If you're paying $90+ a month for Cliniko and only using it for bookings and notes, you're paying for half the platform. Here are the five features sitting in your account right now - and how to turn them on this week.
Most Aussie physio, chiro and OT practices we audit are paying somewhere between $90 and $190 a month for Cliniko. And using maybe 40 percent of what they’re paying for.
That’s not Cliniko’s fault. They’ve built one of the best practice management platforms in the world. The problem is that nobody onboards a busy practice owner through the automation features - so the bookings work, the notes work, the basics work, and the entire automation layer sits switched off.
Most of those features are free with your existing plan. They’re sitting in your account right now, waiting for someone to spend 30 minutes turning them on.
Here are the five worth doing this week.
1. Automated appointment reminders
Cliniko sends SMS and email reminders natively. No add-on, no extra cost, no third-party tool. Most practices have it switched on for emails and switched off for SMS - which is the wrong way around.
A typical no-show rate for an unreminded new-patient appointment is around 30 to 40 percent. With a properly configured reminder sequence, that drops to under 10 percent.
The sequence that works:
- Booking confirmation: Email immediately. Includes practice address, parking notes, what to bring.
- 48-hour reminder: SMS. Short and clear. “Hi {name}, this is a reminder of your appointment with {practitioner} at {time} on {date}. Reply Y to confirm or call us on {phone} to reschedule.”
- 2-hour reminder: SMS again. Same format, urgency cue.
Where to find it in Cliniko: Settings → Communications → Reminders. Toggle SMS on. Customise the templates with merge fields. Save.
SMS credits are charged per message but they’re a few cents each. The maths is simple - one prevented no-show pays for hundreds of reminders.
2. Recall sequences for lapsed patients
This is the feature most practice owners forget exists. Cliniko can automatically email patients who haven’t booked in for a set period - 8 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 months, whatever fits your clinical pattern.
The use cases:
- Chiro maintenance: A patient on a monthly maintenance plan who’s missed two months gets a “we noticed you haven’t been in - is everything OK?” email.
- Physio post-injury: A patient cleared from acute care 12 weeks ago gets a “time for a check-in?” email.
- Annual review: Any patient who hasn’t been in for 12 months gets a “annual review” prompt.
Where to find it in Cliniko: Settings → Communications → Recalls (or Patient Communication, depending on your plan). Set up the trigger, write the template once, leave it running.
What it actually does: re-activates a slice of your existing patient base that would otherwise quietly drift away. A practice with 800 active patients and a 12-month recall typically gets 3 to 6 re-bookings a month from this alone.
3. Email and SMS templates with merge fields
If your front-desk person types the same six emails every week, this is the fix.
Cliniko supports stored templates with merge fields - {first_name}, {practitioner}, {appointment_time}, etc. You write the template once, store it in the system, and any staff member can fire it off in two clicks with all the personal details auto-filled.
The templates worth building:
- New-patient welcome (sent immediately after first booking)
- Pre-appointment checklist (sent 48 hours before, for new patients only)
- Post-appointment summary (sent the same day, for physio or OT progress notes)
- Insurance/claim documentation (the same template every claim, always)
- Cancellation acknowledgement (so cancellations get a polite response, not silence)
Where to find it: Settings → Communications → Templates. Spend 30 minutes once. Save your front-desk person 30 minutes a week, forever.
4. Online booking with intake form attached
This one’s almost guaranteed cash on the table.
Cliniko has online booking built in. Most practices either don’t use it (so all bookings come through the phone), or use it but forget to attach the intake form (so the new patient still has to fill out paperwork in reception, eating into the appointment).
The fix:
- Turn on online booking for the appointment types where it makes sense (new patient consults, follow-ups, maintenance).
- Attach the intake form to the booking flow. Cliniko sends the patient a link to complete it before they arrive.
- Add a confirmation message explaining what to bring, where to park, payment expectations.
The result: new patients arrive with paperwork done. The practitioner has 5 extra minutes of clinical time. The front desk doesn’t get tied up with form-handling. The practice converts a higher percentage of enquiries because the booking flow is easier than calling.
Where to find it: Settings → Online Bookings.
5. Treatment-completion review requests
Cliniko doesn’t send Google review requests natively, but it does send post-appointment emails. Use one of them.
After a completed appointment - especially the third or fourth visit where the patient is clearly happy - send an email with a single direct link to your Google Business Profile review page.
Template:
Hi {first_name},
Hope you’re feeling better after today’s session.
If you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick Google review would mean a lot - it helps other locals find us when they’re looking for a {physio/chiro/OT}.
Here’s the direct link: [your-google-review-link]
Thanks, {practitioner_first_name}
One practice we audited went from 14 Google reviews to 62 in four months with this single automation. New-patient enquiries via Google Maps roughly doubled in the same period.
Where to set it up: Settings → Communications → Templates, then trigger it through a post-appointment recall or a manual send.
When you actually need automation outside Cliniko
The five features above cover most practices. When you need more, it’s usually one of these:
- Multi-step workflows that touch other systems. Cliniko books an appointment → Make scenario adds the patient to Mailerlite → Google Calendar gets a reminder set → Slack notifies the team. Cliniko alone can’t do this. Make or Zapier can.
- Conditional logic. If the patient is on a workers comp claim, send the WorkSafe documentation email. If they’re private, skip it. Cliniko handles simple recalls but not branching logic. Make handles this easily.
- Document generation. Auto-generating a Medicare or DVA invoice PDF from appointment data. Possible with a Make scenario + a doc-generation module.
These are second-stage automations. Don’t build them until the basics inside Cliniko are running.
Where to start
If you’d like a 30-minute audit of which Cliniko features are switched off in your account and what they’re worth in dollars-per-month, book a free AI Ops Audit.
We’ll walk through your current Cliniko setup, identify the two or three features sitting unused, and tell you straight whether you need to look outside Cliniko at all.
No pitch. No obligation. Just a clear picture of what you’re already paying for and not using.
