Where the admin time goes in a veterinary practice, and how to win it back

Clinical notes are only one part of veterinary admin. Calls, reminders, billing, insurance claims, stock handling and repeated data entry all take staff time outside the consult room. Notes have their own guide: how much time a veterinary AI scribe saves.

This guide covers the non-clinical tasks. It shows you how to measure them in your own practice, work out which ones cost the most time, and tell a process problem from a software problem.

What can published evidence tell you about veterinary admin time?

Not as much as you might hope, particularly for UK practices.

A recent survey from the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe (FVE) focused specifically on administrative workload. Of the 75 vets who responded, 64% said their admin workload had doubled in recent years, and none reported a decrease. Prescribing and dispensing admin took the most time, with 41% spending four to six hours a week on it. Most respondents also said more than half of their admin could not be charged to clients.

The FVE is clear about the limits. The survey was shared through social media, collected no demographic data, and the report states that its findings cannot be generalised. Treat it as a sign of direction rather than a benchmark.

No published figure will tell you how many hours your own team spends on admin, or on which tasks. You need to measure that yourself.

How do you build an admin baseline for your practice?

Start by checking what your existing systems already record. Your phone platform may provide call volumes by hour or day. Your PIMS may hold data on reminders sent, invoices outstanding, insurance claims in progress and stock adjustments. Use whatever is already available before asking anyone to track tasks by hand.

For anything the systems cannot show, run a short manual tally using a handful of agreed categories, such as prescription query, booking change, claim query or stock delivery. The aim is to sample how often each task happens and who handles it. You are not trying to capture every minute.

A one to two week sample is a practical starting point. Choose a representative period, not a week affected by unusual leave, bank holidays or seasonal peaks.

Then bring the results together in a simple audit table:

Weekly hours is the number of times per week multiplied by the average minutes, divided by 60. Average minutes can be a reasonable estimate from the person who does the task. It does not need a stopwatch, but use the same method each time you repeat the audit. The risk column stops a rare but high-stakes task from disappearing beneath high-volume ones.

Which areas should the audit cover?

For a practice-level audit, it helps to split non-clinical admin into six areas. This is a working framework, not a fixed classification, so add or merge categories to suit your practice.

Calls and messages

Calls are easy to count if your phone platform logs them. Call duration may understate the burden, because calls can also interrupt another task. Messages by email, social media and text are worth logging separately, since they often sit in a different queue.

Reminders and recalls

When reminders are manual, the workload depends on the size of the list and how many channels or follow-up attempts you use. Phoning clients with overdue boosters and rebooking missed appointments belong here too. How to improve appointment compliance covers the client side.

Billing and unpaid accounts

This covers adding missed charges, correcting invoices and chasing unpaid accounts. Where the payment terminal and the PIMS are separate systems, reconciling them at the end of the day can also become a manual task.

Insurance claims

A claim needs the clinical history, the invoice and the vet’s section of the form, and insurers may come back with queries. Record queries separately from the first submission, because they can add substantial follow-up work.

Stock

Counting, reordering, receiving deliveries and checking expiry dates are steady background work. Where wholesaler and PIMS data do not integrate, deliveries may need duplicate entry or reconciliation. What good stock control looks like goes into the process in more detail.

Repeated data entry

New client registrations, referral histories and lab results are often typed in from another document. In Lupa’s internal data, registering a new patient by hand takes 2 minutes 23 seconds on average. Uploading the referral letter and letting the system read the details takes 29 seconds. That comparison illustrates the potential size of a repeated data-entry task, but it is vendor data and should not be treated as an industry benchmark.

How do you decide which admin to tackle first?

Rank tasks by their total burden, not by how annoying they feel. Frequency matters, but it is only one factor. Look at:

• how often the task happens
• how long it takes each time
• which role does it, and whether that person’s time is needed elsewhere
• how often it has to be redone or corrected
• how much it interrupts other work
• any financial or clinical risk if it goes wrong

Converting each task to weekly hours makes them comparable. A two-minute task done 40 times a day comes to about 6.7 staff hours across a five-day week. A six-hour reconciliation done once a month averages about 1.4 hours a week. The daily task looks small, but in this example it costs more time. A different pair of tasks could come out the other way, which is why the arithmetic is worth doing.

Rework and risk can move a task up the list even when its weekly hours are modest. A claim that goes back and forth with the insurer, or a stock error that affects a controlled drug register, deserves attention beyond its time cost.

Should you stop, simplify, reassign or automate?

Once the highest-burden tasks are clear, take them one at a time and work through four options.

Stop it. Some tasks continue because nobody has stopped them. A paper form that gets retyped into the PIMS, a reminder sent by text and then phoned through anyway, or a report nobody reads are all worth questioning.

Simplify it. Sometimes the task is needed but has more steps than it should. Fewer handoffs, a standard template or one agreed place to record something can cut the time without removing the task.

Reassign it. Check whether the task needs the level of clinical expertise of the person currently doing it. Routine admin can often move to another role, provided clinical escalation routes and professional responsibilities stay clear. Veterinary front desk management looks at how reception roles can be set up for this.

Automate it. Reminders from a set due date, low-stock alerts and pre-filled claim forms are common candidates. Tasks that need judgment, such as an overdue account for a client in difficulty, are better prepared by the system and finished by a person. Which tasks your PIMS should automate sets out the criteria in more detail.

Where does software help with admin, and where does it not?

Software helps most where admin means copying information from one place to another, or joining steps that sit in separate systems. A delivery that updates stock levels when it is received saves someone keying it in from the delivery note.

It helps much less when the process itself is unclear. If nobody has agreed when a booster reminder should go out, or who owns the unpaid accounts list, automating the task will not settle that. The system will apply whatever rule it was given.

Integration depth matters as much as the number of systems. Separate tools create extra work when data has to be copied, reconciled or checked between them. A specialist tool that integrates well can create less admin than a single system with awkward workflows.

How does Lupa handle some of these workflows?

In Lupa, several of these workflows sit in the same PIMS.

• Stock levels update when an invoice is completed, reorder thresholds flag low stock, and deliveries from integrated wholesalers can be received into the system.
• Insurance claims draw on policy, pet and invoice information already held in Lupa, with direct submission where the insurer integration supports it.
• The Billing dashboard brings unpaid invoices into one view and supports individual or bulk reminder emails.
• AI-powered calls can work through a selected list of clients and try to book a chosen appointment type. The AI confirms the appointment with the client on the call. Each attempt is logged with a recording, transcript and summary, so the team can review what was agreed and create or adjust the appointment in the diary.

These workflows still depend on accurate configuration, and on review wherever human judgment is needed. The full list is on the features page.

How do you know whether a change worked?

Run the same audit again once the change has had time to settle, using the same categories and a comparable period. Compare weekly hours, rework and interruptions for the tasks you changed.

Repeated tasks deserve attention because small savings add up when the same workflow happens dozens of times a week. Measuring before and after shows whether that saving is real in your practice.

If admin pressure is already affecting the team, how to reduce vet burnout looks at workload alongside rotas and support.

Book a demo to see how these workflows run in Lupa.