7 Steps to Setting Up Practice Better: A Natural Health Practitioner's Guide

If you're a new graduate or a practitioner who's been putting off getting your systems in order, this one's for you. Practice Better is hands down my favorite practice management platform for natural health practitioners, but like anything worth using well, the initial setup can feel overwhelming if you don't know where to start.

I've set it up from scratch for my business, helped other practitioners do the same, and learned a lot along the way about what to prioritize, what to skip for now, and what will save you the most time in the long run. Here's what I wish someone had told me at the beginning.

First, a Quick Word on Why Practice Better

There are plenty of practice management platforms out there, and I’ve tried plenty of others with an open mind, but nothing else hit the mark. Practice Better was built specifically with holistic and functional health practitioners in mind, and it shows. It handles scheduling, secure messaging, intake forms, wellness plans, group programs, telehealth, payments, and client journaling all in one place. For a solo practitioner, that consolidation alone is worth it.

It also integrates beautifully with That Clean Life for meal planning and has a solid mobile app for clients, which matters more than you'd think when it comes to client compliance and engagement.

Step 1: Start With Your Profile and Branding

Before you touch anything else, get your profile looking professional. Upload a good headshot, write a clear bio that describes who you help and how, and make sure your time zone is correctly set - this one catches people out more than you'd expect, especially if you work across multiple time zones like I do with NZ and US clients.

Your booking page is often the first thing a potential client sees after your website, so treat it like a landing page. Your bio here should mirror your website messaging; consistent language across all your touchpoints builds trust and improves your AI search visibility.

Step 2: Connect Your Payment Processing

Getting paid should be seamless for you and for your clients, and setting this up properly from the start saves a surprising amount of friction later on. Practice Better integrates directly with Stripe, which is my preferred option and the most widely used among practitioners. Square is also available if you already use it elsewhere.

If you don't have a Stripe account yet, creating one takes about ten minutes. Once it's connected, you can attach pricing to each of your services, decide whether payment is collected at booking or after the consultation, and set up packages or payment plans if you offer them.

A few things I've learned are worth getting right from the beginning. Collecting payment at booking (rather than invoicing after) is one of the single biggest things you can do to reduce no-shows, and it removes the awkward end-of-consultation payment conversation entirely. Make sure your cancellation and refund policy is set up and attached to the booking process before your first client confirms an appointment. And if you work across different currencies as I do with NZ and US clients, spend a few minutes understanding how Stripe handles multi-currency transactions before you go live.

Before you launch, test the entire booking and payment flow yourself using a personal email address. It takes five minutes and means you'll know exactly what your clients experience, which is key.

Step 3: Set Up Your Services Before Anything Else

This is the foundation everything else sits on. Go to Services and create each of your consultation types. Some ideas include initial consults, follow-ups, discovery calls, lab reviews, and any packages you offer. Be specific with your service names and descriptions because these appear on your public booking page.

A few things to get right here:

• Set your consultation duration generously at first. You can always tighten it up later, but running over time in your early months is stressful and impacts your next client

• Set your buffer time between appointments. I recommend at least 10 minutes, 15 if you tend to run long or need time to make notes. Also consider adding in a post-session padder to complete your client plan while it is still fresh in your mind - I finally started doing this and this alone has increased my efficiency the most.

• Decide upfront whether you want clients to pay at booking or after the consultation. I strongly recommend payment at booking, it dramatically reduces no-shows. Ensuring your cancelation policy is visible before booking is key here.

Step 4: Build Your Intake Forms

This is where Practice Better really shines, and where most practitioners underinvest their time. A well-built intake form means you walk into every first consultation already knowing the key information, which saves time, impresses clients, and allows you to hit the ground running clinically.

At minimum you want:

• A comprehensive health history form

• A symptom questionnaire relevant to your scope

• A consent and terms of service agreement

• A food and lifestyle questionnaire if relevant to your practice

Build these once, build them well, and they will save you hundreds of hours over the life of your practice. If you'd rather not start from scratch, I have practitioner intake and follow-up forms available in my shop that are fully editable and ready to customise.

Attach your intake forms to your initial consultation service so they are automatically sent when a client books - this is just one of the time-saving automations in the platform.

Step 5: Set Up Your Automations

This is the step most practitioners skip in the early days and later wish they hadn't. Practice Better's automation features handle the repetitive communication that would otherwise eat your time and headspace.

At a minimum, set up:

• Booking confirmation emails These are automatically sent when a client books, confirming the date, time, and what to expect

• Importing completed forms into client files This is really important, as it makes key information easy to find

• Appointment reminders Via email and/or text before the consultation reduces no-shows significantly

• Client tags Organizes your clients to quickly find groups, prospective clients, etc.

• Create notes from the Practice Better Charting Assistant Automatically drop session summary notes into your client files

Each of these takes about 10 minutes to set up once and then runs on its own indefinitely. If you are manually sending reminder emails, this step will change your life.

Step 6: Create Your First Protocol Template

Protocols and Notes are where your clinical work lives in Practice Better and they are the most valuable things you can invest time in early on. Build a template with your standard sections: health goals, nutrition recommendations, supplement protocol, lifestyle recommendations, follow-up schedule - and save it. Every plan you write after that becomes faster because you're customizing rather than starting from scratch.

Practice Better allows you to save protocol templates for common presentations, which becomes extraordinarily useful as your practice grows. If you see a lot of fatigue, gut health, hormone, or mental health cases, having a starting template for each saves significant time without compromising the individualization that makes your work effective.

Step 7: Set Up Your Test Client

And last, but definitely not least, before you see your first real patient, create a test client in Practice Better using a personal email address (this needs to be different than the address you currently use to sign in to your PB account, but one you do get emails from).

Walk through the entire client experience yourself. Book an appointment, complete the intake form, receive the confirmation and reminder emails, join the telehealth room, and if you have payments connected, process a test transaction through Stripe. What you are looking for is anything that feels confusing, incomplete, or unprofessional from the client's perspective.

In my experience this process almost always surfaces something worth fixing. An automation that didn't trigger, a form that was harder to complete on mobile than expected, a confirmation email with placeholder text that never got updated, or a telehealth link that wasn't included where it should have been. These are small things, but they shape the first impression your practice makes..

What to Leave for Later

You don't need to set up everything on day one, and trying to will slow you down more than it helps. Practice Better has a lot to offer - group programs, packages, the client journal feature, food log integration, advanced reporting tools, and a growing list of third-party integrations. It’s all worth exploring eventually, just not yet.

The integrations I come back to most in clinical practice are That Clean Life for building and delivering meal plans directly to clients, Fullscript and Natural Dispensary for recommending and dispensing professional supplements, and Rupa Health and Evexia for functional tests and labs.

The rule I work by is simple: get your core clinical workflow running smoothly first (booking, intake, telehealth, payments, wellness plans and notes) and then add features and integrations one at a time as a clear clinical need arises. That approach keeps things manageable, means every tool you add actually gets used, and makes the whole system feel like it's working for you rather than the other way around.

A Note on Getting Help

Practice Better has genuinely good help documentation and a responsive support team. Their Facebook community is also active and full of practitioners sharing tips and workarounds, worth joining if you haven't already.

And if you'd rather have someone walk through the setup with you, answer your specific questions, and make sure everything is configured correctly for your particular practice, this is what I do! I also do complete set-ups if you need it done for you, and fast.

Most practitioners who work with me get their entire Practice Better setup completed in just a few focused sessions which means they go from overwhelmed to fully operational quickly, rather than across weeks of trial and error.

I work with natural health practitioners across New Zealand and the United States to set up and streamline their practices. From Practice Better and Squarespace to That Clean Life and beyond. If you'd like support getting your systems in order, book a free 15-minute discovery call or explore practitioner support options here.

Yours in health,

Camille Hoffman Registered Clinical Nutritionist, Naturopath & Medical Herbalist Fatigue & Gut Health Specialist | Practitioner Mentor Online ~ NZ & US