Setup and Maintenance

The first thing you need to do is to make sure your Regional and Language settings are correct. The date format is the important item here. To check your settings, go to the Control Panel, and open the Regional and Language Options. On the Regional Options tab, next to the language, click the Customize button. Select the Date tab, and for the Short Date Format, make sure that it looks like this: "dd-MMM-yyyy". The date separator can be a "-" or "/". Now you can just click OK twice to finish. All dates will now be displayed in 02-Jan-2008 format.


Second, you will want to set up your basic clinic information. This includes things like the name of your clinic, your address/phone/fax, as well as setting up the rabies tag series numbers, and beginning invoice number. You will also enter the doctor(s) information here.

When you change the Clinic Name, address, phone, etc. the clinic name will appear on the switchboards (except in the demo version), and the information will be printed out in the header area of all the printed reports, receipts, etc. When you set the number of days for the callback reminders, the labels will be changed in the main patients/vists form to reflect the number of days you have selected.

Clinic Information

You will notice that there are two tax related fields in the upper right corner of the clinic information form. The Standard and Reduced Tax Rates allow for a two tiered tax system for your sales and services. For each item that you sell, and for each service that you provide, you can choose which tax rate applies to that item or service.



The Employee Withholdings button will cause the Witholding form to be displayed. You have several choices for defining witholding for both the employer and the employees. Two witholding tables are provided - both can be defined as either flat rate tables or percentage tables. In both cases, the table contains fields for the amount of pay, and the amount of witholding for both the employer and the employee. The label fields allow you to name the tax fields, so that they are easily identifiable in printed reports.



The tables are useful if you need to withold different amounts or percentages based on the amount of pay. When you create the values for a table, you should start with the lowest amount of pay, and work your way to the highest. The witholding rate is applied by the system finding the highest amount of pay entry in the table that the amount paid to the employee is still below. To clarify, if your table has pay amounts of $100,200,300,400,500,600 ... and the amount paid to the employee is $378, the witholding amounts or percentages would be applied from the tax amounts or percentages contained in the $400 row of the table. If the table has been marked as percentage in the Witholding form, the pay amount will be multiplied by the percentages from the table to calculate the taxes - otherwise, the amounts will be considered a flat amount of taxes. The table in the image below is an example of a flat rate table.



You also have two percentage rates available to use - both with a percentage for the employer and the employee. These rates are applied without regard to the amount paid to the employee. Please note that percentage rates should be entered as decimal numbers - i.e. if the percentage rate is 2.25%, you would enter it as 0.0225

Also note that all of the percentage rates and table rates are cumulative - if you define TaxTable1 and Percentage1, both will be applied to the amount paid.

There are several steps involved to properly set up your new system. Additionally, there are some data entry forms that are useful for both the initial setup and subsequent maintenance of your system. These functions can be found on the Setup and Maintenance Switchboard. To open the Setup and Maintenance Switchboard, first open the More Functions Switchboard - you will find an option there to open the Setup and Maintenance Switchboard.

The Setup and Maintenance Switchboard

Most of these data entry forms are self-explanatory. You can browse through the existing records and edit them as necessary. There is existing data in all of these forms. In the case of the diagnosis types, there are quite a few items that already exist.

You can use the system without changing any of these items, however, in order for photos to work correctly, you must update the photo pathnames to reflect the base pathname of your photos.

Add / Edit AdHocSales Items

You will use the Add / Edit AdHocSales Items and the Add / Edit Drugs forms more frequently than the other forms on this page. At any time, you can use these forms to update price and or quantity, or to add a new item. Changes in price for a given item only affect new visit records - existing records store only the totals, which will not be updated when you update a price.

The Markup field can be used to adjust retail prices for a given category of items. The Markup categories are discussed further here. In the case of the Drugs form, you can also specify whether or not a drug is administered by the doctor, as well as an expiration date.

The QtyThreshold field in both forms allows you to input an inventory quantity which, when reached, will cause the item to be printed in red on the inventory reports.

Add / Edit Drugs

Edit Photo PathNames

This allows you to edit the path name where photos reside on your system. Photos can be placed in several of the entry forms, such as bloodwork, urinalysis, xrays, etc, and each of those categories can have its' own path. For instance, you might want to store your xray photos in "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays", and your bloodwork photos in "C:\Clinic Photos\Bloodwork". The photo pathnames will only need to be input when you initially set up your system.

Clicking on the "Browse ..." buttons will bring up a file dialog, from which you can navigate to the folder of your choice. Select the desired folder and the pathname will be stored in the database for you. Important: Your photos are not stored in the database. Only the name of the file is saved in the database. This keeps the size of the database from becoming unmanageable.

Please note that if you organize your photos by date, you will create problems if any of your photo pathnames are similar to "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays\2008", because when you create a new folder (C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays\2009) and change your photo pathname accordingly, any existing records that had photos in the 2008 folder will no longer be displayed properly, and you will probably get error messages when opening those records. This is because only the part of the filename that is not included in the photo pathname is stored in the database. If your photo pathname is "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays\2009", and you have a photo named "patient-xyz-xray1.jpg", only "patient-xyz-xray1.jpg" gets stored in the database.

If you set your photo pathname to "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays", and you have selected a photo in "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays\2009", all will be well, because "2009\patient-xyz-xray1.jpg" will get stored in the database. Similarly, a photo that was selected from "C:\Clinic Photos\Xrays\2008" will always work correctly.

IMPORTANT: Please note that your photos do NOT get saved in the database! This is done to keep the size of your database down, which in turn makes backing up your database much more efficient. Only the name of the image file is saved - therefore you should also maintain backups for your photos.

Initial Setup

The items on the Initial Setup Switchboard will not be frequently used, however you will use some of these functions occasionally.

Service Categories

This form maintains a list of items that you can select from when assigning service charges to a patient visit. Simply enter a service category name, and the associated cost of the service.

 

Markup Categories

The mark-up categories give you a way by which you can easily adjust the retail price of miscellaneous sales items or drugs. You can create as many categories as you like, and assign a mark-up value to each of the categories.

When you add/edit drugs and adhoc sales items, you can select from this list of mark-up categories, which will assign that item to the selected category. Doing this will immediately cause the retail price of the item to be adjusted.

When you update a category mark-up value, all items from the drugs and adhoc sales items tables that are designated as part of the updated category will have their retail prices updated. It is important to note that retail price is a simple multiplication of the wholesale cost times the mark-up value. For instance, if you want a 30% mark-up for a category, you would use 1.30 for the mark-up value. If you wanted a 100% mark-up, you would use 2.00 for the mark-up value.

Add / Edit Cage Types and Feed Types

These two forms allow you to set up the cage and feeding types that will be used if your clinic offers boarding services. Both forms allow you to set up the name/description and per day pricing information.

Backup your database!

It is VERY important to have a regular backup routine. How you choose to do that is entirely up to you, but it is HIGHLY recommended to back up your database on a regular basis. It is best to store your backup files on a separate storage device - such as an external drive, a flash drive, a CD, or a shared folder on another computer on your network. Before you do a backup, it is recommended to first compact/repair your database. This can significantly reduce the size of the database file.

To perform a "Compact and Repair Database", first close the main patient visits form, and then from the menu, select tools->database utilities->compact and repair database. Next, close Microsoft Access and copy the database file to your backup device.

To maximize the usefulness of your backup procedures, it is recommended that you use a separate backup folder for each day of the week. By doing this, you will always have a weeks worth of backup copies - if something happens to your file - perhaps someone inadvertantly deletes some of the patient records, you will be able to recover the data. The program installer automatically creates these folders, and places a shortcut to the backup folder on your desktop. !!! Remember to copy your backups to an external drive !!!

Don't forget to back up your photos too! Your image files are not stored in the database. More information can be found here.

Please note: The only delete functionality in the system (apart from archiving records) is one that allows you to completely undo an invoice. This function puts inventory back in stock, and deletes any related tax records. That functionality is provided so that if you have already entered the services and sales items for a patient visit, and subsequently the client changes their mind about something, you can easily start over.

If you are not using the Access workgroup security feature, there is nothing to prevent you (or someone else in your clinic) from deleting patient (or any of the other) records . Be warned! If a patient record is deleted, all related records for that patient will also be deleted! This means that all visit records for that patient, all clinic charges, vaccination records, tax records... everything will be deleted automatically.

Archiving Records

In the menu bar, under Setup and Maintenance, you will find a ArchivePatients menu choice. This function opens the ArchivePatients form. In order to be able to use the archiving function, the first thing you need to do is to create a target Archive Database. To do this, copy the VetSysDB.mdb file, and rename the copy to something recognizable - such as VetSysDB-Archive.mdb. Next, open the new archive database, and then open the Patients table in datasheet view (just double-click the Patients table). Now click the small gray square at the top left of that window. That will select all the patient records. Hit the delete key, and your archive database will be empty of all patient and visit records and ready for use.

When you want to archive records, open the ArchivePatients form. The first step is to select the target archive database. Click the button to open a file dialog that will allow you to select the file.

Once you have selected the archive file, you will be presented with two choices for archiving your records. You can choose to archive by PatientID - which is useful when a client is moving, or when a pet has passed away. You can also choose to archive all patient/visit records whose latest visit is older than the date you specify. Thus, you could decide to shrink your database by archiving all patient records whose latest visit was (for example) 6 years ago. Just choose the date option, and input a date 6 years in the past. Another form will open to display the list of patients that will be archived.

Once completed, both options give you a chance to abort the archiving process, however once you click the "Archive" button, the process completes almost immediately. (if there are a large number of patients selected, it may take a minute or two) The patient, visits, vaccinations, bloodwork, urinalysis, anesthesia, xrays, emergency medical, cytology and physical examination records will all be archived, however all invoice/tax related, health certificate, boarding and general photo records will be permanently deleted.

Should the need arise, you can restore one or more patient records by opening your archive database, and selecting your active database as the archive target.