Free tool
Refill revenue leakage calculator
Work out how much heartworm, thyroid, and long term medication margin walks out of your clinic each year, and how much of it is realistically recoverable.
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Refill desk workload calculator
Put real hours on the refill requests your front desk handles every week, and see how much of that time is the phone rather than the pharmacy.
A refill request that arrives by phone is rarely one task. It is a chart lookup, a scroll through dispensing history, a check on whether the exam is current, a note left for whichever doctor is free, and then a callback when the owner does not answer. Nine minutes is a fair average in a busy small animal practice, and almost none of that time is spent counting tablets.
The same request arriving in a structured queue, already carrying the patient weight, the last exam date, and the remaining refills, is a very different task. This calculator sizes the difference across a year using your own request volume, your own minute estimates, and your own front desk pay rate.
Your result
Front desk hours on refills each week
7.2
The weekly cost of your current mix of phoned in and structured requests.
Doctor hours spent authorizing each year
104.0
Authorization time alone, which is the part that cannot be delegated away.
Front desk hours freed if every request arrived queued
218.4
The annual difference between an interruption and a structured request.
Front desk pay reclaimed each year
$4,586
Those hours costed at your own front desk rate, before any revenue effect.
Hours freed are hours moved to other work such as booking rechecks, not automatic payroll savings.
Timing your own refill calls for one week
The defaults are reasonable, but your own numbers are far more persuasive in a practice meeting. Put a tally sheet at the front desk for five working days with three columns: how the request arrived, minutes on the first handling, and whether a callback was needed. Do not time anything else. One week is enough to see the pattern.
Most clinics that run this exercise find two things. The first is that request volume is higher than anyone guessed, because counter requests and technician notes were never counted. The second is that the callback, not the original call, is where the minutes disappear, since the owner who called at nine is unreachable at two.
What the doctor hours figure is really telling you
Two minutes per authorization sounds trivial until it is annualized. At sixty requests a week that is a hundred hours of veterinarian time a year, which is roughly a fortnight of clinical capacity spent on decisions that mostly amount to yes. The number is not an argument for skipping the authorization, which is a legal step tied to your VCPR and your state board expectations.
It is an argument for what surrounds the decision. If the doctor opens the request and sees the weight, the last exam date, the last relevant lab, and how many refills remain on the original order, two minutes is enough. If they have to open the chart and reconstruct all of that, the same decision takes five and it happens between appointments when attention is thinnest.
Questions about this calculator
Should we include technician time in the front desk minutes?
Include whoever actually handles the request first. In many small animal clinics that is a receptionist, but in others a technician fields refills between appointments. Use the pay rate that matches whoever does the work.
Why fifty two weeks rather than an allowance for closures?
It keeps the arithmetic transparent and slightly conservative in the other direction, since refill demand does not stop during a holiday week. If your clinic closes for a stretch, reduce your weekly request count instead.
Are the freed hours real savings?
They are recovered capacity rather than cash. Most practice managers reinvest them into booking overdue rechecks and chasing lapsed heartworm patients, which is where the actual revenue effect shows up in the following quarter.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The refill authorization checklist
One page your front desk can work through for every refill request, from the moment the owner calls to the moment the next due date is on the calendar.
Test that result against your own dispensing history
The figure above is only as good as the inputs you typed over the defaults. Bring it to a live walkthrough and we will set it beside your real doses sold, your recheck intervals, and the refill requests your front desk fielded last week. If your own arithmetic says the gap is too small to chase, we will tell you that.