Help centre
Setting up your clinic
The first hour — clinic details, services, practitioners, rooms and hours — in the order that makes each step possible.
Orla has a setup guide built into the console, and it is worth explaining how it differs from the checklist most software gives you: it answers each step from your actual data, not from a box you ticked. "Create your first service" is done when a service exists, and it goes back to not-done if you delete it. Nobody can mark the clinic ready by ticking things.
The order, and why it is that order
Each step makes the next one possible, so doing them out of order means going back.
1. Your clinic details. Name, address, timezone. The timezone is not cosmetic: every working hour, every slot and every reminder is calculated in it, and getting it right at the start avoids re-checking a diary later.
2. Your logo. It goes on the booking page, the patient portal and the documents you send out. A booking page carrying your logo is a page patients trust; one carrying ours is a page they wonder about.
3. Your services. What you offer, how long each takes, what it costs, and whether it needs a particular kind of room. The duration matters more than people expect — Orla offers slots the length of the actual service rather than a fixed grid, so a 20-minute review and a 60-minute assessment do not pretend to be the same shape.
If a service needs setting-up or clearing-down time, give it a buffer here. Orla reserves that around the appointment and will not offer a slot where the buffer would spill outside working hours.
4. Your practitioners. Each one gets their own diary, their own hours and their own colour in the week view. Put their CORU registration number on the record while you are here — it is what makes a receipt claimable for the patient later, and it is far easier to add now than to chase when somebody needs a receipt.
5. Your rooms and equipment, if that matters to you. Adding them means two appointments can never be offered the same room at the same time. If your clinic is one room and one practitioner, skip it.
6. Working hours, per practitioner, including the days that differ. Set the pattern here; one-off changes — a bank holiday, a late clinic on a Thursday — are overrides on the date rather than edits to the pattern, so the pattern stays true.
7. Your booking page. Turn it on when the six above are right. It reads the same availability engine your diary reads, so anything wrong upstream shows up here as a patient being offered a time that does not exist.
Before you let patients in
Three settings worth a deliberate decision rather than the default:
- Minimum notice — how close to an appointment somebody may book online.
- Cancellation and reschedule cut-offs, and whether a fee applies after them.
- Quiet hours — when Orla will not text your patients. The default is 21:00 to 08:00.
Then the waitlist
Once the booking page is live, switch on joining the waitlist from it. A patient who searched, found nothing that suited, and left is a patient you never knew about. A patient who joined the waitlist is one the next cancellation goes to automatically.
Moving from another system?
Do the setup above first, then bring your patients across — see moving from Cliniko, Zanda or Pabau. Importing into a clinic with no services and no practitioners means mapping appointments onto things that do not exist yet.