Best Veterinary Software for Your Practice (In 2025)
Updated: Mar 20
The difference between a successful and an average veterinary clinic is management and the right softwares. With the veterinary software market expected to reach $1 billion by 2025, these tools are more important than ever. But with so many options picking the best is important because it can help your clinic streamline workflow, reduce errors, and improve client service. This guide will help you decide. Before we move ahead and discuss the key features, let’s find out why these softwares are important for any veterinary practice.
The Importance of Veterinary Software
Since COVID-19, pet ownership has been on the rise leading to a greater demand for veterinary services. As you can understand, efficiency is key for veterinary clinics to meet this growing demand and high client expectations.
Veterinary practice management software is designed to do exactly that. In simple words, it will help your practice in simplifying and automating routine tasks so veterinarians can focus more on caring for animals, managing staff and operations. There are many things which can be automated with these tools including digitizing records, scheduling appointments, tracking patients, and managing everything smoothly. The end result? Practice owners will have to spend less time on paperwork and more time on what matters to the clinic and this not only leads to time-saving and fewer errors but also improves patient care.
Important Features to Look for in Veterinary Practice Software
There are many software options with different features but some features are essential for your practice. Here are the key ones:
Appointment Scheduling and Calendar Management
You should look for software that offers a flexible calendar to book, reschedule, or cancel appointments easily. This is a common feature in the scheduling tools but your shortlisted software should include online booking for clients and automated appointment reminders via email or SMS, this can dramatically reduce no-shows. The calendar should handle multiple doctors and rooms and allow you to set appointment types and durations. A smart scheduling module may even tie into medical records to suggest follow-up visits or vaccine boosters when due.
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and SOAP Notes
An EMR feature lets you store all patient info like exam notes, diagnoses, treatments, lab results, and radiographs in one place. SOAP note templates are often included to standardize recordkeeping. A good EMR gives doctors a complete, up-to-date picture of a pet’s health history, enabling more informed decisions. It should also support attachments (photos, lab PDFs) and ideally integrate with diagnostic tools (more on integrations later). Ensure the software’s EMR is easy to use for charting during exams, as this will save time and reduce errors compared to shuffling paper charts.
Billing and Invoicing
The software should track payments and outstanding balances and support payment plans if needed. There are many modern systems that have built-in payment processing. Some of the features include the ability to swipe credit cards or accept digital wallets directly through the software. This will speed up checkout and link payments to invoices, ensuring accurate financial records. Automatic billing features can prevent undercharging or missed charges by pulling services from the medical record into the invoice automatically.
Client Communication Tools
Most of the top software for veterinary practices includes a suite of client communication features including automated reminders for appointments, vaccinations and medication refills via text or email. It can also include two-way texting to communicate with clients, email newsletters, or even a client portal/mobile app for owners. The software might allow sending visit summaries or lab results to clients at the click of a button. The best client communication tools ensure that critical information from follow-up care instructions to wellness tips is delivered timely to pet owners as it will help in building trust and will lead to client satisfaction.
Inventory Management
An inventory management module lets you log product quantities, set reorder thresholds, and update stock levels automatically as items are used or sold. This prevents the dreaded scenario of running out of critical medicines. Good veterinary software will track stock of medications, prevent over-ordering, and alert you when it’s time to reorder. Many systems can generate purchase orders or integrate with suppliers to streamline reorders (for example, integration with services like Vetcove for ordering supplies). This is important for your veterinary practice because by optimizing inventory you will save money and ensure that the clinic always has the necessary supplies on hand.
Reporting and Analytics
You should look for software that offers reporting on key performance indicators of your practice, like revenue, number of appointments, average transaction value, inventory turnover, etc. This information will help you make data-backed decisions about which services bring more revenue vs. where you need to optimize to ensure increased walk-ins, revenue, etc.
Other key Features
Other valuable features to consider include treatment plan estimates (so you can present costs to clients for approval), prescription management (to handle refills and pharmacy integration), boarding or kennel management if your clinic offers those services, and telemedicine capabilities (which became popular during the pandemic and continue to be useful for follow-ups or remote consultations). A well-rounded veterinary practice management platform should serve as an all-in-one solution for clinical, financial, and administrative tasks.
Each practice is unique, and your results will depend on where your biggest inefficiencies are. But virtually every clinic has some manual process or bottleneck that modern veterinary software can help fix. When you implement the right solution, you’ll likely wonder how you managed without it. The key is to identify those pain points (be it appointment chaos, billing errors, or poor follow-ups) and prioritize software features that target them. Then, once implemented, track your metrics whether it’s no-show rates, invoice turnaround time, or monthly revenue to truly measure the impact. You might be surprised at how much improvement you see in the first year.
Before we move ahead and conclude this topic, we would like to Introduce “Upbook”
Upbook is a front desk software designed to boost efficiency and revenue for healthcare practices. By transforming front desk operations, our tool can help practices increase appointments, improve customer service and drive growth and along with that our software can help you optimize phone systems, track performance, and enhance client engagement with tools like loyalty programs and call management.
Conclusion
For practice owners or managers, it is important to choose the best veterinary software for your practice. You must evaluate different software and understand the capabilities vs evaluate how your internal teams can use these tools.
In one of our webinars, we heard some practice owners decided to look for practice management software to manage the online booking because they saw on Google reviews that many of the customers were very happy about the care but extremely frustrated with offline appointment management, so they took the decision to invest in that first. The goal is to help you understand that every practice is unique and has specific challenges that you want these software solutions to solve. The best approach is to learn from others' feedback and book a free consulting call with them to understand things better.
If you are looking for more information about how DVMelite can help you scale your veterinary practice to the next level, just fill out the form below or If you are looking to understand more about how Upbook can help you streamline your operations, please click here.
