"Practice management software" is one of those phrases that sounds precise until you try to buy some. Two products with the same label can have almost nothing in common: one is a clinical record with a calendar bolted on, another is a billing engine that also stores notes, a third is essentially a scheduling product for a reception desk.
That is worth knowing before you compare prices, because you will otherwise compare two things that are not the same thing.
A phrase that covers four different products
Under the umbrella there are four jobs, and every vendor is stronger at some than at others.
| The job | What it looks like when it is good | What it costs you when it is bad |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical record | A follow-up note takes under two minutes and starts from the last one | Notes written at home at nine in the evening, or not at all |
| Diary | Every practitioner sees the same thing, on any device, immediately | Double bookings, and a reception desk that phones to check |
| Money | Who owes what, and what each practitioner earned, without a spreadsheet | A Sunday a month, and arguments you cannot settle with evidence |
| Documents | A report for a GP or an insurer in a couple of minutes | The referral source that quietly stops referring |
Rank those four for your practice before you look at a single product page. Most owners find the ranking is not what they assumed: the clinical record is where the hours go, but the money is where the arguments are.
What changes the day the second practitioner starts
Almost every practice runs on something informal until this moment, and then three things break at once.
- Attribution. Who wrote this note. Who moved that appointment. Who took the cash. With one person these questions do not exist; with two they arrive within a fortnight.
- Visibility. Both of you need to see the room's availability, and neither of you needs to see everything the other does. Those are different permissions and most informal setups have neither.
- The split. Percentage, rent-a-room, salary plus bonus — whatever you agreed, somebody now has to calculate it monthly, from data that has to be right.
The signal is the second clinician, not the hundredth patient. A solo physiotherapist with three hundred patients can run on a spreadsheet and often should. Two physiotherapists with sixty patients between them usually cannot, because the spreadsheet cannot answer "who changed this, and when".
Shared records, and who is allowed to see what
In a practice, patients are the practice's, not the individual clinician's — clinically and usually contractually. When someone covers a colleague's Thursday, they need the history: what was found, what was tried, what the plan is. Without it you get a session that starts from scratch, and a patient who notices.
Two things to check in any product you are considering:
- Does a covering clinician get the full timeline, or a summary someone had to remember to write?
- Is there an audit trail? Who opened a record, who edited it, when. This is the part nobody thinks about until there is a complaint, at which point it is the only thing that matters.
What belongs in the note itself — and how long you have to keep it — is a whole subject of its own, and it is covered here.
A diary each, and one view of the room
A practice diary has to do two contradictory things: give each practitioner a column they own, and give whoever answers the phone one view of the whole room. If the product only does the first, reception improvises. If it only does the second, everyone is looking at a wall of appointments to find their own three.
Things that separate a practice diary from a personal calendar:
- Per-practitioner columns you can look at side by side or one at a time.
- Rooms and equipment, if two clinicians share one treatment room or one piece of kit. A diary that only knows about people will let you book two people into one room happily.
- Recurring courses of treatment that can be moved one session at a time without rebuilding the rest.
- A waiting list. Thursday's eleven o'clock cancels; who wanted an earlier slot? In a practice, that list is worth real money every week, and it is usually the difference between a cancellation costing you an hour and costing you nothing.
- Group classes, if you run Pilates or rehab groups, with attendance per participant rather than one appointment for eight people.
Payouts: the part that eats a Sunday every month
This is the quiet reason most practices eventually buy software, and it never appears in the feature comparison because it is not one feature.
The calculation sounds simple: sessions delivered, times the agreed share. It stops being simple immediately. A ten-session package bought in January and used across two practitioners. A group class with six participants, two of whom were on packages. A no-show your policy says is chargeable. A session delivered at a discounted fund rate. A payment taken in cash at the desk.
Doing that monthly from two spreadsheets is a Sunday afternoon, every month, and every error is a conversation with a colleague about money. Doing it from the same data that recorded the sessions is a screen you read.
Payouts are not payroll. Software that calculates what each practitioner earned is not the same as software that pays them, handles tax, superannuation or pension contributions. Most practice management products — ours included — do the first and not the second. If a vendor implies otherwise, ask them to describe exactly which tax filings they produce.
The numbers a practice owner should read monthly
Not a dashboard with forty tiles. Five things, same day each month, written down so you can see a trend.
- Occupancy per practitioner. Booked against available. It tells you who needs marketing help and who needs another room.
- New patients and where they came from. If you cannot answer the second half, you are marketing blind.
- Average sessions per course of treatment. When it falls, people are dropping out early. That is a communication problem before it is a marketing one.
- Rebooking rate. What proportion leave with the next appointment booked. Cheaper to improve than acquisition, and mostly decided in the last thirty seconds of a session.
- Missed appointments as a percentage of bookings, per practitioner. One clinician at double everyone else's rate is a booking habit, not a patient problem.
Revenue is deliberately absent. It is the result of those five and it lags them by weeks.
See it with two practitioners in it
Create the account, add a colleague, put a real week in both diaries and run the payout screen. That is a thirty-minute test and it answers more than any demo.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.Buying: per user, per patient, or per feature
Three pricing models, and they favour very different practices.
- Per practitioner. Predictable, and it punishes part-timers: a clinician who works Fridays costs the same as one who works five days.
- Per active patient. Fine while you are small, and it has a habit of escalating exactly when a practice is growing and cash is tightest.
- Per feature tier. The one to read carefully. The feature you actually need — a second diary, exports, group classes — has a way of living one tier above where you are.
Whichever it is, do the same arithmetic: what will the bill be in month three, with every person who will really have a login, plus any per-message or per-document charges. Compare those numbers, not the ones on the pricing page. There is more on this in the article on what these products actually cost.
What Physioly covers for a practice, and what it leaves out
Physioly's practice plans give each practitioner their own diary, shared patient records with a session timeline, group classes billed per participant, session packages, payment and overdue tracking, consolidated finances, and payouts calculated per practitioner so the monthly split is not a spreadsheet exercise. Pricing is US$95 a month for up to 3 practitioners, US$239 for up to 10 and US$399 for up to 20, with unlimited patients on all three.
What it is not:
- Not payroll. It works out what each practitioner earned. Paying them and the tax around it happens elsewhere.
- Not rostering or HR. No staff scheduling, leave tracking or timesheets.
- No stock control. Consumables and retail are counted somewhere else.
- No health fund or insurer claiming. Record a fund and its fee schedule, issue an invoice — but the claim is lodged through your terminal or the fund's portal.
- No accounting sync. Nothing that talks to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks. You export and hand it over.
- No patient self-booking. Patients confirm and see what is coming; they do not put themselves into your diary.
- Twenty practitioners is the ceiling on the published plans. Beyond that it is a conversation, not a pricing page.
- Billing is in US dollars, so expect your card issuer's exchange rate and possibly a foreign transaction fee.
For a practice of two to twenty physiotherapists that wants records, diary and money in one place, that is a fair fit. For a practice whose central problem is claiming or payroll, it is not — and you would discover that in week one anyway, so it may as well be now.
Questions we get asked
What is physiotherapy practice management software?
An umbrella term for software that holds four things at once: clinical records, the appointment diary, the money, and the reports you send to other people. In a practice with several practitioners it also has to handle who can see which record, a diary per clinician, and how each practitioner gets paid.
When does a physiotherapy practice outgrow spreadsheets?
Usually at the second practitioner rather than at a patient count. One person can hold a diary and a payment list in their head and a spreadsheet; two people cannot, because the question becomes who changed what and when, and a spreadsheet has no answer to that.
Should each physiotherapist have their own login?
Yes, and this is not a licensing argument. A shared login destroys attribution: you cannot tell who wrote a note, who moved an appointment or who took a payment. That matters for professional records, for any complaint, and for a payout calculation nobody wants to argue about.
How much does practice management software cost for a clinic?
Vendors price per practitioner, per active patient, or per feature tier, so headline prices are not comparable. Physioly publishes practice pricing at US$95 a month for up to 3 practitioners, US$239 for up to 10 and US$399 for up to 20, with unlimited patients on all three. Work out your month-three bill including every user you will actually add.
Does Physioly do payroll and rostering?
No. Physioly calculates what each practitioner earned from the sessions they delivered, including packages and group classes. Paying them, and the tax that goes with it, happens in a payroll system or with your accountant. There is no staff rostering, leave tracking or timesheets either.