Your clinic’s settings are crucial for getting your practice running smoothly with Shepherd. ‘Clinic Settings’ contains a lot of behind-the-scenes information about your clinic, and even contains a few things that pop up on invoices, medical records, and reports.

To navigate to your clinic settings:

  1. Select ‘Admin’ on the left side of the screen

  2. Select ‘Clinic Settings’

Note: If you’re unable to see either of these buttons, it’s because the role you’re assigned doesn’t have the appropriate permissions. If you feel like you should be able to access these, talk to your supervisor.

Clinic Settings is broken down into 5 sections:

Let’s dive into each section a bit more and learn what’s there.

General

The ‘General’ section of ‘Clinic Settings’ contains the information about your practice’s physical location, as well as other information like your practice’s logo, and notes that populate on certain printed documents like invoices. There are 3 main sections to this page:

  • Contact Information

  • Advanced Settings

  • Office Hours & Closures

Contact Information

Note: if you don't see one of the fields, you'll likely need to select the 'Edit Clinic Settings' button to see it.

Here's a breakdown of all the field in your clinic's settings:

  • Name: your practice's name

  • Email: your practice's general email—or the best email for clients to reach you at

  • Phone: the best phone number for clients to call

  • Fax: your practice's fax number

  • Tax Rate: adds the appropriate tax to charges on patients invoices*

  • Address: the physical address for your clinic

  • Time Zone: needs to be selected for reminders, as well logging activity within Shepherd (records, invoices, etc.)

  • Temperature unit: Fahrenheit or Celsius

  • Website: if your practice has a website, add that here

  • Info: displays at the bottom of printed documents, so this can be a tagline, slogan, or practical information like business hours.

*You can set your Tax Rate based on either the Clinic Address, or Client Zip Code.

Advanced Settings

In the advanced settings, you’re able to do a bit of fine-tuning on the backend of Shepherd. Here’s a breakdown of the 8 fields:

  • Enable whiteboard: Enables Shepherd’s standard whiteboard feature

  • Enable Boarding: Enables Shepherd's Boarding Calendar

  • Enable Messaging: Turns the Message Center on/off

  • Refills count toward production: Select if your practice offers commissions on prescription refills

  • Automatic Sign Out: The amount of time a user is inactive before being logged out

  • SMS Number: Number SMS messages will be sent from

  • Invoice Notes: A practice-specific note that prints on every invoice. You can use this for business announcements, payment information, etc.

  • Estimate Disclaimer: A client-facing reminder that an estimate is an estimate and may be different than their actual bill. This appears on all estimates you send/give to clients.

  • Postcard Note: a client-facing note to be included on the reminder postcards

  • Available Body Maps: turn on/off specific body maps that will populate as options within Physical Exams and Forms

Notification Settings

Each notification can be sent via email or text.

  • Send Appointment Notifications: Sends automated appointment reminders to clients. These are triggered by scheduled appointments.

  • Send Reminder Notifications: Also sends reminders to clients to make appointments. These are triggered by products.

  • Notification Setting Defaults When Creating a Client: These set communication preference defaults when you're creating a new client (see below)

Diagnoses Settings

Shepherd uses American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) codes as standard. However if you want to add in the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) and/or the Small Animal Specialty (SAS) codes, you can activate those here.

Office Hours & Closures

Here you are able to set up:

  • Clinic Availability: The clinic's hours of operation, as well as scheduled breaks

  • Office Closures: Specific days/holidays the clinic is closed

  • SMS Auto Response: Default text message that will be sent as an automatic reply if a client sends a message outside of your scheduled office availability

Adding/editing office hours follow the same pattern as adding/editing provider availability.

To add/edit office hours, select the ‘Edit Office Hours’ button.

If there’s a break, select the ‘+ Break’ button and add in when their break is.

To add/edit office closures, select the ‘Add New’ button. You can also quickly delete a closure by selecting the ‘delete’ icon (which looks like a trash can) on the right side of the screen under ‘Actions.’

Other Clinic Settings

Locations

Locations are anywhere a patient can be in your practice—parking spots, the lobby, boarding, surgery, or exam rooms.

To add a new location, select the ‘Add New’ button over to the right. You can also edit an existing location (by selecting the pencil icon), or archive it (by selecting the box icon).

Tip: You can filter the dashboard by location to see all of the patients within a specific location. You can also apply multiple filters at the same time such as location and doctor.

Referral Sources

A referral source is anything that sends business your way. It can be another referring practice, an existing client, a digital campaign you’re running, or a search engine result. They’re a great way to track where new business is coming from.

You can add one or more referral sources when creating or editing a client.

Client Discounts

Client discounts are applied to discountable line items and are automatically calculated on invoices. All you need to do to make them is give them a descriptive name (‘Employee,’ ‘Teacher,’ 'Military', etc.) and discount percentage Client discounts are applied to the client profile when creating or editing a client.

Tip: You’re able to control which items are discountable in the ‘Products’ section of admin.

Payment Settings

If you’re using Shepherd Pay, our integrated payment solutions partner, this is where you’ll put in the Source Key and the PIN provided by your customer success associate.

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