Open a group practice in a week

Why the order of operations matters

Carepatron is a layered system. Locations sit underneath services. Services sit underneath team availability. Team availability sits underneath online booking. If you invite four clinicians into an empty workspace, the first hour of every onboarding becomes you explaining what's not there yet. Worse, every clinician will start configuring their own services and availability around assumptions that change a week later.

The correct order is branding → locations → services → team → availability → workflows → soft launch. Each step assumes the previous one is done. Set up locations before services because every service needs at least one location to appear in online booking. Build the service catalogue before inviting the team because team members are assigned to specific services. Get availability dialled in before turning on workflows because workflow reminders depend on actual booked appointments.

One exception worth flagging: subscription tier. Decide upfront whether you're on Plus or Advanced. Custom branding (your logo and theme colour) needs Plus or Advanced. Sidebar logos and changing a team member's permissions after they've joined need Advanced. Pricing is per team member, per workspace, and changes are prorated automatically. At list prices, Plus is $39 per team member a month ($31 billed annually) and Advanced is $49 ($39 annually), so four clinicians on Advanced cost $196 a month, or $156 billed annually. Free is $0 regardless of team size. Check carepatron.com/pricing for current offers for new subscribers.

Your workspace's Get started page, shown to the owner for the first 14 days, walks through a similar order: locations, services, your team, importing clients and online payments.

The plan that follows assumes you're the owner, you have admin access, and you're opening the workspace from a blank slate. Adapt the pace to fit your calendar. The sequence matters more than the calendar dates.

Foundations: owner setup and branding

Do this alone, before any team member sees the workspace. A branded workspace tells clinicians the system is ready for them. A bare default tells them they're early.

Go to Settings → Workspace Settings → Details → Workspace branding. Click Edit, then Upload logo, and add your practice logo: PNG or JPEG, under 5MB. Saving needs Plus or Advanced. On Advanced you can also upload expanded and collapsed sidebar logos. The expanded version shows when the left-hand menu is open. The collapsed version displays as a small snapshot, so a full wordmark won't read well at that size.

In the same panel, set your workspace Theme colour (Plus or Advanced). It applies to everyone on your team who hasn't picked a personal theme. Settings → My Profile → Theme only changes your own view.

While you're in workspace settings, check the workspace name and country are correct, and set your currency and tax details under Settings → Billing → Billing details. Each person sets their own time zone under Settings → My Profile → Details.

Finally, before moving on: if your workspace includes the sample team member Wendy Smith, delete her from your team page. She's a demo account for exploring the platform, and removing her now saves you explaining who she is to the team later in the week. Hover over her row, click the overflow icon (three vertical dots), and select Delete.

Locations and services

Locations come before services because every service must be available at one or more locations to appear in online booking. Skip this and your booking page can come up empty even with services configured.

Go to Settings → Scheduling → Locations. Click + New location. For a multi-site practice, create one location per consulting room or office address. If you have two offices with three rooms each, that's six locations, not two. Granular locations let you assign specific rooms to specific clinicians later, which matters when two practitioners share a building.

Add your virtual locations next. Carepatron's own video calls are built in, so you don't need to create a location for them. Other location types include Phone call, Telehealth video call, Google Meet, Zoom, Doxy.me and Microsoft Teams. Each of these takes a room or meeting link you paste in. If a clinician connects their own Zoom account (lesson 5.3), Zoom also appears as a booking option that creates a meeting for each appointment.

With locations in place, move to Settings → Scheduling → Services. Build your service catalogue. For a group practice, organise by collections grouped by treatment phase rather than by clinician. Try Initial consultations, Treatment sessions, and Reviews. Clinician-based collections look tidy until you hire someone or someone leaves. Phase-based collections hold up through both.

On the Services page, select New collection, enter a name, and select the services to include from the dropdown. For each individual service, set duration, price, billing code, and whether it's a Group event (toggle the slider on the service details page if you offer workshops or group therapy; this needs Plus or Advanced). Hold off on assigning staff and locations until your team is in, that's the cross-cutting step once invitations have gone out.

Inviting the team, and the permission pattern

Now invite the team. Go to Your team in the left side panel and click New team member. In the Invite team members window, paste the email addresses of everyone you're inviting and click Send invite. Before you send, use the Services and Permissions tabs to set what new members can do. If someone doesn't receive their invite, share your invite link from the same window instead. People who join by link wait in Requesting access until you approve them.

Permissions cover five areas: client and contact profiles, client and contact documentation, scheduling, invoices and payments, and workspace settings. Each has separate view and edit access, set to None, Assigned only or Everything, except Scheduling, which uses None, Own calendar or Everything, and Workspace settings, which uses None or Everything. New members start with profiles, documentation and invoices on Assigned only, scheduling on Own calendar, and workspace settings on None. You can change these when you invite on any plan. Changing an existing member's permissions later needs Advanced, so if you expect roles to shift, that's an argument for Advanced.

Five practical role patterns cover most group practices:

• Practice manager: Everything across all five areas. Usually one or two people.
• Practitioner: client profiles and documentation set to Assigned only, scheduling set to Own calendar, invoices set to Assigned only or None depending on your billing setup, workspace settings set to None.
• Front desk admin: scheduling and invoices set to Everything, client documentation set to None. They handle bookings and billing without seeing clinical notes.
• Billing-only contractor: invoices set to Everything, everything else None or Assigned only.
• Locum or short-term clinician: same as Practitioner, with documentation set to Assigned only and scheduling set to Own calendar.

One tip: after you change someone's permissions, ask them to refresh the page so the change shows up. To assign clients to a clinician, go to the team member's Permissions tab and click Assign clients.

Per-clinician availability and service assignment

This is where most group practices stall. Each team member needs services ticked and an availability schedule set, otherwise their slots won't appear in online booking.

On the team page, click a team member's name, then go to the Services & availability tab. Click Edit under services and tick the boxes for each service that clinician offers. If a service isn't ticked here, online booking will not surface that clinician for that service even if everything else is configured correctly.

Then scroll to Availability and click + New. Select the days of the week, set the working hours, and attach a location to each block. A clinician who works Monday and Wednesday at the main office and Tuesday and Thursday from telehealth needs two availability blocks, one per location. Save.

Use New date override under Date specific hours to change a clinician's hours on one date, such as a half-day for a CPD course. An override needs a time range, so it can't mark a whole day off. For holidays or a conference, add an Out of office event from Calendar → New.

The critical detail: online booking will only show a slot when all three conditions are met. The service has online booking enabled and at least one location attached. The clinician is assigned to the service. The clinician has availability at that location at that time. Miss any one of these and the slot vanishes from the booking page. When troubleshooting a missing slot, work backwards through these three.

If your practice runs multiple Carepatron workspaces, for example, a clinical workspace and a separate teaching workspace, connect the same Google account to each clinician's profile in every workspace. Go to Settings → My Profile → Connected apps and connect Google Calendar. Calendar sync needs Plus or Advanced in each workspace. Once connected to the same Google account across workspaces, a booking in any workspace blocks that time slot in all the others. No more double-bookings across practices.

Workflow architecture for a team

Workflows fire on triggers and run for the whole workspace. Set them up once at the owner level and every clinician inherits the same automated client onboarding.

Go to Workflows in the left sidebar. Built-in workflows cover the essentials, and the Templates tab has ready-made workflows you can copy and adapt on Plus or Advanced.

For a new group practice, prioritise two built-in workflows:

Send intake: Fires when a new client is created. Sends every form in your default Intake folder (marked Default in Templates) to the new client. To add a form, go to Templates, hover over it, click Move to folder, and select Intake. Keep it to the few forms every client needs.

Send Portal invite: Fires when a new client is created. Invites them to the client portal so they can book follow-ups, message the team, and access shared documents. Both start inactive: hover over each one and click the toggle icon (Activate).

Then check your reminders under Workflows → Reminders. New workspaces already have an appointment email 48 hours before and an appointment SMS 24 hours before, plus an invoice email the day before it's due. Add an intake reminder (e.g. 3 days after the forms are sent, if they're not complete). Add a portal invite reminder: it follows up invites that Send Portal invite sent, not ones you send by hand. Reminders don't have an on/off switch, so edit or delete them as needed.

One plan caveat to flag: on Free, built-in workflows send by email only, and there are no reminders, no SMS and no way to change workflow wording. Plus and Advanced unlock all of these, though SMS and your own workflows don't run during the free trial. Lock this in before launch.

Documentation defaults and AI Scribe standards

A group practice writes notes faster when everyone uses the same template structure. Set the defaults at the workspace level before launch, so nobody invents their own format.

Start with a team-wide note template. SOAP or DAP are the common starting points, pick one based on your dominant specialty. Mental health teams usually default to DAP, physical health teams to SOAP. Build the template once in Templates, then make sure clinicians know to use it. There's no enforcement, but a shared default plus a five-minute team walkthrough is usually enough.

Next, audit your intake template library. The forms in the default intake folder are what every new client receives via the Send intake workflow. Strip it back to the essentials: a consent form, an intake questionnaire, anything jurisdictionally required, and maybe a payment authorisation. It's easy to pile templates in here until new clients receive seven forms on day one. Three to five forms is a better baseline. Move anything that's clinician-specific or condition-specific out of the default folder, those get sent manually when needed.

If your team uses AI Scribe, standardise the settings before clinicians start recording. AI Scribe settings are personal, so ask each clinician to set the same ones: Default template (the same SOAP or DAP you chose above), Perspective (1st person, 3rd person or Clinical format) and Verbosity (Concise, Standard, Detailed or Super detailed). Inconsistent AI Scribe settings across a team mean inconsistent notes across the chart, which becomes a headache at supervision or audit time.

Finally, a brief on the team channel about your conventions: how to title sessions, how to handle no-shows in the calendar, what tags to use on client profiles, what file naming pattern to use for uploaded documents. Five minutes of written convention saves hours of cleanup over the first month.

Soft launch and the first week's metrics

Don't open the workspace to real clients on launch day. Run a one-clinician dummy week with test clients first.

Create two or three test clients with your own emails (or alternate addresses you can access). Book them into different services across different clinicians and different locations. Then walk the full flow yourself:

1. The booking confirmation lands in the test client's inbox.
2. The appointment reminder fires at the configured interval.
3. The intake forms send and arrive correctly.
4. The portal invite lands and the test client can sign up.
5. The appointment appears on the assigned clinician's calendar with the correct location.
6. After the session, an invoice can be generated and sent, and you can record a payment against it.
7. The clinician can write and sign a note, and the note attaches to the right client.

If a booking slot is missing, check five things, in this order:

1. The service has online booking enabled.
2. The service has a location attached.
3. The service has the clinician in its assigned team.
4. The clinician has availability overlapping the requested time.
5. The clinician has the service ticked in their Services & availability tab.

Then brief the team for real launch. Schedule a 30-minute team session before go-live: walk through the booking link, show where notes are stored, show how to handle a cancellation, show how to send a manual intake form. Don't try to teach everything, focus on the daily-driver flows.

Go live on a Monday. Watch the first week carefully. Track three things: bookings completed without manual intervention, intake forms completed before first session, and time from session end to note signed. These three tell you whether the workspace is actually saving the team time. If any of the three is trending the wrong way at end of week one, the system isn't broken, your defaults are wrong, and you can adjust the templates, reminders, or workflows without re-onboarding anyone.