Practice Without Chaos: The Six Zanda Features Many Practices Overlook

[00:00:09] DAMIEN:

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Health Practice Buzz. Today's webinar topic: Practice Without the Chaos — the six Zanda features many practices overlook. This is a fantastic topic, and I'm really looking forward to diving right in today. My co-host is Kim Simmons, founder of Virtually Irreplaceable. Kim, you've been with us for some time, and you've actually been on a webinar with me before — a good couple of years ago, I think we worked out. So I might throw to you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and what you do, and then we'll dive right in.

KIM:

Sure. Thank you, and thank you so much for having me back. Obviously it went down well the first time, so I'm really happy to be back and talking to you again. I started out as a virtual assistant working for a fair few offices in private practice, and that's how I found Zanda, which was Power Diary at the time. One of my clients asked me to do a comparison of EHRs and find the best one, and I found you, so I've been working with you ever since. I now have a team of VAs, and we specialize in working with group practices — it's always therapists in private practice: psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists. I now also train VAs on how to set up their own business working with therapists in private practice, specifically on Zanda. So I train them on how to set up Zanda, use Zanda, and get therapists using the system. It's very integrated with your company, which I love. Yes, that's what I do now.

[00:02:01] DAMIEN:

Wonderful. I think your expertise today brings a different perspective, and just so people are clear, you're not employed by us — this is a completely separate business that you operate, and we've just had a great alignment over the years. And now people are going to pick up on an accent. Let's hear Kim — let people know where you're joining us from today.

KIM:

Yes, so I'm in a place called Hatfield, which is in Hertfordshire, just a bit north of London in the UK.

DAMIEN:

Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for joining, and I'm really excited for you to share with our audience today some of the key features that you've found, in your experience, people tend to overlook. That's really what we'll focus on, because I think you bring a different perspective: you're working with companies that are using Zanda, and training other people on how to set up practices on Zanda as well. So it really is a unique perspective, and it'll be excellent to get your take.

So what we're going to cover, very briefly, today: a little bit about why practices can get chaotic — I'm sure you've seen this many times, and perhaps it's one of the reasons people reach out originally for assistance. A little bit around the importance of starting out right, but it's never too late: if you find yourself in the midst of chaos, it's always fixable. Then we'll dive into the most underutilized features, the ones we identified together when we were preparing for this webinar — the things that really move the needle. Then we'll talk a little bit about the client experience, and look at three things you can actually do today to put some of this into action.

So, a little bit about why practices tend to get chaotic. For those who know my backstory, I'm Damien, one of the co-founders here at Zanda, but also a psychologist, and I built a group private practice and really experienced this first-hand. People start out with their practices and there are usually lots of questions in their mind about whether this is even going to work, whether they're going to get any clients, and so on, and that makes perfect sense. People kick off and often don't think about setting up the systems and processes to begin with, because it's often that initial survival concern and all the internal insecurities that I'm sure everyone can relate to. So there are lots of manual processes, and then the practice starts to become successful and starts to grow, and as it scales, the inefficiencies become more and more evident. But of course people are then really busy, and it becomes difficult to find the time. That's where practices can get chaotic.

So if you feel like your practice is a little chaotic, you're not alone. If you don't have a system, or you don't have a good system, or it's not being well utilized, this is a very common experience. The best time to start is, ideally, when you're starting out — that's awesome. If not, and you find yourself running the practice, there's always a way you can turn that around, step by step. I'm sure you've walked people through this process many times, Kim.

[00:05:53] KIM:

Yeah, I've definitely set up about 100 private practice systems in the decade that I've worked, and it's pretty much always the same, because you do your therapy training, however you do that, but no one teaches you how to run a business. I think a lot of people start out thinking, "I want a private practice," which is amazing, but they don't then look into how to run a business and how to set up all the back-end stuff. I would say the majority of therapists get into private practice because they want to do therapy, obviously — they don't necessarily want to book appointments and manage their inbox all day and do invoicing and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of a second thought. And I think a lot of people bootstrap, which is what nearly all businesses do regardless of what you're doing: you bootstrap, and you do what you can, and what works for you with one, two or three clients and feels manageable, with a paper diary or just a Google Calendar or whatever. It becomes unmanageable when you have a busy practice and you're working full-time in your practice. That's when it becomes unmanageable, basically.

[00:07:01] DAMIEN:

Yeah, and we find — you're obviously in the UK and I'm based in Australia, and we have a lot of customers in North America as well — in all the main areas that we operate, it's the same story. The training, whether it's Australia, UK or Europe, understandably focuses on the clinical side of becoming a health practitioner and how to do that well, but there really isn't any business training, and there's really no preparation for that. Like I say, people get into this space to provide services. So, starting out right and setting it up. Ideally — and this is something we were talking about when we met — it was really about front-loading your practice, so setting it up from the start. What do you mean by the term front-loading? What does that mean in this context?

[00:08:05] KIM:

So when we start working with therapists in private practice, we have this workflow called the private practice workflow, and it's basically the client journey. I've recognized seven steps of the client journey, from when they first inquire with you all the way to when they finish working with you. We go through every single step and work out the process and procedure for each thing: how are you going to deal with an inquiry, how do they come in, how do you respond to people — you literally think about your practice that way, through the client journey. And then, as we've said, it's once-ify. You think about what you want to say to clients in this scenario, how you want to deal with this, what you want your forms to look like, what you want your email templates to look like, and you think about it up front, once. You set that up and then it's kind of one and done, pretty much. Obviously some things change, like when you change your fees or your cancellation policy, for example, but mainly you think about it once, do the work up front, set it up, and it's done. You can kind of sit back and think, "Right, now my practice kind of runs itself and I can focus on doing the therapy."

[00:09:22] DAMIEN:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the once-ify concept — we talk about it too, so it's a good alignment. In our own private practice, for instance, I found just silly things that I was doing over and over. There'd be things like recording a message for the Christmas break, when we'd close the practice for a couple of weeks over Christmas, and I'd find I had to think about the wording each time and change our answering machine recording. When we were doing employment things, like sending rejection emails or acceptance emails — all those little fiddly things that I'd be repeating over and over. What you said is spot on, and the idea behind how Zanda's built is allowing you to once-ify and to front-load as much as you can, all the sorts of things you can think about, so that, like you said, it automates and you don't end up spending time reinventing the wheel over and over. That's going to be a bit of a theme we'll see as we talk through today.

Okay, so I'm going to throw to you here, because this is something I think you have really good insight into: there's a gap between using Zanda and optimizing it. What are the things you tend to find happen here?

[00:10:46] KIM:

Yeah, so a lot of people come to me when they want an EHR — they've outgrown whatever they use, and they want an EHR, and that's one way. But another way a lot of people find me is that they're already using Zanda, or they've set up Zanda, or they've chosen to use it, but they feel like they're not getting the most out of it. They don't say it's not working for me. What they say is, "I feel like I'm not using it to the best of its ability." They've watched YouTube videos I've made, talking about the system and what it can do, or they've watched your help videos, which are amazing by the way, and they really love it, but then they say, "I just don't know how to set this up, or I don't know what it can do specifically," so can I help them optimize the system?

I feel like that's true of all systems. It doesn't matter what it is: you get a system, maybe for one purpose — maybe they're getting it to manage their appointments, so they think, "I'll just manage my appointments on this" — but it does so much more, and even in that managing-appointments bit there are things they're not optimizing, which we'll talk about in a minute. It's such a powerful system, with so much it can do. I'm sure I don't even know all the features, because I use it for what I use it for, and I'm not seeing the things it can do for different types of businesses. So it's about people using the system but feeling like, "Well, I'm still having to send emails or reminders — I'm still sending them out manually." That's why they come to me: "Can you just tell me what I'm not using so that I can automate as much as possible?"

[00:12:38] DAMIEN:

Yeah, and a little bit of behind-the-curtains here from the Zanda perspective: we have a really full set of features — we've been doing this for a long time now and building things out — but one of the things that's always a challenge is helping people discover those new features, because how it is now is different to how it was a year ago and the year before that. We're always rolling out new things and trying to help people discover them. So what we thought would be kind of fun today was, in the work that you do with the people you work with, to identify the six things that you really think are overlooked, or that people don't think about in the right way. So let's dive straight into that. The first one we've got here is automations. Tell us what you see, how people can use them effectively, what moves the needle here, and the things that you set up for people.

[00:13:40] KIM:

Yeah, so I think with automations, the thing people are worried or nervous about is it feeling like it's not personal, or worrying that if they set an automation up, clients are going to get all these emails and things that they don't need. One thing I really don't think people understand is that there are system-level automations, but then you can get down to the client level. For example, if you work as a therapist in private practice, face-to-face and online — let's say 80% of your practice is online — you could set the system to send online reminders, so everyone gets an online reminder. However, for those few clients, maybe three or four, that you see face-to-face, you can override the system in the client profile and say, "Right, they're not going to get the online reminder, they're going to get the face-to-face reminder," and things like that. There's more you can do around that, but it's the thing people worry about: first of all, that the automations won't seem personal, and second of all, that clients are going to get the wrong things. I think they're not really sure that there's the system level and the client level as well. So that's one thing.

And then it's the merge fields within them as well. Again, they're worried about the personalization. They want to say the client's name, they want the appointment time and date to come up, and things like that. There are so many merge fields, which are basically the system pulling information — so it says "insert appointment detail," "insert client first name," things like that — and you can make it really personal. From what we talked about before, with thinking about it up front, you can really think about what you want to say to this client in an appointment with you: what information is really important for them to know, and important for me to give out. Like my cancellation policy, if they're coming face-to-face, giving them details about parking and reception, all that kind of stuff. So you can make it really personal, but set up an automation so that you don't have to think about it, and the automations and reminders go out as you want them to.

[00:15:53] DAMIEN:

Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think there's also a perspective shift, because as the system administrator or the practice owner, you know that they're automations, you know there are a lot of them going out, and you know the system's doing a lot of correspondence. But from the client's perspective, that's not their experience at all. What they're getting is targeted, relevant messages connected to their treatment, or their appointments, or the practicalities, or the forms, or whatever it is that's been automated. Like you said, by using merge fields it feels personal, and you can control the number you're sending and the timing. So I think it is a perspective shift, and one of the things you can do is set yourself up as a fake client in the system and experience the journey as well. If you set them up and say, "Okay, I just want to see what this feels like," that's a great thing to do, because then you'll actually see them and realize that, yeah, it feels personal, it feels timely, and it keeps a connection between the practice and the point in the journey that the client is on with you.

So automations, they're amazing. The use of automations has just gone up, up, up since we released them. And as you probably know, Kim, we expand the different things you can do with automations — the triggers and the things you can use — and I'm sure you've discovered that. If someone watching this hasn't looked at automations in a while, have a look and you'll see. And if you're a Zanda user and there's functionality you'd like around automations, different trigger points and so forth, do let us know. Give us that feedback, because we update this all the time, and that's all based on people saying, "Hey, I have this use case, this would be awesome if it could do this," and we can build that in.

Very good. All right, let's jump to number two. This one is around service types and client profiles. When we were originally talking, this wasn't what I had at the top of my head, so when you raised it, I thought, oh, this is interesting. So I'll let you take it away and talk a little bit about how you utilize these and the difference it makes.

[00:18:39] KIM:

Yeah, this makes such a massive difference. This was the first one I said to you as well, wasn't it? It was the biggest aha moment for people. Obviously you can't use it for all types of businesses — if it's a beauty salon, for example, and someone can book a wax or a massage or whatever, that's not it. But for therapists in private practice, usually the client is seeing them for a specific service type every single week, every single time. So by being able to put the service type into the client profile, on the billing setup page, when you come to book an appointment all you need to do is choose the time, enter the client's name, and then decide the location if it's different from your generic one — you could set it as online by default, but occasionally a client may see you face-to-face. That's all you need to do, and it makes such a massive difference, because it means, one, you don't have to have loads of, for example, psychotherapy sessions at £100 and £90 and £80 because you've got people on all different fees. In the billing setup you can add discounts, so you can have your standard fee and then say, "This client gets a 20% discount," or £20 or $20, whatever it is, but then you don't have to remember that information every single time. When you're booking an appointment, the system knows, "Okay, this client has this appointment and it's this price," and it's done. It's literally a two-second job to book an appointment. Whereas if you don't have that, you're booking an appointment and you're like, "Okay, well, what session type do they have? What price do they pay?" and it takes a lot longer. So even just that small thing — and what I find is that 90% of the time when we do Zanda check-ups for people, when we're looking at their system and seeing what they're not utilizing, this is one that they don't utilize. It's such a quick fix, and it makes such a massive difference to them, booking appointments and saving time.

[00:20:38] DAMIEN:

Yeah, absolutely. The other thing around it too is that if the system knows that's the appointment to put in when you book the time on the calendar, it knows the right length of time. So you just click the block that's the start time, and the system automatically knows what appointment that person has, and therefore makes the appointment the right length as well. Look, it's small, but because appointments are made so frequently, it's an activity that's repeated, so it takes away some admin, and it also reduces the risk of errors, because you've got that consistency there as well. And then you've got some information about merging profiles, for couples and for children, and there are different ways of managing that. What's your tip for people on this?

[00:21:36] KIM:

Yeah, it's funny, because me and my team do this differently, and it's quite funny. I trained her — "Why are you doing it differently to me?" — but she's like, "Because they had a new feature," and I wasn't aware, but she was. So, yeah.

Managing couples: it's really great when you have individual profiles, so that each person is filling out the forms and things like that, and then you merge the profile, so you can have individual appointments and you can also have couple appointments. This is really great for legal safety as well, if you're working with both parties. For example, client notes: if you're seeing someone individually, one-off, the other person can't request the notes for that appointment, because it's in a completely separate file. So I really liked that. Merging profiles can be really helpful, because then once you book an appointment, both people get the appointment reminder, so it just separates the individual from the couple when you're working with couples.

And then for children, we talk about contacts — adding contacts — so that the parents get the reminders as well as the child. The child might not have an email address, for example, so what we always do is leave the child's email blank in their profile, but then add a parent or parents, so that we're not sending the wrong information. All the merge fields are correct, we're sending it to the recipient, not the client, and things like that. So being able to use contacts correctly, and merging profiles for couples or families, can be really, really useful.

DAMIEN:

Yeah. And by merging, I should make it clear too — that's not the same tool as merging a duplicate profile, you mean? If you have a duplicate in your system, you can merge it, and it compresses it into one and combines it all. But you're talking about using a couple, a profile type that allows those two to be connected.

[00:23:35] KIM:

Yes, yes. You set them up individually, and then you can set up a merged profile — like Mr and Mrs Whoever, or whatever it is — and then just add the members in. That's something I learned recently that you could do.

DAMIEN:

Yes, it is something we added, so that you could have a profile type that allows the couple to be considered a client, and then you can have separate profiles linked to that as well. And like most things in Zanda, it came from feedback. As you said, there can be some legal considerations: if there's a request for information, or a subpoena, or all those sorts of things that can happen, it can be nice and contained and very clear what information belongs to what. Different countries also have different rules about working with couples. In some professions and in some countries, you can have one practitioner seeing all parties, the couple and each client individually, while others have rules around not doing that, and all sorts of things. So this allows the flexibility to set it up to match whatever scenario you're in.

So those are two good things, and yes — the reason your team was doing it slightly differently is because we added that. We did add a feature to allow that. Okay, let's jump into number three: Stripe integration and utilizing the client portal. Now, I could talk about this, but I'd like you to, because you've got a different perspective and a different way that you talk to people about it. What do you see, and why should people utilize Stripe and the client portal?

[00:25:27] KIM:

Yeah, so when I talk to people about going onto Zanda, or when they're using Zanda and I ask them if they've integrated with Stripe, they say, "I don't want to pay the fees." That's always the way, right? Because when you're doing it by BACS, or whatever it is in other countries, there are no fees, but it is more time-consuming for the client and also for the therapist. So I talk to them about how, sometimes when we upgrade our systems and platforms, that's a way for them to upgrade their fees as well. Obviously you can't pass card payment processing fees onto the client, but it's a way for you to say, "Right, I've upgraded my system, it's an upgraded service for the client as well," so you can justify, if you want that kind of word, putting your fees up to cover that.

However, even if you didn't want to do that, what I often say to them is, "Okay, how often are you checking your bank account and updating whatever system you're using — even if it's just your paper diary and ticking off that they've paid, which happens a lot?" And they say, "Well, I'm checking my bank every day." And I'm like, "Every single day you're logging on?" And they're like, "Yeah, multiple times a day, usually just before the session starts, I'm checking my bank." And I'm like, "How long do you think that takes?" So I get them to work out how much time invoicing — checking your bank account and updating some kind of system — is taking them. Then I can tell them roughly how much the Stripe fees are going to be, based on how many clients they're seeing and things like that, and where that sits. What they usually find is that it's pretty much the same, if not that they're spending a lot more time. If they use their hourly fee — they say, "Well, it takes me three hours a month," and I'm like, "Okay, well, that's costing you £300 a month, versus the Stripe fees, which are only £150, for example." That puts it into perspective: "Oh yeah, I'm not actually taking my time, and how much that costs me, into account."

And so usually what people can do, because they're saving so much time on admin anyway — even just with this feature, with invoicing and updating systems with payments, and then overdue invoices, which you can do with an automation workflow if you use Stripe — all of that stuff, you take away that time, and you could see one more client. Not even a week: one more client a month, and it would pay for all of this. So I just talk to them in those terms. It's the same when people want to work with a VA: they say, "I can't afford a VA," and I say, "Okay, well, how much time are you spending on admin?" It's the same concept.

So once you integrate with Stripe, obviously the system sends the invoice and the client pays, which is much easier for them, and people find that people pay quicker because they've got that pay link. Someone gets an invoice and they think, "Oh my God, I've got to log on to my bank, I've got to do all this stuff, I've got to put a reference number in," and they say, "Oh, sure, I'll do it later." Whereas when they see "click here to pay," it's like, "All right, I'll just do it now." Stripe also saves the client's card details, so they don't even have to enter their card — it's just, "Yeah, that's the card I want to use, done" — so it's so quick for them. They tend to pay when they get their invoice, as opposed to waiting until 10 minutes before the session and then panicking.

Once they make the payment, it updates the system automatically, so if they haven't paid you can very easily see on the system — a pound sign disappears, or stays if they haven't paid — and you can really quickly say, "Okay, I'm seeing this client now, but they haven't paid me yet." You can also set up an automation so that if they haven't paid within however many days of the appointment, they get an overdue invoice reminder. And you know that's safe, because everyone pays online, so you're not sending overdue invoice reminders to people who have already paid. So it makes the whole process of invoicing, getting money and sending overdue invoice reminders feel a bit more removed, and it just takes it off your plate.

[00:29:29] DAMIEN:

Yeah, I think — and just for the non-UK audience too — when you're talking about the payment system or the alternative that people use there, that's where people put a direct transfer into a therapist's bank account, and that's been a very common practice historically in the UK. But with that comes all those things you talked about: needing to manually check it, needing to mark it off, and so on. It's the same in other countries, like Australia or North America, where people may be using credit card processing terminals in the clinic itself. That still requires the person to get out their card and swipe it, and it still needs to be manually updated in Zanda to record that the payment is there. When you've got that, it can slow down the workflow, if you've got a reception area, or if you're a solo practitioner doing it yourself — you've got the time it takes to process the payment, record it, and make sure it's recorded correctly.

What we find, and I think it goes beyond just Stripe and is a good thing for practices to think about overall, is that when something like, let's just say, Stripe has a fee attached, you weigh that up against exactly what you're pointing out: what is the time, right? And we often don't think about that. When we started our practice, at the start I was doing everything. I was literally down there on the weekends doing the cleaning, maintaining the little courtyard we had around the first practice building — until I worked out, hang on, we can spend some money and have someone else do that. The cost just doesn't make any sense, either from a work–life balance point of view or, like you were talking about before, in terms of how many clients I would need to see to make this worthwhile. And usually it's, like you said, one, or half a client a month or something. And it certainly runs a lot more efficiently.

And then with the client portal — this is something else that, obviously, we built for a reason — what do you observe when people use the client portal? What improvements do you see in their workflow, and are there any tips you have for people?

KIM:

Yeah, I think that's another thing that people, especially therapists, worry about: "Oh no, I want to be in charge of my calendar. I don't want people to be able to just book in with me when they want." And I do say — I have always said — that if you're working in private practice and you can get people on regular weekly or bi-weekly sessions, that is preferable, because then you know where you are: you know how many clients you need, how many sessions you need a month or a week to pay your bills and earn what you want to earn. However, if you do enable the client portal, the thing I always loved about Zanda is that it's so customizable, which a lot of other systems aren't. When you open the client portal in the back end, there are so many things you can switch on and off, and so much you can control about what you allow people to do.

You could let them just reschedule appointments, but then you can lock that down and say they can't reschedule with less than two days' notice, or whatever your cancellation period is, so it's not like letting them cancel and reschedule willy-nilly. They're not free to do whatever they want; you can lock it down. But they can also see their upcoming appointments, so they don't have to contact you all the time and ask, "When's my next appointment?" Just being able to view appointments, even if they can't cancel or reschedule, is useful. Being able to pay invoices: if they've lost their email about it, they know they can always go on their client portal and see what's overdue or what they need to pay for. There are so many things they can see. Their forms, for example: if you say to them, "I'm sorry, but my cancellation period is 48 hours, which you signed for when you did your intake," and people are like, "What? No, I don't remember that," then they can see their form and say, "Oh, yeah, I did sign that. I didn't read it" — which we all do when we sign contracts. We don't read it until it becomes relevant.

So having the client portal doesn't mean people can just say, "Oh, I'm just going to book in with this person at 8 o'clock at night." You can set the times you accept bookings, from this time to this time per day, and you can add lunch breaks in there, whatever you want. You can lock it down so much, and make it so that people can't book less than 24 hours ahead, so you can log in in the morning and not get a surprise appointment that day. There are so many things you can do with the client portal that are really helpful for clients and for the practitioner, and it cuts down on the amount of communication. We all know emails — in most people's lives there are just so many emails about things that could be automated by the client. You don't need to be involved in everything all the time.

[00:35:00] DAMIEN:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think — I think I can say this safely as a psychologist and health practitioner myself — we do like control. We do like to feel like we're in control of our practices, our calendars, our time, and so on. That feedback, and that need to be able to set it so that it does the things the practice is comfortable with, and set it in a way that means people can't, like you say, book at weird times, or you don't turn up and find you've got a surprise appointment. Now, if you want to allow people to do that, that's absolutely fine too; you can do that.

The other side to it that we built intentionally: you can have zero payment upfront, where you allow people to book and not pay anything, or you can take a deposit, which really helps if you want people to have some financial commitment to attending their appointment, or you can charge fully upfront. You can set that based on whatever your policy is. It allows you to ramp up the efficiency of how a practice operates without losing that control. And if you're watching this and you haven't looked at the client portal recently, it's worth a revisit, because we've constantly evolved it, and it actually does a lot more than it used to. You can even see on the screenshot we've got there that there's a waitlist option too, which lets people join a waitlist if you're booked up.

The other quick comment, just around the client portal for people who haven't used it, is that I'm thinking a little about the client experience. If we think more broadly about the way everyone's work and lives are — people's lives aren't nine to five as much; things are all over the place, people work different shifts and all sorts of stuff — when they have the thought, "I need to book that appointment," there's every chance that thought occurs outside the hours you're open. And if booking by phone is the only way people can book an appointment, there's a good chance you either miss out on a new client, if it's a new referral coming through, or people don't book because they forget, and they end up with gaps in their treatment and all the rest of it, just through disorganization or the organizational element of booking appointments. They have the thought, but it's 10 p.m. and they think, "Oh yeah, I'll book in with my physio, or my PT, first thing in the morning," and then often that gets missed.

So we tend to see that when people activate the client portal and put a link on their website, their socials, wherever they might, a lot of bookings come in outside of normal business hours. That can be new clients, or it can be existing clients, depending on your settings — you can accept new ones or lock it down to just existing ones, so you can control everything. We see that, and it's obviously good commercially, but it's also good from a client outcome point of view, because they're more likely to be consistent in treatment.

All right, let's motor on and look at number four: tools for debt collection. What tips do you have? How do you set this up for people, or suggest people set up debt collection in Zanda?

[00:38:54] KIM:

Yeah, so I think it's all the things we've talked about: having the service types on there, using Stripe so that people can pay, and using the automation workflows so that if people haven't paid within a certain time, you can send them reminders, which you pre-write, so they don't need to be like "Pay me now." They can be very nice, like, "Oh, I think you may have overlooked this," or however you want to word it. So you can do those automations. Then there are also really quick reports you can run in the system: "Okay, last week, how many people didn't pay me? How much am I owed?" Just running those reports. From that report you can then send overdue invoice reminders, and you can change the template, so you can have a first reminder and a second reminder, with different templates for each. All of the things we've talked about can help with that.

[00:39:51] DAMIEN:

Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to say, look, the other element to this, that we know from the data, is that the longer someone owes — the longer the invoice is outstanding — the less chance you have of actually being able to collect it, for all sorts of reasons. So obviously prevention is always better, so all the things we talked about to prevent someone owing money. But then having the system very quickly and automatically chase up outstanding invoices means the gap between when the service was provided and when that money is collected automatically gets really reduced. So your collection rate goes up, and that's great from a cash flow point of view. And then you had one other tip, I think, in terms of creating a little bit of distance, for people who may be uncomfortable — we were talking about this in our prep. What's your tip for people who might be a little uncomfortable about chasing up?

[00:40:58] KIM:

Yeah, so one of the good things you can do in Zanda, with the automation reminder templates and things, is that you can put any email address you want in there. So you could have an accounts address at your business, so the accounts department of your private practice is the one chasing the invoices, not you. I have set that up for people who are not yet quite ready to work with a VA, and also some people who think they need a VA, and then we set up Zanda and it's like, "You don't actually need one" — now the system's set up properly and you have all these automations and stuff, you don't need a VA. But they say, "Yeah, but I'm just nervous about chasing money. I don't like doing it." I worked with someone recently who never chases money, and I'm like, "Oh my God." That's thousands of pounds just going out the door, and she just refuses to do it, so I said, "Let's set up another accounts department for you, and they can chase the money," and she said, "Okay, yeah, that sounds like a good idea." It's not like deceiving people — I don't see it as deceiving people. It's just removing yourself a little bit from it. Of course, you should be able to talk about money with your clients when you're in business, but I do know, working with hundreds of therapists, if not more, that this is one of the main things they get nervous or worried about: money, increasing fees, chasing unpaid payments and stuff like that. So being able to, just for those invoice emails, set up an accounts email and say "accounts at my business is sending you stuff." Of course, you might need to talk to the client in person if they've failed to pay for three sessions or something like that — you have to bring it up eventually — but it is a way you can step back a little bit from this process if needed.

[00:42:45] DAMIEN:

Yeah, I think it's a great tip. Like I say, sometimes we do need to talk about it, and it's a good skill to develop and be comfortable with. But at the end of the day, the human element often kicks in. We avoid stuff as well. No one ever sits down and says, "Today I really feel like debt collection." So it's setting the system up so it does it for you, reduces admin, improves cash flow, and, like you say, you can have it separated a little bit from your interaction with the client if you want.

[00:43:23] KIM:

Yeah, just quickly on that, one more thing: having a system as well. When you're chasing invoices and you don't have a system like Zanda, it can be like, "Yeah, we saw you here," and they say, "Prove it, I don't remember seeing you." Whereas with the system, you can literally pull out the time — it's so easy to run a report and say, "These are the times I've seen you that you haven't paid for." That can be really helpful for proving that you saw that client, because you can't necessarily do that if you're using a paper diary, and also your own memory — you're like, "Did I? I don't know, it was two months ago, I can't really remember now." Whereas if you're using the system correctly, and using appointment statuses and things like that, and saying, "Yep, this person arrived, this one was completed," you trust yourself more to be like, "Yeah, I know I saw that client, and it's fine." It's beyond the clinical notes, whatever might be recorded.

DAMIEN:

And also, if you're using the client portal — we'll throw back to that — people can go on, look, and verify for themselves, and they can also see outstanding invoices. We know that sometimes clients with an outstanding invoice feel uncomfortable as well, because they're embarrassed or something. So giving them a way to pay, either by an automated link that goes out through an automation like you were talking about, or by going to the client portal, clicking pay and entering their card details if they're not saved, and having that be done without them having to interact with anyone, we see outstanding debt get cleared at a much higher rate as well. Okay, so moving on to number five: client statuses, waitlists and tags. Walk us through this. What do you see people not taking advantage of here, and what are some tips for people?

[00:45:12] KIM:

Yeah, so one of the things I always make sure therapists have set up is the client statuses, which you can make up yourself, or there are templates in there for you. Basically it's having statuses like active clients, waiting list, inquiries, paused clients, closed clients. That can be really helpful because, one, you can run reports — "How many active clients have I got? How many clients have I seen in the past year that I've finished working with?" — all that kind of stuff. So running my reports via client statuses can be really helpful. But one of the things I love using it for is the bulk email function. Again, I don't know if people know that this exists, but you can basically send a bulk email, like a mailing list, like Mailchimp or whatever, where you send a targeted email to a select type of people.

For example, like you were talking about with the holiday notice: if you were going to have time off, you could write a template — a standard one — and then just change the dates as needed. Then you could say, "Okay, I want all of my active clients to be sent a holiday notice that I'm going on holiday between this time and this time," and you can add things in, like a merge field for their next appointment: "I'm off between this date and this date, your next appointment is this time on this day," and that will be specific to each client. Each client will look like they've got an email to themselves — they're not going to get CC'd in with a hundred people. And you can put a link to the client portal if they don't have an appointment, so they can book in, so it's also a way of generating more work for yourself. Being able to say, "I want all of this to go to all of my active clients," can be really useful.

The same goes for clients that you haven't seen for a certain amount of time, if you want to chase them up. Now, I obviously don't recommend this with actual therapy, but for other types of businesses this can be really useful: "If someone hasn't had an appointment in X amount of time, let's remind them that we're here for your physio session," or whatever it is. And also, for example, if you're sick — let's say you don't have a VA and you're really sick — being able to email everyone who has an appointment with you that day and just say, "I'm sick, sorry," rather than sending out six individual emails when you're ill, can be really helpful as well. So I've kind of gone off on a tangent with the bulk emails. I really love that.

DAMIEN:

Yeah. And for people who may not be aware, you can do that in bulk with email or SMS, using the same filters, and then decide which one you're sending. For the sick example, for instance, you have a template that says, "I'm unavailable today due to sickness, we have to cancel your appointment," and then you can run a filter to generate a list. Let's say you want to definitely make sure they see it and know it — you can do that using the bulk send.

And just on that, you've raised something interesting around bulk sends, from a security and privacy point of view. Behind the scenes, when we send a bulk email from Zanda, we send them all out individually, right? So even though it's a bulk send and you see this list of people, we don't do what you'll sometimes see people do, with a CC or BCC list. From a technical point of view, behind the scenes they're sent out as individual emails. Each one is created individually, queued in the system and sent one at a time. It happens super, super fast — it feels like it's instant — but what we're doing behind the scenes is a separate entry for each one. That's just important to know, because it's different to some systems that will bulk-send but are actually doing something perhaps not quite right for healthcare.

Now, for waitlists, you can use tags. You had thoughts around the best use of this.

[00:49:34] KIM:

Yeah. So again, the thing I like about the waitlist is that you can add the person's details, but then also say, "When are you actually available to see me?" You can tick the days, and then you can also go into morning, afternoon, evening as well, which I really love. So let's say you have a client finish with you on Wednesday at 10 a.m. You could look at your waitlist and see who matches, rather than having to send an email to everybody, or going first come, first served, and then they say, "Well, I already told you I can't see you Wednesday, I can only do evenings," for example. So you're not having that bad communication up front, which can put people off — they think, "They're not listening to me, and if my therapist isn't going to listen to me, that's not great, right?" It's also wasting your time, because you're asking this person and that person. So being able to look at the availability and say, "Okay, this person matches my availability," you've got a much better chance of that person saying yes. Of course, they might have slipped off the waiting list at that point, but you've got a much better chance of that person saying, "Yep, that's an appointment I can do." And using things like tags as well: for example, if you're a therapist and a supervisor, and you do EMDR or something like that, being able to tag people so you know what you're seeing them for — maybe you only want a certain number of eating disorder clients, or a certain number of supervisees — you can tag them so you know, "Okay, this person is here, but this is what they're here for," and that can be really helpful as well.

[00:51:13] DAMIEN:

Yeah, absolutely. So again, it allows you to balance, and to make informed decisions about which people you might want to fill a cancellation with. And then of course, in the calendar, you can also have it suggest people from the waitlist that will fit into the available spot. By recording that information on the waitlist, it also allows the system to better help you fill gaps you might have. And we are also building — I won't give away too much right now — some features on the waitlist that will draw even more on that availability, to help make sure the time practitioners have available is utilized to the max. So I won't go into too much detail now, but some really cool things. Okay, so that's number five, and the last one we'll talk about is forms, templates and linked profile fields — you were talking to us about this. Now, this is sometimes a missed feature, or people aren't really maximizing it.

[00:52:28] KIM:

Yeah, so what we always suggest is having a welcome email — a welcome email template that pulls relevant information out of your contract. Like I joked about before, people don't read contracts, they really don't, especially if they're a few sessions in; they're not really reading all the ins and outs of everything. So pulling out relevant information — how people book with you, what your cancellation policy is, what your fee is — and putting that into the welcome email, making it really clear to people how it's going to be when they see you. For example, if they're coming to see you face-to-face, adding parking instructions, Google Maps links, and information about whether there's a reception or what time they should turn up. Lots of people see clients in their homes, so letting them know that there might not be a toilet available, or any information that's relevant to a client to get them to that session, especially on a first session, because people have a lot of anxiety about starting therapy, especially if they're going to see you face-to-face and they've never met you before and don't know where they're going. Any way that we can mitigate anxiety and worry is better, so creating this really lovely welcome email can really help. I've found that once we've implemented this, the number of people who go from inquiry to that first session has massively increased — so many therapists have reported to me, "Oh my God, I'm hardly getting anyone not turn up," which is amazing. That's what we want, because acquiring a new client is the hardest thing to do. Once you've got them, getting them to repeat is so much easier than having to find a new one and being on this complete marketing hamster wheel all the time. We don't want that. We want a full practice as much as possible. Obviously, you can't keep people in therapy who don't need it, but we want to get them to the session, and keep them as long as they need our help.

[00:54:22] DAMIEN:

Yeah, and this is essentially a time-efficient but curated experience for them. You can make that pathway from the inquiry all the way through without it taking a lot of admin time. And this really comes back to the idea around the client experience outside the treatment room, which we've touched on. One of the things we think about a lot at Zanda is how important that client experience is for clients, because clients often don't have a good way of directly assessing the quality of treatment. If you think about it, even your own GP or your own therapist or whoever — it's actually hard to know, unless it's your area of expertise, whether what you're getting is good. So people use proxies.

This is my theory around what we see happen: clients use other measures to evaluate, and that's often things like what we're talking about today. Was the experience easy and friendly? Did I feel listened to? Think about how I found the practice — were they nice? Was it convenient? All of those experiences around the treatment actually influence the way people feel about the treatment itself, and about the practice and the practitioner. When it comes to them providing feedback to a referrer, or referring you to their friends, family or work, it's often based on those things, as much as we'd like to think it was all based on the quality of the treatment — because I'm sure everyone is wonderfully skilled and doing a great job. But interestingly, the client experience has a disproportionate impact on how they rate that service. So utilizing the things we're talking about is really designed to optimize that, without it being something you have to think about or spend a lot of time on.

Okay. Now, before we finish up for today, if you had to boil it down to a few things people can do today, what three things would you suggest?

[00:56:57] KIM:

Okay, so if you're using Zanda and you feel like it's not optimized enough, these are the things I think will make the biggest difference to you really quickly. The first one is adding those service types. If your type of business has a specific service type per client, add the service type in — it's going to speed up everything from booking appointments to invoicing, all of it. Add the service type, and if people need discounts and things like that, you can do that; it's in the billing setup of the client profile. Go through all of your active clients and get that done. That would be a really quick win for you.

The second thing is to once-ify your emails. Like I said, look at all of the things you send out regularly — the things you send over and over again: appointment reminders, welcome emails, whatever it is. Sit down for a bit of time and think about what you want to say to clients when they join your practice, and when they get email reminders. Think about them once, really thoughtfully, put them on the system, done right, and it's done. Use merge fields, of course, as much as possible. That's really going to help you personalize emails and bring out the information you need, like the appointment time and date and things like that. That's something else I would recommend.

And then thirdly, look at your intake forms. We kind of skipped over the linked profile bit, but that's going to really speed up your admin as well. If a client fills in information like their name, their address, their date of birth, their preferred name, their contact details, then, if you use a linked profile, it will automatically update their profile for you once they fill that out, and it means there's so much less admin for you to do. You don't need to find the form and then put the information into the system — it's thought of that for you. So those are the three things I would say will make the most difference to your system straight away, without talking about the portal and things like that. This is going to speed up the back end. Quick wins you can do.

DAMIEN:

And for people who might have been using Zanda for a long time, with this idea of linked profile fields: you might have a template you've been using forever, so just go back and check that you're using it, because we added it a few years ago now. It's sometimes the case that people never revisit their templates, and you can just change the field type to a linked profile and it will merge straight in. And the one you mentioned more recently was around contacts, so that you can collect contact information at the start, which is a more recent update. Okay, if people want to get in touch with you, Kim, what do you offer, and how can they reach out to you?

[00:59:37] KIM:

Yeah, I've got a ton of services for therapists in private practice, whether they're free or paid. There are tons of resources. I've got a YouTube channel that has tons of information about setting up a private practice and doing that back-end admin, so YouTube or Instagram would be great if people want to follow me. I've also got a load of courses and work that we do around Zanda specifically. Me and my team specifically work with group practices now, but I've also trained some VAs, and they work with solo practices, so you can go to my VA directory on my website, and there are loads of people there who can help you if you're looking for a VA. We also offer services like just making sure you're using your Zanda correctly, so we can do a check for you and say, "This is what you should do, this is what we can help you with." And I also have a Zanda setup course, where I go through how to set up Zanda from start to finish. It's specific to therapists in private practice, because that's my expertise. I've put in a special offer code for people who have watched this webinar if they want some money off that course. It's a do-it-yourself course — it's step by step, with video guidance — and there's loads of information about all of the things we've talked about with regard to once-ifying, and I have templates to help you get started as well.

[01:00:56] DAMIEN:

Wonderful. And I highly recommend — as we were saying at the start, Kim, you've been working with us, with Zanda, or Power Diary previously, obviously for a long time, and it's really nice, because I think you really get how therapists operate and the sorts of things they need, and whenever we talk, I think, yep, you get it. You've been there, you've seen the full variety, and you think about it in very similar ways to how we think about making things easier and making life better for practitioners. So check out Kim's — she's got all her socials and everything there — and definitely, I highly recommend checking that out.

Just a couple of things. We were talking about ideas before: you can go to Help, then Submit Idea, which takes you to our ideas board. We were talking about automations and things, and if there are triggers you'd like that we don't have, or different things, submit that. It goes in, you can also see other people's ideas, and you can vote them up. So if you see someone else's idea, vote on it. We use that as one of the really key sources of information about what people want, and that's how we build most of our stuff. And there's Zanda Academy as well, with setup guides and tips.

Very good. Well, you can contact us through all the normal ways, and you can jump on and book calls, whatever you like — we're always there to help. So thank you, first of all, Kim, thank you very much for joining again. It's lovely to get your perspective, and it's just a different take, working with all the people that you do. Thank you very much for sharing your experience and expertise and pointing out things that people often may overlook, and that can really enhance their practice. So thanks for coming back.

KIM:

Oh, you're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

[01:03:03] DAMIEN:

All right. Thank you. Bye, everyone.

KIM:

Bye.