Skip to main content
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.

​
What you’re looking at

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: 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. Once a visit is closed, Check out is replaced by Check back in, and Cancel check-in is no longer offered on a visit that is already cancelled. Selecting Edit retitles it Edit Check-In and swaps the footer button to Save changes.

​
Check someone in

1

Open the Check In Patient sheet

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.Once one is chosen, the sheet shows that appointment’s Forms & documents list, with anything Required before visit at the top. To send them something for this visit, select Send to patient there — see Send from an appointment.
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. The person you pick is told — a A patient was assigned to you notice stays in their notification bell until they acknowledge it, and pops up on their screen if they are signed in — and the client appears on their My Patients list for that day, marked Checked in today. They can also see all their assigned visits under the Mine tab of the front desk board.
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.

​
After the check-in

Select View on the card to reopen the visit. From there you can:
  • Edit — change the items, assignment, room or reason, then Save changes. The toast reads Check-in updated. The Check-in time can only be changed while the client is still checked in; once they are checked out it is locked, with “Check the patient back in to change the check-in time.” A cancelled visit has no Edit — it reads Reopen to make changes.
  • Check out — close the visit. Check out is also on the card itself, so a routine departure takes one select.
  • Cancel check-in — remove a visit recorded in error. It asks for a Reason, kept with the visit’s audit trail; Cancel check-in stays disabled until you type one, and Keep check-in backs out. The toast reads Check-in cancelled. A checked-out visit cannot be cancelled directly — check them back in first.
A visit’s status only ever changes through these buttons, in this order: a checked-in client can be checked out or cancelled, and a checked-out or cancelled visit can only be checked back in. Anything else is refused with a message naming where the visit stands — for example “This visit is checked out — check the patient back in before cancelling”. Past visits stay on the chart’s History tab, where View check-in reopens the same sheet.

​
Put someone back on the board

Checked somebody out by mistake, or cancelled the wrong visit? Choose Check back in — on the card itself, or inside the visit. This works for today’s visits only (your practice’s time zone); an older visit reads “This visit is from an earlier day — check the patient in again instead.”, so a closed visit from last week never reappears on today’s board.
The arrival time is kept. Checking someone back in restores the original visit rather than starting a new one, so the time they actually arrived — and the wait built on it — is unchanged. Checking them in again from scratch would instead create a second visit with a fresh arrival time, and the board would count them twice.
This works for a visit that was checked out and for one that was cancelled. If two people press it at once, nothing breaks — a visit that is already on the board simply stays there.
A visit the practice closed automatically (see below) can still be checked back in on the day it was closed, even though that is not the day it arrived — the “today” rule is measured against the closing, not the arrival, for exactly that one case. After that day, check the client in again instead.

​
Automatic check-out

A visit nobody closes does not stay open forever. Every clinic checks out an unattended visit automatically after a fixed window — 24 hours by default — unless the client is still in care: an open triage, a consultation in progress, or a current admission all hold it open past the window. An automatically closed visit shows a Checked out automatically tag next to the Out: time instead of a staff name — nobody at your practice did this, so nobody is credited with it. It sends no notification, no email and no automation run. History and the visit record are unaffected either way.
On a solo or team practice, the window is fixed at 24 hours — there is no setting to change it. A hospital-structured clinic on the Enterprise plan can extend it under Facility settings.

​
When you or the practice are out of office

If the practice, or the clinician the client is here to see, is marked out of office at the moment you check someone in, the check-in stops and asks first. The message names who is away and when they are back — for example Dana Rivera is out of office “until Sep 22, 12:00 PM (America/New_York). Check this patient in anyway?” — and offers Check in anyway.
  • The clinician checked is the one on the chosen appointment, then the one under Assign to. A block for the whole practice is checked first.
  • The time checked is the time under Check-in time, in the practice’s time zone — not the appointment’s booked time.
  • Any staff member can confirm. Nothing is saved until you do.
  • A visit checked in this way carries a During Out of Office badge on the card, in the visit sheet and on the chart’s History.
  • Check back in asks the same question when the visit is returned to the board during a block, and offers Reopen anyway.
  • Edit, Check out and Cancel check-in never ask.
The client is at the desk, so nothing that normally happens at check-in is held back: the visit record can still be downloaded or emailed, and any automations your practice runs on check-in still run.

​
Your patient has arrived

Checking someone in tells the right clinician right away — an in-app notification and, if they haven’t turned it off, an email. It never names the client or says why they’re here: just an arrival time and a link to open the check-in board. It goes to:
  • the clinician on the appointment this visit is for, if there is one;
  • the client’s primary provider on their care team, in force right now — this is what still fires for a walk-in with no appointment, or one with nobody assigned;
  • whoever is covering either of them right now, if a coverage delegation is active.
Whoever recorded the check-in never gets their own notice, and a colleague who has never signed in is skipped. Reopening a visit with Check back in does not send it again — it’s the same arrival, not a new one.
This runs even when the check-in itself needed Check in anyway during an Out of Office block — the automations tied to a check-in are never held back by Out of Office.
Two switches decide who actually gets an email (the in-app bell always shows it to whoever it’s for):
  • Settings → Notifications → Patient — your practice’s switch for this category. Off, and nobody at the practice gets the email.
  • Their own avatar → Profile and Settings → Notifications → Product & account emails — each person’s own switch (see Choose which emails you get). Off, and that person alone stops getting emailed, without changing anyone else’s.

​
Issue the visit record

The reopened visit has Download PDF and Email patient. Emailing confirms with Visit record sent and names the address it went to.

​
Who can do this

Role decides whether the client’s chart opens. Nothing inside the check-in card is behind a separate permission. 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.
See Staff permissions.

​
Check it worked

  • The card on Overview reads Checked in with a live dot, and shows the time, the assigned staff member and the room.
  • After checking out, the card returns to Not checked in and the visit is on the History tab.
  • Email patient reports Visit record sent.

​
Common issues

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.
Add a reason, appointment, or at least one item. You have none of the three. Add any one.
The visit is stamped with the time under Check-in time, not the time you saved. Reopen the visit, select Edit and correct it while the client is still checked in. The time can’t be set in the future, can’t move before the day the visit started, and can’t move later than a triage already recorded for them — the message says which.
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.
The practice, or the clinician the visit is with, is marked out of office at the check-in time. The message says who and until when. Select Check in anyway if the visit is going ahead — it is marked During Out of Office — or change Check-in time or Assign to if the wrong one was chosen.
Check them back in — the same day. There is no confirmation on check-out precisely because it is reversible this way.
Outbound email is switched off for that workspace, so nothing was sent. Use Download PDF and send it yourself, and see Notification settings.

​
FAQ

No. Visit items describe what the visit is for; billing is raised separately on the Billing tab. See Invoices.
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.
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.
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.
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.