Courtney
Education Specialist
What’s your biggest headache in controlled drug management? Almost every customer before moving to the VetSnap digital logbook said: reconciling paper logs.
It’s easy to see why. Reconciliation of paper logs often turns into a messy, frustrating, and time-consuming “chore”.
And it’s more than just annoying, it also adds up hours of work every week. Because of this, many vets reconcile only when it’s necessary or at the end of a container. Some teams reconcile only when they notice an obvious discrepancy or do the physical inventory count, often just once a year.
As a result, they miss discrepancies that are harder to spot and then to resolve. And when it comes to controlled substances, even small mistakes can put your compliance at risk. It is especially nerve-wracking during the DEA inspection.
How Much Time Does It Take to Reconcile Paper Logs?
What paper logs lack, even having the most scrupulous organization, is a reliable audit trail. So, every time reconciliation is delayed, you’ll need to literally turn back in time and manually gather “all the dots”. You may need to track the controlled drug movements over a specific period and compare your entries against your PIMS invoices.
Such manual tracking is a tedious job which is often prone to issues like:
- Missed log entries or charges
- Mismatched items
- Mathematical errors
- Duplicate entries
- Unexplained waste
- Illegible handwriting, spelling errors
Any of them can lead to a discrepancy, distort inventory balance, affect all your physical counts, make you recalculate or update the total balance, and even fully review source logs.
Many of our customers mentioned during demos that fixing such issues before VetSnap was extremely frustrating and time-consuming. They had to dig through different paper records with a separate logbook for each drug or pull “who-got” and inventory usage reports from their PIMS.
This often meant staying late after the shift or spending weekends filling the gaps in the logs. Even for smaller practices, investigating what’s missing in records can be a challenge while patients are already waiting in the hall.
Unfortunately, manual reconciliation took time from what matters the most — their families, proper sleep and rest.
At VetSnap, we listen closely to our customers as every story and struggle matters.
Here’s what Karla, an RVT at a veterinary hospital in North Carolina, shared with us:
“For me personally, VetSnap has been a huge time-saver. Before, if we had to figure out why a vial was missing a few milliliters of a controlled drug or find the reason for waste, it would turn into extra hours at work and sometimes even half of our weekends spent ‘playing detectives’. What I hated most was matching all the PIMS invoices with our mess of logs across different binders…”
Marcy, an LVT, from a clinic in New Hampshire, also said:
“We often postponed reconciliation until the end of the week. During the week, we just had too much on our plate. You know, too many patients, not enough staff. What we like most about VetSnap is that it reconciles every single day and shows us exactly what should be fixed, instead of piling it all up for the weekend.”
Let’s look closer at how VetSnap auto-reconciliation saves the day of veterinarians across the country.
How VetSnap Helps Reconcile Logs Faster
The VetSnap integrated digital logbook takes your burden of both logging and reconciliation. The system automatically compares and matches your logs with the inventory levels, tracing back discrepancies, and double-checking calculations.
Every night, VetSnap does the heavy lifting for you. The system cross-references your controlled substances logs against your PIMS invoices, ensuring that everything is accurate and up-to-date. VetSnap is integrated with the most popular PIMS and adds new integrations to help customers reconcile effortlessly.
By the time you start a new day, VetSnap has already reviewed all the records, flagged errors, and matched logs with invoices.
All this is available for the VetSnap customers in the Reconcile Tab. Every entry you create gets to the Pending Logs and will be automatically reconciled overnight.
Even if you were so busy during the day that you forgot to create a log, the reconciliation catches it by integrating with your PIMS and next morning, reminds you to add this entry based on the invoice details.
VetSnap compares the slightest details of your logbook entry against the invoice record from PIMS. If there are any mismatches or an invoice/log is missing, you’ll be notified about that.
Any errors flagged during the auto-reconciliation process will be in the section Fix needed. When you open the entry, you can see that the system guides you through needed corrections and lets you edit the entry.
All changes are timestamped and any fixes are visible through the history of changes with the name of a person who made them.
If everything is perfectly matching and your logs of the day have no issues to fix, they will be auto-archived.
We asked customers what they think about VetSnap now and how their reconciliation and logging processes improved. Look what they answered:
Caitlin, a Practice Manager at a veterinary hospital in Upstate NY, noticed substantial changes: “Now, if anything is off, any little bit, it’s immediately evident in VetSnap. I honestly think that there are errors that I can catch now using VetSnap that I wouldn’t have caught even with all my redundancy with the practice management software, the spreadsheet, and the paper logs. I used to have to bring these paper logs home on the weekends and spend hours filling them out. Now, we’re much better and faster. I’m logging in seconds and VetSnap reconciles it the same dayC
Caitlin, an office manager at an emergency hospital in Michigan, shares: “Now, we have a streamlined logging process and higher efficiency without errors and problems with reconciliation. Having VetSnap integrated with our PMS ezyVet, we’ve resolved issues with missed logs and have clear drug tracking. For our busy emergency hospital, reconciling logs is no longer a challenge. Doctors and technicians don’t have to enter all that information manually and can freely practice medicine.”
To Wrap Up
Reconciliation of records kept on paper or spreadsheets can seriously hold your clinic back. Not only does manual reconciliation compromise your compliance but it also consumes too much time and costs to cover extra hours of work.
VetSnap, a digital logbook with PIMS integrations and auto-reconciliation, can do the job and free up a couple of hours for patient care or your personal life.
Learn more about how VetSnap can simplify your controlled substances management — book a demo with our team.