Data Isn’t the Problem. What We Do With It Is.
Most veterinary practices today are sitting on a lot of data.
Consults, invoices, reminders, compliance rates, clinical notes, team performance, client behaviour, it’s all there, quietly piling up inside the PMS.
And yet, when I speak to clinics, I hear the same thing again and again:
“We’ve got the reports… we’re just not sure what to do with them.”
That gap between having data and using it, is where most of the opportunity (and frustration) lives.
Reporting isn’t insight
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth.
Most PMS reporting is descriptive, not decision‑driven.
It tells you what happened:
Revenue last month
Number of consults
Reminder counts
Average transaction value
Useful? Yes.
Enough? Not even close.
What practices actually need is help answering questions like:
Where are we leaking revenue or care?
Which reminders genuinely change behaviour?
Which clients are drifting, and why?
What should we act on this week, not just review at the end of the month?
A report that doesn’t lead to action is just a spreadsheet with good intentions.
PMS data is only as good as its setup
This is the bit that rarely gets said out loud.
If your PMS isn’t configured intentionally, the data coming out of it will always be noisy, misleading, or both.
Common issues I see:
Inconsistent coding between clinicians
Reminders set up years ago and never reviewed
Automations firing… but not aligning to how the practice actually works
Dashboards that look impressive but answer nobody’s real questions
When this happens, practices either:
Stop trusting the data, or
Spend hours debating whether the numbers are “right”
Neither leads to better outcomes.
Reminders: small tweaks, massive impact
If there’s one area that’s consistently under-optimised, it’s reminders.
Not because practices don’t care, but because reminder systems quietly sprawl over time.
The difference between:
A reminder that gets ignored, and
A reminder that drives compliance
…often comes down to small things:
Timing
Language
Channel
Frequency
Who it sounds like it’s coming from
When reminders are aligned properly, they don’t just improve revenue, they improve patient outcomes and reduce awkward conversations at reception.
That’s a win worth chasing.
Good data reduces stress (not adds to it)
There’s a misconception that becoming “data-driven” means more work.
In reality, good data removes work:
Fewer gut-feel decisions
Fewer reactive fire-fights
Clearer priorities for the team
The goal isn’t to turn vets into analysts.
It’s to give practices confidence, confidence that the decisions they’re making are grounded in reality.
Where clinics often get stuck
From the outside, it usually looks like a tooling problem.
From the inside, it’s more often:
Where do we start?
Which metrics actually matter for us?
How do we make this stick once everyone gets busy again?
This is where reporting, reminders, and workflows stop being technical questions and start being leadership ones.
Customer lifetime value: the metric hiding in plain sight
There’s one concept that ties reporting, reminders, and outcomes together, and it’s still surprisingly underused in veterinary.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Not in a cold, corporate way. In a very practical, very human one.
At its simplest, CLV helps answer a powerful question:
What does a good, long‑term client relationship actually look like in our practice?
When you start viewing your data through that lens, things change.
You stop obsessing over single transactions and start paying attention to patterns:
How consistently clients come back
Whether pets stay on preventive care
Where drop‑off happens in the first 12–24 months
Which reminders genuinely keep pets under care
This is where PMS data becomes strategic.
Small improvements compound:
Better reminder compliance
Clearer communication
Smoother onboarding of new clients
None of these feel dramatic on their own, but together they materially increase lifetime value and improve standards of care.
And the best part?
Optimising for CLV usually aligns incentives across the whole practice:
Clients feel better supported
Teams have fewer difficult conversations
Practices build more predictable, sustainable revenue
That’s not about extracting more value from clients.
It’s about earning it over time.
My closing thought
Your PMS already knows more about your practice than you probably realise.
The opportunity isn’t always buying another system.
It’s learning how to ask better questions of the one you already have.
When reporting is clear, reminders are intentional, and data is trusted, something shifts:
Teams feel more in control
Outcomes improve
Decisions get easier
That’s not about chasing perfection.
That’s about building a practice that runs on purpose, not just momentum.
And that’s work worth doing.