A summer of work on money, scheduling and the desk
Most of what follows came from clinics using Saff through the summer: taking money properly, filling the gap a cancellation leaves, and giving everyone at the clinic, not only the doctor, a screen that matches their job.
The money loop
The front desk can take a payment against a visit and hand the patient an itemised bill rather than a single total. A payment taken in error is reversed rather than deleted: the reversal is recorded as a credit note, so the ledger keeps both halves. At the end of the day the till is closed against a counted cash figure, and any difference is written down instead of absorbed.
Booking deposits, insurance claims and a receivables view arrived alongside, on the plans that include them.
Paying by card inside Saff still needs a payment provider connected to your clinic. Until one is, an unpaid invoice tells the patient to settle at the reception desk rather than showing them a button that cannot work.
Days that change
- A cancellation waiting list. A slot that frees up can be offered to the patients who asked to be told.
- Doctor unavailable. Before anything is cancelled you see exactly which patients are stranded; then the whole set can be cancelled together, each patient with a notice.
- The day in time order. The queue follows appointment time, not the order the bookings arrived in.
- One room, one patient. Two appointments can no longer be placed in the same room at the same time.
- Clinic closures (public holidays, and the days you are simply not open) are set once and respected by booking.
The rest of the team
Nurses, pharmacists, receptionists and clinic admins have their own roles and their own screens: vitals and nursing notes, a shift handover the outgoing shift writes and the incoming one reads, a staff rota, and alerts that go to the group who can act on them: a critical vital sign, stock about to expire, or someone in the waiting room who needs attention now.
The stockroom
Stock is held per branch, scanned by barcode, moved between branches with a transfer that both ends can see, and reconciled by a stock count that records who counted what. Low stock and approaching expiry raise an alert rather than waiting to be noticed.
Bringing an existing clinic in
Patients, and your service catalogue with its price list, can be imported from a spreadsheet. The preview shows what will be created, what will be skipped, and what looks like a record you already have, before anything is written.
Privacy and security
- Two-factor codes on staff accounts are checked at sign-in.
- Opening a patient's chart writes an audit row naming the person who opened it.
- The audit log is notarised, so an altered or missing row can be detected rather than merely being unlikely.
- "Delete my account" now removes the account and the data behind it, and tells you what it removed.
- Intake answers and the pregnancy and paediatric fields are encrypted at rest.
Smaller things
Arabic prescriptions render properly in the PDF. Every clock in the product reads the clinic's own timezone rather than the server's. The waiting-room board no longer breaks on load. Sign-out and the panic button are reachable on a phone.