Searching for physiotherapy software is a strange experience. Twelve products, twelve identical grids of ticks, and every one of them claims to be built by physiotherapists for physiotherapists. Two hours in you have learned nothing you can act on, because feature grids compare the wrong thing: they compare what exists, not what it is like to use at ten past four on a Thursday with a patient waiting.
What follows is the way we would go about it if we were choosing, which is a slightly awkward thing for us to write given that we sell one of these products. We have tried to keep it useful anyway, and there is a section near the end that says plainly what ours does not do.
The four jobs. Everything else is decoration
Strip away the marketing and physiotherapy software has four jobs. If a product does these well, the rest of the list is a bonus. If it does any of them badly, no amount of extra features will rescue it.
- Hold a clinical record you could defend. Legible, dated, attributable, and complete enough that another clinician could pick up the case.
- Run a diary you trust. Trust meaning: what it shows is what is happening, on every device, without a refresh ritual.
- Tell you who has paid. Not accounting. Just an honest answer to "who owes me money" without opening a spreadsheet.
- Produce a document for someone else. A report for a GP, an insurer, a solicitor, or the patient. Quickly, and without embarrassment.
Hold each product you are considering against those four. You will find that half the shortlist falls away on the first one.
Notes: the one you should test hardest
You will write notes thousands of times a year. You will use the reporting screen maybe monthly. Almost every buying decision gets made the other way round, because reports demo beautifully and notes do not.
So test notes, with a stopwatch, on the device you would really use. Not the demo account on a big monitor with a sales person narrating — your phone or your tablet, in the room, between patients, with someone waiting.
A test worth doing. Write three real notes back to back: a first assessment, a routine follow-up, and a discharge. Time all three. Then try to find something from note one while note three is open. Speed of writing matters; speed of finding matters more and is almost never demonstrated.
Specific things to check while you are in there:
- Does the follow-up note start from something? Copying forward the previous session and editing the bits that changed is the single biggest time saver in clinical software. Typing every follow-up from an empty box is why people abandon systems in month two.
- Can you structure a note without being forced into someone's template? SOAP is useful and not universal. A product that only allows its own layout will fight you on every unusual case.
- Are measurements stored as numbers or as prose? A pain score buried in a paragraph is a sentence. A pain score in a field is a chart across twelve sessions, and a patient looking at that chart behaves differently from one who is asked how it feels today.
- What happens when you lose signal mid-note? Ask directly. The answer is rarely in the marketing material and you will find out eventually in a basement treatment room.
If you want the longer version of what belongs in a note and how long to keep it, we wrote a separate piece on record keeping.
The diary, and the part nobody demos
Any diary looks fine with six appointments in it. Load it properly before you judge: a full week, recurring courses of treatment, two practitioners if that is your situation, a couple of cancellations and a reschedule.
Then look at the things that only show up under load.
- Recurring appointments. Can you book ten Tuesdays in one action, and then move only the fourth one without detonating the other nine?
- The cancellation, twenty minutes later. Someone drops out on Thursday morning. Can you see, in one place, who wanted an earlier slot? A waiting list is worth more than most features with their own marketing page, because it converts an empty hour into a paid one.
- Double booking. Does the system stop you, warn you, or let it happen silently? All three are defensible. Not knowing which is not.
- Who is not confirmed. The evening before, can you get a list of tomorrow's unconfirmed appointments? That list is the one thing that reliably reduces no-shows, and the arithmetic behind it is here.
A word on "automatic reminders". Ask what the phrase means in that product, because it means at least three different things. Some vendors send SMS and charge per message. Some send email only. Some — ours included — give you a link to send yourself and record the confirmation that comes back. All are legitimate. Being surprised by which one you bought is not.
Money, and why it belongs in the same place
The most common setup in small practice is a diary in one tool and payments in a spreadsheet, and it works for about eighteen months. What breaks it is packages: a patient buys ten sessions, attends four, misses one that you decide to count, comes back in March. Reconstructing that from two systems is twenty minutes of forensic work, and you will do it while someone waits.
What to look for, in order of how often it matters:
- Session packages that decrement properly, including the argument about whether a missed session counts.
- An overdue list you can read in ten seconds.
- Expenses, so the monthly figure is profit rather than turnover.
- Per-practitioner splits, if anyone else works with you. Rent-a-room, percentage, salary plus bonus — the arrangement matters less than not calculating it by hand every month.
- Export. Your accountant wants a file, not a login.
Features that sound essential and mostly are not
Some honesty about the feature grid, including features we happen to have.
| Feature | Worth paying for when | Usually not, when |
|---|---|---|
| Telehealth built in | You run remote sessions weekly and want them in the same record | You run four a year and already have a video tool that works |
| Exercise prescription library | You prescribe home programmes to most patients and want them logged | You have your own handouts, which patients already recognise |
| Patient self-booking | Front-of-house time is your bottleneck and your service is standardised | You triage before booking, which is most musculoskeletal caseloads |
| Outcome measure libraries | You report to an insurer or a network that asks for specific instruments | You track two or three measures you have used for years |
| A dashboard with forty tiles | Never, in a practice under twenty practitioners | Always. Five numbers, read monthly, beat forty read never |
None of that is an argument against those features. It is an argument against paying a tier upgrade for one you will use twice.
Three questions vendors would rather you did not ask
Ask these during the trial, while you are still a prospect and somebody is motivated to answer.
- How do I get my data out? Specifically: can I export patient records and financial history to a file I can open without your software, at any time, without asking permission? A clear yes is worth more than three features. A vague answer tells you exactly what leaving will feel like.
- What will I be billed in month three? Not the headline price. The price including the second user, the per-message charges, the tier you will need once you pass the patient limit, and the annual-versus-monthly difference.
- Where is the data hosted, and who can see it? You are the one with the professional obligation. You need a written answer, not reassurance.
Ask us those three
Export is a button. Our prices are on the pricing page with no per-message extras. Hosting details in writing, on request, before you sign up rather than after.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.How to run a trial in about an hour
Most trials are wasted wandering around the settings screen and concluding that it seems nice. A better method, spread over a week:
- Pick your five most awkward patients. Not the straightforward ones — the long course of treatment, the one on a package, the serial rescheduler, the home visit, the complicated history. Every product handles easy cases.
- Put a real week in the diary, recurring appointments included.
- Write three notes in the room, on your own device, timed.
- Produce one PDF and read it as though you were the GP receiving it.
- Export everything you just entered.
If step five is awkward, you have learned the single most useful thing a trial can tell you.
Decide on two things, not twelve. After that hour you will know how long a note takes and whether the diary matches reality. Those two predict whether you are still using it next year better than any feature comparison.
Where Physioly fits, and where it does not
Physioly is built for solo physiotherapists and small practices. Clinical records with a session-by-session timeline, an online diary with a waiting list, assessment forms by specialty, pain-scale tracking charted across a course of treatment, session packages, payment tracking, PDF reports and a public profile page. It runs in a browser on whatever device is nearest, and there is a free plan that costs nothing forever, with the first seven days completely unlimited.
What it does not do, which you would find out eventually anyway:
- No health fund or insurer claiming. You can record a fund and its fee schedule and issue an invoice, but lodging the claim happens in your terminal or the insurer's portal. If claiming from inside the software is your main reason for buying, buy something built locally around that.
- No accounting integration. Nothing that syncs with Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks. You export, and hand the file over.
- No SMS gateway. We do not buy and send text messages for you. Confirmation works through a patient link you send yourself, and the confirmations come back into the diary.
- No patient self-booking. Patients confirm appointments and see what is coming; they do not put themselves into your diary. For most musculoskeletal caseloads that is a feature, but if self-booking is the thing you want, we are not it.
- No native app. A progressive web app you can install to the home screen. Nothing in the App Store or Play Store.
- The free plan is small after day seven. The first week has no limits; after that it holds one patient. A real working account, not a demo — but not a free system for a full caseload, and we would rather say so here.
- Support is email and WhatsApp. Real people, not a phone line, and not around the clock in every time zone.
- Billing is in US dollars, so your card issuer's exchange rate and possibly a foreign transaction fee apply.
If one of those is a dealbreaker, you have just saved yourself a trial. If none of them are, the free account takes about two minutes and nobody asks for a card.
Questions we get asked
What should physiotherapy software actually do?
Four things: hold a clinical record you can defend, run a diary you trust, tell you who has paid, and produce a document for somebody else at short notice. A product that does those four well is worth more than one with a long feature list and a slow notes screen.
How long does it take to learn physiotherapy software?
If writing your first note takes longer than fifteen minutes with nobody helping you, that is a finding, not a teething problem. Good software for a small practice should be usable on the first afternoon; the parts that take longer to learn are usually finance settings and report templates, not the clinical record.
Is cloud physiotherapy software safe for patient records?
It can be, and it is usually safer than a laptop that leaves the building. What matters is specifics: encrypted transport and storage, per-user logins rather than a shared one, an audit trail of who opened which record, backups you do not have to remember, and a written answer about where the data is hosted. Ask for those in writing before you sign up, not after.
Do I need physiotherapy software if I work on my own?
Not on day one. A spreadsheet and a paper diary genuinely work for a small caseload. The moment to change is usually one of three: you start editing records on two devices, you are asked for a report at short notice, or you lose track of who has paid. Any of those twice in a month is the signal.
Can I move my patients from another system into Physioly?
From a spreadsheet, yes: Physioly imports Excel or CSV, recognises the columns, shows every patient on screen before anything is saved and skips obvious duplicates. From another product, it depends on what that product lets you export — ask them for a CSV of patients and appointments before you cancel anything. Paper records are typing, and no import changes that.