Development of CRM for veterinary clinics and pet boarding services

A veterinary clinic is a place where love for animals is combined with high professionalism. But this is not enough – success in the veterinary business is determined not only by the quality of treatment, but also by service, marketing, personnel management, medicines, documents. All this requires 24/7 attention, so managing a modern veterinary clinic without digital tools is like treating a patient without a diagnosis. Queues, mixed up cards, lost appointments, forgotten appointments – all this not only reduces the level of service, but also slows down business development.

A custom CRM program for veterinary clinics in Ukraine and foreign countries, developed by the AVADA MEDIA team, will manage your business processes with surgeon’s precision. Forget about routine, paper journals and lost customers – the system will work for the health of your furry, feathered and scaly patients and the prosperity of your business. We do not offer template solutions, but individually develop your own unique CRM for your veterinary business, tailored to the specifics of your activity. So that every visit, every operation, and every dose of vaccine is taken into account, and the client remains satisfied and returns again.

Managing a veterinary clinic is not only a love for animals, but also a complex business process that has its own unique features, risks and difficulties.

• Centralized data storage 

Veterinarians need to keep a detailed medical history of each pet, take into account the characteristics of the breed, allergies, procedures performed, appointments and much more. Manually maintaining such records is fraught with errors and loss of important information. Software for veterinary clinics makes it possible to structure all data in electronic form, providing quick and convenient access to them at any time.

• Schedule and appointment management

The flow of patients in a veterinary clinic is often unpredictable. Therefore, it is important to strictly plan the working hours of doctors, avoid overlaps, double appointments, “windows” in the schedule, prevent lack of time for procedures and promptly respond to emergencies. CRM for a veterinarian helps optimize the appointment schedule, keeps records of patients, warns of overload and downtime. The system can be implemented with convenient tools for online booking, automatic scheduling and sending clients reminders about visits.

• Personalized approach

Pet owners are very sensitive to their pets and appreciate an individual approach. The program for a veterinary clinic allows you to collect information about customers’ preferences, the history of their requests and use this data to build trusting and long-term relationships. For example, you can send personalized birthday greetings to your pet or reminders about the opportunity to purchase food of a certain brand.

• Financial accounting and analytics

Controlling income and expenses, invoicing, and tracking payments are important components of any business. A CRM management system for a veterinary clinic automates these processes, minimizes the risk of errors and provides a transparent picture of the clinic’s financial status. You will always be aware of which clients have debts, which services are in greatest demand and how to optimize pricing policy.

• Communication with customers

Maintaining contact with pet owners is the key to their loyalty and trust. CRM for veterinary business makes it possible to organize effective communication through various channels: SMS-mailings with reminders about visits, email-mailings with useful information and promotions, integration with messengers for operational support, storing information about each visit, procedure, appointment, collecting feedback.

• Marketing and attracting new customers

In conditions of growing competition, it is important to attract new customers and retain existing ones. CRM-system for veterinary medicine provides tools for segmenting the customer base, conducting marketing campaigns and assessing their effectiveness. You will be able to accurately target your offers and attract exactly those who need your services.

• Personnel management

In a large veterinary clinic, it is important to effectively coordinate the work of doctors, assistants and administrators. CRM-system for veterinary clinics can include modules for accounting of working hours, calculating salaries and controlling the performance of tasks.

• Process automation

Veterinarians don’t just treat – they consult, prepare documents, and keep patient histories. CRM programs for veterinary clinics take the routine off their shoulders: they automatically create charts, generate documents, store images, analyzes, and conclusions.

• Inventory management

Wherever there is a warehouse, there will always be shortages, surpluses, and delays. CRM for veterinarians integrates with the warehouse accounting system, controls the movement of goods, automatically writes off medications after procedures, and records expenses.

• Reporting and control

An automated veterinary clinic management system collects data and turns it into reports that help you make management decisions based on numbers, not intuition. At any time, you can find out which services are the most profitable, when to expect peak load, how many clients are returning, which doctors are more busy than others, etc.

• Data security and privacy

Sometimes personal data of clients (name, phone number, information about the pet) is sent via regular e-mail and messengers without encryption. In addition, veterinary clinic employees can use one account or access to shared files. And without a specialized system, it is impossible to track who made changes to the data and when. All this increases the risk of unauthorized viewing, leakage or even intentional deletion of data.

In CRM, you can protect personal data of clients and medical information of pets using modern encryption technologies, multi-level authentication, separation of access rights and regular backups. This minimizes the risk of leakage, data loss or unauthorized access.

Veterinary business is multifaceted. It intertwines medicine, customer service, retail sales (medicines, food, accessories) and even hotel services for pets. Grooming, chipping, pet hotels and shelters – each type of service involves its own processes, tasks and risks. A CRM system for a veterinary clinic should not be universal for everyone, but adapted to each direction.

CRM for a veterinary clinic

For veterinary hospitals, the key needs are accurate medical data recording, effective record management and high-quality interaction with animal owners. Therefore, CRM for veterinary clinics should primarily include the following functions:

• maintaining an electronic patient history – an animal card with diagnoses, appointments, vaccinations, test results and images, available to the doctor in a few clicks, including past visits and operation protocols;
• automatic reminders (SMS, email or push notifications) to pet owners about revaccinations, deworming or scheduled examinations;
• online appointment booking with the ability to choose a doctor, date and time, as well as pre-pay for the consultation;
• accounting for drugs and consumables – automatic write-off from the warehouse after use in treatment, warning about minimal residues;
• integration with laboratories and diagnostic equipment – test results and images are automatically pulled into the system and attached to the patient’s card.

How it works: the cat owner receives an SMS reminder about the annual vaccination, follows the link, registers in online format for a convenient time and pays for the service. Payment is recorded in the CRM, the necessary drugs are reserved automatically.

CRM for a pet hotel

Automation of an animal shelter should primarily ensure booking places in a pet hotel, taking into account the peculiarities of keeping each pet and convenient communication with its owners. Therefore, the following functions are implemented in pet hotel management programs:

• booking rooms with the date, time of check-in, type of animal, special conditions (for example, a separate enclosure for aggressive dogs);
• a log of stay, where the time of arrival and departure, features of care, taking medications (if necessary) are recorded;
• accounting for food and medications according to the schedule – the system forms an individual schedule of feeding and medication, and the administrator sees the tasks for each day;
• recording the sale of additional and related services – grooming, walking, photo reports, everything is taken into account and automatically added to the client’s account;
• checking the availability of necessary vaccinations before check-in, blocking reservations without relevant documents.

Thus, if you have a CRM for pet hotels, then during the booking process the administrator will see that the dog does not have a rabies vaccination and will offer to sign up for vaccination before registering it at the pet hotel.

CRM for animal shelter services

Shelters, shelters and temporary animal housing centers are a complex area, often with a volunteer basis. Automation of the animal shelter service should provide:

• accounting of all wards – data on found, transferred, adapted animals – nickname, age, sex, breed, history of getting to the shelter, behavioral features, medical records and photos;
• access to the shelter history – dates of admission, treatment, sterilization, vaccination, return to the owner or transfer for adoption;
• fundraising and donation management – recording of receipts, expenses for each animal, reports for sponsors;
• integration with the shelter website – automatic publication of animals on the website with photos, history, status “looking for a home”.

CRM for grooming

For grooming salons, the order in recording clients, accounting for preferences in haircuts and care, as well as management of consumables are important. Therefore, CRM systems for grooming salons usually implement the following functions:

• accounting for masters and employment zones – groomers’ schedule, distribution by halls and tables;
• procedure calendar – booking for washing, haircut, trimming, claws, comprehensive services;
• automatic order generation – the CRM program for animals selects a list of consumables for a specific service and writes them off from the warehouse;
• maintaining a loyalty program and bonuses – recording the number of visits, accruing discounts or gifts to regular customers.

CRM for veterinary pharmacies and pet stores

Many veterinary clinics combine medical and commercial functions. The program for a veterinary pharmacy takes on key tasks:

• management of stock and expiration dates, automatic notifications about products that are about to expire;
• linking purchases to a customer card so that you can see purchase history and offer personalized recommendations;
• online booking – the client places an order in the CRM for a veterinary pharmacy or through the website, the system reserves the goods, sends a message about readiness for pickup.

Veterinary clinic automation becomes a necessity when standard management methods no longer cope with the volume of tasks and begin to slow down development. Here are the key signs that it is time for your clinic to switch to a CRM system:

1. Records are lost, information is not synchronized between employees, errors occur in medical histories.
2. Different channels for recording patients (calls, messages, paper journals) lead to confusion, double bookings or lost clients.
3. High workload for administrators who spend too much time on manual data processing, calls, reminders and reporting.
4. Difficulties with accurate accounting of the remaining medicines, feed and consumables; often have to order at the last moment or, conversely, face surpluses.
5. The lack of up-to-date analytics, i.e. key metrics on the workload of doctors, the profitability of services, the dynamics of visits – forces management decisions to be made intuitively, and not based on data.
6. As the number of clients, branches or areas of work increases, the current system ceases to cope with the load, and quality control of services decreases.
7. There is no single database – information about clients, pets, visits, services and payments is scattered, stored in different sources and not synchronized.
8. The level of service decreases, as errors in records, delays in service, lack of reminders negatively affect customer relations and the reputation of the clinic.
9. There is a risk of leakage of confidential information. When client data and medical information are stored in unsecured systems or on paper, this increases the risk of loss or unauthorized access.

If you catch yourself thinking that routine tasks eat up time, and management decisions have to be made blindly – then the time has come to implement CRM in your veterinary clinic.

Developing a program for a veterinary clinic is a consistent construction of an individual ecosystem that will be organically woven into business processes. This approach requires phased, in-depth work, where each step serves as the foundation for the next.

1. Analysis and definition of goals

At the initial stage, analysts delve into the specifics of your work, study existing processes – patient registration, medical documentation, methods of interaction with clients, financial accounting. To do this, they conduct interviews with key employees, analyze current systems (if any), identify weaknesses and inefficiencies, and also determine the strategic goals and expectations of the customer from the future CRM system for the veterinary business.

2. Technical task

Based on the analysis, a detailed technical task is developed – a kind of project roadmap. The TOR contains a detailed description of the functional and non-functional requirements for CRM for a veterinary clinic, its architecture and integrations with other services (e.g., telephony, online calendars), as well as requirements for data security and performance. This document serves as the basis for all further development.

3. Design and prototyping

At the design stage, architects develop the logical structure of the future CRM system for a veterinary clinic, determine the interaction between various modules and databases. In parallel, UX designers create interactive prototypes of interfaces using Moqups, Figma, Adobe XD, which allow testing the system before development begins and agreeing it with the customer.

4. Development of UX/UI design

At this stage, prototypes are made visually attractive and intuitive. It is important to find a balance between a professional medical environment and a friendly, understandable interface. UX/UI designers create a stylish and ergonomic interface, taking into account the corporate identity of your clinic and usability. In the process, they also create guidelines – uniform standards for all screens, so that the interface is holistic and easy to perceive. Particular attention is paid to ease of navigation, logical arrangement of elements and accessibility of information, adaptability for different devices (laptop, tablet, smartphone), so that working with the system is as comfortable and efficient as possible for each employee in any conditions.

5. Creating a program code

A key stage at which programmers translate approved mockups and technical specifications into clean, optimized program code. Front-end developers are responsible for creating a user interface with which employees interact (web pages, forms, tables, etc.). For this, modern web technologies are used – HTML, CSS, JavaScript, as well as popular frameworks and libraries – React, Angular, Vue.js, which ensure high speed and adaptability of the interface.

Backend developers create the server part of the system, which is responsible for data processing, application logic, interaction with databases and integration with other services. For backend development, reliable and scalable programming languages ​​Python, Java, Node.js and PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB databases are used. Development is carried out according to flexible Scrum and Agile methodologies, sprints with demonstration of intermediate results.

6. Comprehensive testing

Before release, an individual program for managing a veterinary clinic undergoes comprehensive multi-level testing. A team of QA engineers checks its functionality and compliance with the requirements of the technical specifications, evaluates usability, performance under high loads, tests security and integrations. Manual methods and automatic tools such as Selenium, JUnit, PyTest are used for testing.

7. Release and implementation

After successful completion of all testing stages, the CRM system is placed on production servers, the environment is configured, data is transferred from existing systems and employees are trained to work with the new program. It is important to ensure a smooth transition to the new system, providing comprehensive support at the initial stage of operation.

8. Support and development of CRM for veterinary clinics

After the release, the project does not end – the management system for a veterinary clinic requires regular support: updates, fixes, adaptations to changing tasks. Project support under SLA involves regular backups, monitoring of performance, and bug fixes. It is also possible to refine the system as the business grows: adding new functions, integrations, and modules. This approach allows CRM to evolve together with the veterinary clinic, adapting to new realities.

Many veterinary clinics strive to adapt standard CRMs for medicine or trade to their specifics. But the veterinary business is a special area where patients are unable to speak, which stories are stored for years. Therefore, we develop individual CRM programs for veterinarians on a turnkey basis, based on their needs, processes, and scale.

We take into account everything:

• specifics of animal accounting;
• legal nuances (vet passport, vaccinations, permits);
• the possibility of integration with telemedicine, IoT equipment, online consultations;
• flexibility of access rights so that the administrator does not see finances, and the doctor does not dig into reports.

Your own CRM system for veterinary clinics will grow with you: it will add branches, new directions, a hotel for animals, a pet store – all this without global changes to the system.

We offer a comprehensive approach: from the development of individual solutions, fully adapted to the specifics of your business, to customization and refinement of existing software products. You can also start with basic modules and gradually expand the functionality along with the development of the clinic. Our approach and many years of experience in creating management systems allow you to choose the optimal way to automate your veterinary business. Our specialists will develop a CRM system that really works: reduces routine, speeds up customer service, helps manage resources and stimulates the growth of your business.