A guided path, not a settings dump
The moment you verify your email after creating your ClinyPal account, you're dropped straight into a short, guided setup wizard rather than an empty Dashboard or a long settings form. The wizard exists because a brand-new clinic in ClinyPal genuinely has nothing configured yet — no location, no working hours, no staff besides you — and asking you to discover all of that yourself through the main Settings menu would be a rough first impression.
Instead, the wizard asks for a small number of things, in a fixed order, each one unlocking the next: your clinic's name and the industry it operates in, your first physical location, and your first invited team member. It's designed to take a few minutes, not an afternoon — anything more detailed (appointment types, tax rates, message templates, and so on) is deliberately left for later, reachable from Settings once you're actually using the product.
- Confirm or adjust your clinic's name and choose your specialty or industry template
- Add your first location, including its address and time zone
- See how your chosen specialty template pre-fills a starting set of appointment types
- Add your first practitioner or staff member
- Land on your Dashboard for the first time, with an onboarding checklist for everything the wizard didn't cover
Walking through the wizard
The steps below run in order, and each one has to be completed before the wizard lets you move to the next — this genuinely is a sequential process, unlike most of the rest of ClinyPal where you're free to jump between sections as you please.
Confirm your clinic name
The wizard opens with the clinic name you entered during signup, already filled in and editable. This is your last easy chance to fix a typo before the name starts appearing on patient-facing material, so double-check spelling and capitalization here rather than waiting to correct it later from Settings.
Choose a specialty or industry template
Next, you're asked what kind of practice you run — options include general medical practice, dental, physiotherapy, chiropractic, allied health, and a generic "other" option for anything that doesn't fit neatly. This choice isn't cosmetic: it determines the starter set of appointment types, and the vocabulary used elsewhere in ClinyPal (for example "patients" versus a more clinic-specific term), that your account launches with.
Add your first location
Enter your clinic's physical address and select its time zone. If you operate from more than one site, you only add the first one here — additional locations are added later from Settings, once you're past onboarding. The time zone you pick determines how every appointment time, reminder, and report date is displayed for this location, so get this right now rather than after appointments have already been booked against it.
Review the appointment types your template created
Based on the specialty you chose, ClinyPal pre-creates a small starter list of appointment types (for example, "New Patient Consultation" and "Follow-up" for a general medical template). You can accept these as-is and refine them later, or make quick adjustments to names and durations right here before continuing.
Add your first practitioner or staff member
Add yourself, or another staff member, as the clinic's first practitioner. If you're not personally the one delivering care (for example, you're setting this up as a practice manager), you can add the practicing clinician here directly instead of adding yourself. This step overlaps deliberately with the invite flow covered in <a href="#">Inviting Your Team</a> — this is only meant to get one working staff record in place so the scheduler isn't completely empty on your first visit to it; inviting the rest of your team properly comes next.
Finish and land on your Dashboard
The wizard's final screen confirms setup is complete and hands you off to your <a href="/getting-started/your-dashboard/">Dashboard</a> — the same home screen you'll see every time you sign in from now on, except this first time it's carrying an onboarding checklist covering everything the wizard intentionally skipped.
Getting the location right the first time
Of everything the wizard asks for, the location's time zone is the field most worth slowing down for. Every appointment, reminder send time, and report date range in ClinyPal is calculated relative to a location's time zone — get it wrong and appointment reminders can appear to go out at odd hours, or a day's schedule can look subtly shifted compared to what your front desk expects, without any obvious error message pointing at the cause.
If your clinic address is entered correctly, ClinyPal will usually suggest the matching time zone automatically — but it's shown as an editable field rather than a locked one, since some regions span more than one time zone or observe daylight saving differently than a straightforward address lookup would assume. Confirm it explicitly rather than assuming the suggestion is always right.
What your specialty template actually changes
The specialty template you pick during the wizard is a starting point, not a locked configuration — nothing about your choice here restricts what you can do with ClinyPal afterward. Its purpose is purely to save you from configuring appointment types and terminology completely from scratch.
| Template | Starter appointment types you'll see | Typical first adjustment clinics make |
|---|---|---|
| General medical practice | New Patient Consultation, Follow-up, Annual Check-up | Splitting "Follow-up" into shorter and longer variants once real booking patterns emerge. |
| Dental | New Patient Exam, Hygiene/Cleaning, Restorative Visit | Adding procedure-specific types (e.g. "Crown Fitting") as the practice's service list grows. |
| Physiotherapy / allied health | Initial Assessment, Standard Treatment Session, Review | Adjusting default session duration to match typical treatment length. |
| Chiropractic | New Patient Consultation, Adjustment | Adding a shorter "Quick Adjustment" type for established patients. |
| Other / general | Consultation, Follow-up | Renaming both to match clinic-specific terminology, since this template makes the fewest assumptions. |
Whichever template you choose, every appointment type it creates can be renamed, retimed, recolored, or deleted afterward, and you're free to add entirely new ones. The full reference for that configuration screen — including how appointment type choices ripple into the scheduler and online booking — lives in Appointment Types (Settings), once you're ready to go beyond what the wizard set up for you.
Arriving on your Dashboard
Finishing the wizard hands you off to your Dashboard — the same screen you'll land on every time you sign in going forward. The first time you see it, though, it looks a little different from how it will a few weeks in: because the wizard intentionally kept its scope narrow, the Dashboard's onboarding checklist is there to guide you through everything that still needs attention before your clinic is fully operational.
That typically includes inviting the rest of your team, configuring online booking if you intend to offer it, setting up message templates so confirmations and reminders read the way you want, and adding your services or products if you bill for anything beyond appointments. None of this is required before you can start booking your first real appointment — it's simply surfaced so nothing important gets forgotten in the first busy week.