Most solo physios do not go shopping for software. They hit something: a former patient rings asking for a letter and the notes are in a notebook in the boot of the car. Or the accountant wants last quarter's takings and the only record is a bank statement plus memory. That is usually the week people start searching.
So this is not a feature tour. It is what matters when you are one person, probably renting a room, possibly doing home visits, and definitely not being paid to sit in front of a computer.
The spreadsheet works, right up until it does not
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good first system. It is free, you already know how it behaves, and for the first twenty or thirty patients it holds together fine. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What is worth knowing is how it comes apart, because it is never dramatic. It is boring and it happens on a busy week.
- Two devices, two versions. You edit on the laptop at home, open it on your phone at the clinic, and now there are two files and no reliable way to tell which one is current.
- No record of who changed what, or when. If a note is amended six months after the session, nothing in the file says so. In a complaint, that gap is the problem — not the amendment.
- One careless sort. Sort a range without the adjacent columns and the rows scramble silently. No error message. People have discovered this weeks later.
- Backups are a promise you make to yourself. Ask yourself when you last tested restoring one.
- Everything lives in the same file. Clinical notes sit next to phone numbers and payment details, so every time you send the sheet to your bookkeeper you send all of it.
None of that means you have to switch this week. It means the spreadsheet has a ceiling, and it is better to find out where yours is on a Tuesday than during a complaint.
What actually matters in the software
Vendor feature lists are long on purpose — it is easier to list ninety things than to be right about six. These are the ones that change your week.
Notes you can write in the room
If a note takes more than three or four minutes, you will not write it in the room. And if you do not write it in the room, you will write it at nine at night from memory, which is how notes get thin.
So count the taps. Open patient, add session, save — how many? Can you see last session's note while you write today's? Are there templates by presentation, so a respiratory assessment does not start from a blank box? That is the difference between notes that get written and notes that get meant.
A diary that survives contact with reality
Recurring bookings, because a course of treatment is almost never one appointment. Blocking out time without inventing a fake patient. Moving somebody to Thursday without retyping everything. And if you do home visits, being able to open a record on a phone with one bar of signal in somebody's lounge room.
Money, without running a second system
What came in, what is still outstanding, who is part-way through a package and how many sessions are left on it. This is usually where people find money they had genuinely forgotten to chase — not because they are careless, but because an unpaid session from five weeks ago leaves no trace anywhere else.
Getting things out again
A PDF for the referring GP. A summary the patient can hand to their insurer. Your figures in a spreadsheet at end of financial year. If a system can only show you your data on its own screen, treat that as a flag, not a feature.
Something that will still be here in five years
Unglamorous, but: does the vendor publish its prices, can you reach a human, does the product visibly get updated? Abandoned software is worse than a spreadsheet, because your records are inside it.
On mobile apps. A lot of practitioners assume they need something from the App Store. What you usually need is something that works properly in a phone browser and can be pinned to the home screen. Physioly is that — a progressive web app, no download, no store listing. Deliberate, but it is a real trade-off: if an App Store presence matters to you, that is a legitimate reason to look elsewhere.
What it costs, honestly
Pricing in this market is all over the place, and the headline number rarely survives contact with the detail. Two things distort comparisons more than anything else.
Per-patient caps versus per-practitioner pricing. A plan capped at 50 patients and a plan charging per practitioner look similar on a pricing page and behave completely differently once your caseload moves. Work out your own active-patient count first, then compare.
What is not in the monthly fee. SMS credits, card processing, onboarding or migration fees, a charge per extra user. Ask for the number you will actually be billed in month three, not month one.
Our own published prices, so there is at least one concrete set in front of you:
| Physioly plan | Per month | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Free | US$0 | Free forever. First 7 days with no limits at all, then 2 patients with full records, diary and finances. |
| Essential | US$29 | Up to 20 patients. Starting out, or a part-time caseload. |
| Professional | US$39 | Up to 50 patients. A full solo week. |
| Elite | US$65 | Unlimited patients, priority support. |
| Practice Essential | US$95 | Up to 3 practitioners, unlimited patients, a diary each. |
| Practice Pro | US$239 | Up to 10 practitioners, with payouts calculated per practitioner. |
| Practice Elite | US$399 | Up to 20 practitioners. |
We bill in US dollars. If you are in Melbourne, Manchester or Mississauga, your card issuer applies its own exchange rate and may add a foreign transaction fee, so the amount on your statement will not be exactly the number above. We would rather you read that here than find it later.
How to run a trial that tells you something
Most trials get wasted on a tour of the settings screen. A better method, which takes about an hour spread over a week:
- Pick your five most awkward patients. Not the straightforward ones — the long-running course, the one on a package, the one who keeps rescheduling, the home visit, the one with a complicated history. Software handles easy cases; it is the awkward ones that expose it.
- Put a real week in the diary. Recurring appointments included.
- Write three notes in the room, on the device you would actually use. Time yourself.
- Produce one PDF and read it as though you were the GP receiving it.
- Try to export everything you just entered.
If step five is awkward, you have learned the most useful thing available in a trial.
Try it with five real patients
The first 7 days on Physioly have no limits, and no card is required to start. If it does not survive your awkward cases, you have lost a week and nothing else.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.The question almost nobody asks at sign-up
How do I get my data out?
Ask it during the trial, while you are still a prospect and someone is inclined to answer. Specifically: can I export patient records and my financial history to a file I can open without this software, without asking anybody's permission, at any time? A clear yes is worth more than three features. A vague answer tells you what the relationship will look like when you want to leave.
Same question in the other direction, which is the one people do ask: getting in. Physioly imports from Excel or CSV, shows you every patient on screen before anything is saved, and skips obvious duplicates. If your existing records are on paper, no import helps you — that is typing, and it is worth doing once properly rather than twice badly.
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, assessment forms by specialty, pain-scale tracking with a chart across a course of treatment, a public portfolio page, session packages, payment tracking and PDF reports. Everything runs in a browser, on whatever device is nearest.
What it does not do, because you will find out eventually and it may as well be now:
- No health fund or insurer claiming. You can record a fund and its fee schedule against a patient and issue an invoice, but lodging the claim happens elsewhere — your HICAPS terminal, the Medicare or ACC process, the insurer's own portal. If claiming from inside the software is your main reason for buying, a product built locally around that will serve you better than we will.
- No accounting integration. There is no sync with Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks. You export and hand the file to whoever does your books.
- No SMS gateway. Physioly does not buy and send text messages on your behalf. Appointment confirmation works through a link you send the patient yourself — more on that in the article on no-shows.
- No native app. A progressive web app you can install to the home screen, and nothing in the App Store or Play Store.
- The free plan is small after day seven. The first week is genuinely unlimited; after that the free plan holds 2 patients. It is a real working account, not a demo, but it is not a free practice management system for a full caseload and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- Support is email and Telegram. Real people, not a phone line, and not around the clock across every time zone.
If none of those are dealbreakers, the free account costs nothing and takes a couple of minutes. If one of them is, you have just saved yourself a trial.
Questions we get asked
Do I really need practice management software as a solo physiotherapist?
Not on day one. A spreadsheet plus a paper diary genuinely works for a small caseload. The point at which it stops working is usually one of three things: you start editing records on more than one device, you need to produce a document for somebody else at short notice, or you lose track of who has paid. Any of those happening twice in a month is your signal.
What does physiotherapy practice management software cost?
It varies widely because vendors price on different things — per practitioner, per active patient, or per feature tier. Physioly publishes its prices: a free forever plan, then US$29, US$39 and US$65 a month for solo physiotherapists, and US$95, US$239 and US$399 a month for practices with up to 3, 10 and 20 practitioners. When comparing, work out what you would be billed in month three, including any per-message or per-user charges.
Can I move my patient list across from a spreadsheet?
Yes. Physioly imports from Excel (.xlsx) or CSV, recognises the columns on its own and shows you every patient on screen before anything is saved, skipping obvious duplicates. Paper records are a different matter — no import will help there, so budget the typing time.
Does Physioly submit health fund or insurance claims?
No. You can record a patient’s health fund and its fee schedule and issue an invoice, but the claim itself is lodged outside Physioly — through your terminal or the fund’s own portal. If in-software claiming is essential for you, choose a product built around your country’s claiming system.
Is there a Physioly app for iPhone or Android?
Not in the app stores. Physioly is a progressive web app: it runs in the browser and can be installed to your home screen, where it behaves like an app. That covers phones, tablets and computers with one version, but it does mean there is no App Store or Play Store listing.