicate booking without adding anything.
• Where relevant, specify which practitioner performs which procedure — useful as soon as there's more than one of you.

This list becomes the practice's shared vocabulary. From the moment the front desk and the practitioner name things the same way, half the misunderstandings disappear on their own.

Give each procedure its real duration

The most widespread mistake is to cut the day into uniform slots — fifteen or twenty minutes for everyone — then be surprised at the delay piling up by ten o'clock. A first appointment with a full history doesn't fit in the same time as a prescription renewal. When each procedure carries its own duration, the schedule stops lying: the day shown on screen resembles the day you live.

The best way to find the right duration isn't to estimate it but to observe it. For a week, note the actual start and end times of a few consultations of each type, then round up rather than down. A practice that plans generously finishes on time; a practice that plans tightly accumulates a delay that lands on the waiting room.

Set your fees once and for all

The third piece is pricing, and it's the one that produces the friction patients see most. When the fee is attached to the procedure in the tool, there's nothing left to remember or ask about: the front desk quotes the right amount on the phone, the invoice is prepared with no re-entry, and nobody discovers a gap at payment time.

• A reference fee per procedure, so the amount quoted and the amount billed are always the same.
• Framed discounts — family, long-standing patient, goodwill gesture — applied explicitly rather than from memory.
• Quotes for heavier courses of treatment, so the patient knows where they stand before starting.
• Tracking of outstanding balances, so partial payments don't fall through the cracks.

The side effect is welcome: at month end, the figures become usable. You can finally see which procedures take the most time, which weigh most in fees, and where the gap between the two lies.

Fit the tool to your specialty, not the other way round

A general practice, a dental practice and an imaging clinic don't work the same way. The first runs short consultations back to back; the second plans long sessions and treatment plans spread over months; the third organizes its day around equipment. A rigid tool forces everyone into a single model — and that's usually the moment the paper book quietly reappears on the counter, running in parallel.

That's why customization matters as much as the features themselves. Your services, your durations, your fees, your opening hours, your practitioners and their days in: all of it should reflect your practice as it actually runs, not a theoretical one. Setup is precisely the moment you impose that reality on the tool.

Review twice a year, without losing a day to it

A setup isn't set in stone. Fees change, a procedure disappears, a practitioner joins the team, a duration turns out to be consistently too short. Get into the habit of a quick review twice a year: run through the list of services, compare planned durations against observed ones, update the fees. Half an hour is enough, and it prevents the slow drift that leaves nobody trusting the tool's settings two years on.

A well-configured practice doesn't ask its team to remember: it already tells them what to do.

Setting up your practice with Uli

This is exactly what Uli enables. You define your services and your practitioners, adjust durations so the drag-and-drop schedule matches your reality, and attach your fees to each procedure so quotes, invoices, discounts and outstanding-balance tracking flow naturally from the appointment. Around that base, everything connects: the real-time queue, day-before SMS reminders with confirmation by return SMS, the single patient record with X-rays, lab results and prescriptions as attachments, and statistics that finally rest on categories that mean something. Online booking by the patient will extend this set shortly.

And because this is health data, everything is hosted 100% in Algeria, AES-256 encrypted with an audit log. Uli starts at 3,000 DZD/month and the trial is free for 14 days — ample time to set up your services and fees, then judge over a week of real appointments.