The complete guide to Practice Better automations

Practice Better's native automations are more capable than most people realize. We regularly look inside accounts that are using two or three of them when half a dozen would fit.

Here's the full list, what each one is great for, and a few things that make them work better.

You'll find them all under My Practice > Automations.

The native automations

Add and invite new clients automatically. New clients get their portal invitation without anyone sending it. A small one that removes a surprising amount of admin.

Confirm new bookings automatically. Removes the manual approval step so clients get certainty right away.

Confirm new packages automatically. Same idea for packages.

Send forms after a booking is confirmed. Your intake arrives the moment someone books, so it's done before the appointment rather than in the waiting room.

Send forms after a package is confirmed. The package version of the above.

Import completed form data into a client's file. The automation that makes form mappings run on their own. If you use form mappings, this should be on.

Add, update or remove client tags. Tags drive segmentation, reporting and program cohorts. Automating them keeps your client list organized without anyone maintaining it.

Task automations. Create tasks immediately or on a schedule before or after a session. Lovely for onboarding checklists and prep work.

Create notes from a recorded session. Available with the AI Charting Assistant add-on. Turns a recorded session into a draft note.

Google review requests after sessions. Asks for a review at a consistent moment rather than whenever someone remembers.

Birthday messages. A small human touch that runs forever once it's set up.

Custom payment plans. Handles installments and deposits automatically.

Archive and unregister clients after program enrollment ends. Keeps programs tidy once someone completes them.

How to make them work better

Build one automation per service when the forms differ. A single form automation applies all its selected forms to all its selected services. If your initial consult and your follow-up need different forms, give each its own automation.

Remember they aren't retroactive. An automation acts on what happens after you turn it on. For clients already enrolled in a program, invite them manually from the program's Enrollments tab.

On team accounts, enable shared automations per person. A shared automation has to be switched on for each team member before it runs for them.

Check your plan tier. Several of the features these automations act on require Professional or above, including recurring forms, group sessions and SMS reminders.

How they're designed

Practice Better's automations follow a clean pattern: a trigger happens, and an action follows.

That's what makes them so dependable. It also means they're not built for multi-step sequences. There's no wait step and no branching, so something like "wait three days, then follow up only if they haven't booked" sits outside what native automations do. For anything sequenced or conditional, practices add a separate operations layer alongside Practice Better.

For everything within that trigger-and-action pattern, though, it's worth turning on every automation that fits your practice. Most accounts have hours of weekly admin sitting in automations nobody's switched on yet.

Would rather hand this to someone?

Our Practice Better setup is $997 for one practitioner, one location and up to three programs, whether you're building from scratch or fixing what you have. Form mappings, automations, permissions, all of it, tested end to end.