How to run a mobile physiotherapy practice on Movari

Let me start with the disclaimer, because you will find out in week one otherwise.

Movari has no concept of location. There is no postcode field, no travel-time calculation, no mileage log, no route planner, no zones. An appointment has a single optional free-text box called Location, and that is the entire extent of it.

If you want software that plans your route between visits, this is not it, and no amount of setup will make it that.

What follows is how to run a mobile practice on Movari anyway (which a good number of physios do) and where the rough edges genuinely are.

The core trick: appointment types are your pricing model

You can create as many appointment types as you like, and each one has its own name, duration and price. There is no cap and no tier where you get more of them.

That single fact is what makes variable pricing work. You are not looking for a "travel surcharge" feature, because there isn't one. You are naming the geography into the appointment type itself:

• Home visit: LS1 to LS6 · 60 min · £55
• Home visit: outside Leeds · 75 min · £70
• Home visit: first assessment, LS1 to LS6 · 90 min · £80

This works end to end. It shows correctly on your public booking page with the price on it. It fills in the charge automatically when you book the appointment. It snapshots onto the record so that changing your prices next year does not rewrite last year's invoices.

Two things to be clear about. The system has no idea what a zone is: "LS1 to LS6" is just letters in a name, and nothing validates that the patient picked the right one. And the price includes your travel, because there is no separate line item for it. Work out your rate per visit including the drive, and set that as the price.

Bake the driving into the duration

The second trick is the same idea applied to time.

If a visit is 45 minutes of treatment and 20 minutes of driving, do not create a 45-minute appointment type. Create a 65-minute one. Your diary then tells the truth about when you are actually free, and your online booking page stops offering people a slot you cannot physically reach.

For longer trips, or for a day where you are working one side of the city and want to protect the drive back, block the time out directly in the diary. Blocked time is excluded from online booking automatically.

It is cruder than a routing engine. It is also completely reliable, which a routing engine working from an address a patient typed in is often not.

Use Request mode, not Instant

This is the recommendation I would make most strongly, and it is where the honest limitation bites.

Movari offers three ways to run the book. You can turn online booking off entirely and book everything yourself. You can have patients request a slot that you then confirm. Or you can have Instant booking, where the patient books, pays, and it is confirmed automatically.

For a mobile practice, use Request. The reason is specific: a patient booking online cannot give you their address. There is no address field on the booking form. There is a free-text notes box, and that is all. On both self-serve paths the appointment's Location field is left empty regardless of what they type.

In Request mode this costs you almost nothing, because you are confirming each booking by hand anyway. You read their note, you check the postcode is one you actually cover at the price they picked, you put the address into the Location field, and you confirm. Ten seconds.

In Instant mode you would wake up to a confirmed, paid appointment for an address you do not have, at a price that may be wrong for the distance. Don't.

The address then does useful work

Once the address is in the Location field, it flows into the appointment confirmation email and the reminder email. So the patient gets their own address read back to them, which catches the wrong-flat-number problem before you are standing outside it.

It also sits on the appointment in your diary and on the calendar entry, so the morning check is one screen rather than a hunt through messages.

Keep the patient's usual address on their patient record too. That is where it belongs long term; the appointment Location is for where this visit is, which for some patients is their mother's house or their workplace.

What a working setup looks like

1. Two or three appointment types per geography band, priced to include travel.
2. Durations that include drive time, not just treatment time.
3. Online booking on, set to Request, so you approve each one.
4. Minimum notice set generously. The default is 24 hours, and for a mobile practice you may want more, because you cannot absorb a last-minute booking on the far side of town the way a clinic can.
5. Working hours set to when you are actually available to travel, which is usually narrower than clinic hours.
6. Blocked time for anything that eats the day: a long drive, a school run, a standing commitment.

Where you will still feel it

You will keep a map open. Movari will not sequence your day for you or tell you that Thursday's bookings zigzag across the city. You will see that yourself, looking at the diary, and fix it by moving appointments.

For a solo mobile physio doing four to seven visits a day, that is genuinely fine; you know your patch better than a routing algorithm does. If you are running a team of six across a county, you want dispatch software, and you should buy dispatch software.

Everything else (the notes, the exercise programmes, the payments, the invoicing, the phone line, the patient messages) works exactly the same whether you see people in a room or in their front room. That part was never the hard bit.