Where clinic-wide defaults live
Most of what ClinyPal does for a specific patient, appointment, or invoice is controlled somewhere close to that record. General Settings (/settings/general-setting) is different — it's the small set of switches that apply to the whole clinic at once, before anything more specific has a chance to override them. If you've ever wondered where a behavior you see everywhere in the product actually gets configured, this page is usually the answer.
Rather than one long form, the page is split into four tabs — General, Calendar, Communication, and Security — each grouping settings that share a theme. That grouping matters more than it looks: a receptionist troubleshooting a scheduling quirk should be looking at Calendar, not scrolling past password-policy fields to find it. Knowing which tab a setting belongs to is often faster than knowing the setting's exact name.
- <strong>General</strong> — clinic identity and baseline behavior that everything else falls back to
- <strong>Calendar</strong> — how the scheduler looks and behaves before any practitioner- or location-level override
- <strong>Communication</strong> — the default channel and timing rules for automated patient messages
- <strong>Security</strong> — clinic-wide account-safety rules that apply to every staff member
- Why this page is a starting point, not the final word, on any of these topics
General tab: the baseline everything else falls back to
The General tab holds the settings that define your clinic as a whole — the defaults that apply everywhere unless something more specific steps in to override them. A useful way to think about it: if a setting could reasonably differ from one location to another, it probably doesn't belong here; it belongs on Business Information instead, at the location level. If it's true for the clinic no matter which location or practitioner you're looking at, General is where it lives.
This distinction trips people up most often when a multi-location clinic wants one location to behave differently from the rest. If you change a setting here and a specific location doesn't reflect it, check whether that location has its own override configured on its Business Information detail panel before assuming General Settings isn't working.
Calendar tab: shaping the scheduler before anyone touches it
The Calendar tab holds scheduling defaults — the settings that decide how the appointment calendar looks and behaves the moment a new practitioner or location is added, before anyone has gone in and customized it further. This covers things in the spirit of default slot sizing and which day the week is treated as starting on: choices that are tedious to set individually for every practitioner, so the clinic picks a sensible default once here instead.
Because these are defaults, not hard rules, they can still be overridden further down — a practitioner's own working-hours configuration on their Practitioner Settings page takes precedence over the clinic-wide default once it's set. Think of the Calendar tab as answering "what should a brand-new practitioner's schedule look like before anyone configures anything for them," not "what will every practitioner's schedule always look like."
Communication tab: the default channel and timing rules
The Communication tab holds your clinic's baseline for how and when ClinyPal talks to patients and staff automatically — the fallback behavior that applies before any message-specific or template-specific setting narrows it down further. It's the right place to look when you're asking a clinic-wide question like "by default, does our clinic prefer SMS or email for automated messages," rather than a question about one specific message's wording.
It's easy to confuse this tab with the individual message templates — confirmation, reminder, cancellation, and follow-up emails and texts each have their own dedicated settings page for wording and timing. Communication here is the default posture the clinic takes before any of those specifics apply, not a place to edit the wording of a particular message.
Security tab: clinic-wide account safety
The Security tab holds the account-safety rules that apply to every staff member equally — the kind of clinic-level policy in the spirit of session timeout behavior and password-strength requirements. These exist because a clinic handling patient health information has a real interest in setting a consistent security bar for its whole team, rather than leaving it to each individual staff member's judgment.
It's worth being clear about what this tab is not: it doesn't control what any individual person can see or do inside ClinyPal. That's governed by the role assigned to each staff member, which is a per-user setting, not a clinic-wide one.