Record an arrival, attach the services and labs the visit is for, then check the client out and issue the visit record.
Checking someone in records that they arrived, what they came for and who they are seeing. Checking them out closes the visit and lets you issue a visit record they can keep.
Check-in happens from the client’s own chart — a solo or team practice has no separate front-desk board, so there is nothing to keep in sync.The card sits on the chart’s Overview tab and has two states:
State
What the card shows
Not checked in
”Check the client in for their visit”, and a Check in button
Checked in
A pulsing green dot, the arrival time, the assigned staff member and the room, with View and Check out
Check in opens a sheet titled Check In Patient, with the client’s name underneath. Reopening an existing visit with View opens the same sheet titled Patient Check-In, in read-only form: a Checked in or Checked out badge, “by” whoever recorded it, the In: and Out: times, the Visit items, and the buttons Edit, Check out, Download PDF, Email patient and Cancel check-in. Selecting Edit retitles it Edit Check-In and swaps the footer button to Save changes.
Select Check in. The sheet opens with the current time already chosen.
2
Confirm the arrival time
Under Check-in time, change it if they arrived earlier than you got to the screen. This is the time the visit is recorded against, not the time you saved.
3
Attach the appointment, if there is one
Choose it under Appointment (optional) — the field only appears when the client has appointments. Leave it on No appointment for a walk-in.
4
Say what the visit is for
Visit items — services, labs, custom has two pickers, + Add service and + Add lab test, and a free-text box (“Custom item…”) with its own Add button. Add as many as the visit needs.
5
Assign the visit
Pick the clinician or team member under Assign to, or leave it on Unassigned and assign later.
6
Enter the reason and the room
Reason for visit is free text — the placeholder suggests “e.g. Follow-up”. Location / room (“e.g. Room 3”) is for practices that track rooms, and Notes (optional) takes “Anything the care team should know…”.
7
Select Check in
The toast names the client — … checked in — and the card on Overview turns green.
The sheet refuses to save an empty visit: Add a reason, appointment, or at least one item. Any one of the three satisfies it; a check-in with none of them tells the clinician nothing.
Role decides whether the client’s chart opens. Nothing inside the check-in card is behind a separate permission.
Action
Who can do it by default
Governed by
Check a client in
Any staff member who can open that chart
The access tier chosen when they were invited
Edit a check-in
Any staff member who can open that chart
Role
Check out, or cancel a check-in
Any staff member who can open that chart
Role
Download or email the visit record
Any staff member who can open that chart
Role
On Solo and Team the levers are the role somebody holds and the access tier you gave them — Basic and Billing cover their own clients only, Full client list and Entire practice cover everybody. There is no per-role navigation editor on these plans, and the Permissions sheet (“What they may do on the pages their role already opens”) carries only clinical-authority acts such as signing and countersigning, none of which apply here.Two behaviours surprise people:
Enforcement is opt-in, per person. A colleague never saved in the permissions sheet is unrestricted. The sheet warns “Saving starts enforcing”.
A denied action is recorded; an allowed one is not. Hiding a module from somebody’s sidebar is a convenience, not a security boundary.
The chart is still loading the client record. That is deliberate — a check-in recorded before the chart knows whose it is would be attached to nobody. Give it a moment; if it never enables, reopen the chart from Clients.
The sheet will not save
Add a reason, appointment, or at least one item. You have none of the three. Add any one.
The arrival time is wrong
The visit is stamped with the time under Check-in time, not the time you saved. Reopen the visit, select Edit and correct it.
There is no Appointment field in the sheet
That field only renders when the client has appointments on file. Without one, record the visit as a walk-in — the reason or a visit item is enough.
Checked out by mistake
Check them back in. There is no confirmation on check-out precisely because it is reversible this way.
Email prepared (outbound disabled)
Outbound email is switched off for that workspace, so nothing was sent. Use Download PDF and send it yourself, and see Notification settings.
No. Visit items describe what the visit is for; billing is raised separately on the Billing tab. See Invoices.
Do I have to book an appointment before checking someone in?
No. Leave Appointment (optional) on No appointment and the visit records as a walk-in. Attaching one links the two so the calendar and the chart agree.
What is the difference between cancelling and checking out?
Check out closes a visit that happened. Cancel check-in removes one that should never have been recorded. Use cancel only for mistakes — a client who arrived and left is checked out.
Can I check two people in at once?
Not from one sheet. Each check-in belongs to one client’s chart, so a couple or a family is checked in one at a time.
What does the client get in the visit record?
The arrival and departure times, who they saw, the room, the reason and the visit items — a receipt of attendance, not a clinical note. Nothing you wrote in Notes (optional) or in a clinical note is on it.