Marking arrivals and no-shows during the day is what makes follow-ups, no-show fees and the attendance reports accurate. It takes one click and is easy to forget.

Why the status matters

Every appointment starts as Scheduled. What you change it to during the day drives other parts of ClinyPal: a Completed visit appears in the uninvoiced and missing-notes lists until it's billed and written up, and creates the patient's next recall if the appointment type has a default recall; a No Show can carry a fee and feeds the cancellations report; Arrived is what lets you start the session and shows how long the patient has waited. So the status is worth keeping right, not tidying up at the end of the week.

Change it from the appointment

Select the appointment on the calendar. The buttons offered depend on where it is now:

  • Arrived (for a telehealth visit, Patient joined) when the patient is here. The card records the arrival time and shows how long they've waited.
  • Start session on an in-person appointment once the patient has arrived and gone in; the card then shows In session and how long it has run. A telehealth appointment has Join call instead, for the practitioner it's booked with, and Resend link; ending the call marks the visit completed. See Run a telehealth session.
  • Mark completed when the visit is over. From here you'd write the note and raise the invoice.
  • Did not arrive (Did not join for telehealth) marks a no-show. If the location has a no-show fee, it's charged now: taken from any deposit first, the rest invoiced to the patient, never more than the appointment's price, and the patient gets a short notice saying what happened to their money.
  • Charge no-show fee appears on an appointment the hourly sweep marked as a no-show, because that automatic mark charges nothing. Use it once you've checked the patient really didn't come.
An open appointment card for Amira Haddad showing the type, date, time and practitioner, with the buttons Arrived, Mark completed and Did not arrive, and links including History and Book another.
An appointment at 10:00 with the status buttons Arrived, Mark completed and Did not arrive.

In a group session, select the patient's name first; each person has their own status. For a canceled appointment the status can't be changed at all; see Cancel an appointment. If someone else changed the appointment while you had it open you're told it was changed by someone else and asked to refresh; open it again and you'll see their change.

The automatic no-show

An appointment still Scheduled three hours after it was due to end is marked No Show by ClinyPal, so a forgotten check-in doesn't sit as Scheduled forever. Nothing is charged for an automatic no-show, because the most common cause is a patient who came and was never checked in. Administrators and reception see these on the dashboard as No-show fees to review, covering the last 14 days at locations with a fee. Open each one and either select Charge no-show fee or set the status to what really happened.

Correct a wrong status

Statuses can be moved back as well as forward: an arrived patient can go back to Scheduled, a no-show to Arrived or Completed, a completed visit to Arrived or No Show. Correcting a no-show reverses its fee: the money goes back on the visit's invoice, any account credit created from the deposit is removed and the fee invoice is voided. Changes made by hand to that invoice since are kept. Every status change is listed under Change history on the appointment, with who made it and when.