The role of Clinic Manager is a tough one. Being responsible for the smooth running of a medical practice – whether chiropractic, aesthetic, psychiatric or any other – is hard work and requires many diverse skills. You need to be extremely organised and yet flexible enough to deal with the unexpected. You’ll be superb at both time management and team management; at delegation and diplomacy. You’re probably not medically trained, but you do need a good understanding of the treatments and procedures your clinic offers. You need to be unafraid to get your hands dirty with the nitty gritty of the day-to-day stuff, but also able to step back and see the bigger picture.
Luckily, a good clinic management package or practice management system like e-clinic can help you with this challenging role. A good clinic software package will speed up and in some cases automate much of the day to day admin for you and your team. Decent clinic management software will also reduce paperwork and errors. An effective software package will assist with routine tasks like appointment booking (in clinic and online), payments, consent and treatment forms, stock-keeping and routine communications, including text appointment reminders.
But what about the bigger picture? Part of the role of an effective clinic manager is having an overall view of the business. Software like e-clinic includes comprehensive reporting tools to allow you to understand your business better.
We’ve spoken to the e-clinic support team as well as some of our clients to find out how they use reporting in e-clinic and discover the reports they rely on.
1) Where are my enquiries coming from?
This is a key piece of data for any successful clinic, and with e-clinic, it’s simple to find out. Running the ‘Enquiries by Marketing Source’ report will immediately give you a breakdown of the number of new enquiries each week, month, or year, and show you how they heard about your clinic. You can also find out how many of those enquiries went on to book treatments and see what those treatments were. Perhaps you want to dig a little deeper? Export your data to Microsoft Excel or use a third party reporting tool like Microsoft Power BI to chart the age, gender or postcode area of your enquiries.
Knowing how your patients find out about you means you can manage your marketing budget more effectively. e-clinic Managing Director Mark Lainchbury believes: “You can only grow your business when you understand your customers, and the start of that journey is understanding why they first walked through your door. Is it because they heard about you from a friend, or because you spent thousands on an expensive billboard campaign? This kind of management information is priceless, and understanding this has been key in the rapid growth of some of our most successful clients.”
2) What is my sales breakdown?
e-clinic offers a number of ways to view the value of sales. Some of the most popular reports are ‘Sales by Treatment’, ‘Sales by Practitioner’ and ‘Sales by Clinic’. These reports would allow you to see the total value of sales for the selected period, broken down by, for example, the treatment type. This can help identify your most popular (and profitable) treatments, your most successful practitioners, and can highlight if a clinic within your group is failing to achieve targets.
Robin, in our e-clinic support team, said: “I consider this to be one of the most helpful reports an e-clinic user can run. If you’re confident with Excel and enjoy using pivot tables, you can learn even more. If you want help with this, just email me!”
3) How much money should I have?
A key daily report, and the most frequently run in e-clinic, is ‘Receipts by Payment Method’. This report would be run at the end of each day and would show how much money has been taken, broken down by cash, card, gift voucher and cheque.
A longstanding e-clinic client who runs a physiotherapy clinic said: “We run this report daily as it helps us keep track of money in. If something’s gone wrong, we can quickly identify the error, then we’re back on track for the next day.”
If you want to know more about the reports in e-clinic, contact our helpful UK-based support team by email. They are always happy to answer your questions and give you hints and tips on making the most of e-clinic. We also run regular training courses for new users and those wishing to expand their skills, including a popular one day ‘Advanced Reporting’ course.
