It's the first Monday after month-end, 7:20 p.m. The owner DVM finishes the last callback and opens three tabs. The PIMS month-end report says revenue rose 4%. The ad agency's PDF says impressions climbed 30%. The phone vendor's dashboard holds a bar chart nobody has opened since spring.
None of the three answers what the owner wants to know: are more families coming in, and are the ones already on the books coming back?
These are the veterinary practice KPIs we'd show an owner each month at a one- to five-vet practice. There are eight. Each takes minutes to pull, and each points at something the front desk or the marketing can change.
Why monthly, and why only eight
Revenue is the result; these eight explain it. Weekly numbers swing too much at a small practice, where one DVM's week off moves everything. A quarterly look comes too late to catch a reminder run that broke in its first week.
Margins leave little room for guessing. AVMA's 2026 economic figures put the median companion-animal practice at about $595,000 gross per full-time vet, down in 2025. Expenses take about 70% of that. A month of empty exam rooms shows up fast at that margin.
Compare each number with last month and with the same month last year. Seasons matter: spring brings puppy and kitten visits, and February fills with dental bookings.
Where each number lives
Part of the reason owners skip this is that the eight sit in four or five places. New clients, transactions and lapsed clients come from the PIMS. Calls live with the phone vendor, reviews on the Google listing, and ad spend in Google Ads and Meta. Reminder and no-show counts may sit in the PIMS or in a separate reminder service.
Give one person the job of gathering them, usually the practice manager, and give them a fixed day to do it. A number that needs four logins gets skipped by March.
Number 1 of 8 New clients and their cost
Count the households seen for the first time this month, then split them by where they came from: Google Maps, the website, an ad, a referral, a walk-in. Your PIMS can count them. The source needs a question at booking, or call tracking that gives every ad and listing a line of its own.
Then divide outside marketing spend by the new clients it brought in. Mature practices spend 0.5 to 1% of gross on outside marketing, according to dvm360's write-up of WTA and AAHA benchmarks. An average practice took in about $1.5 million in 2024, per AVMA, so that range comes to $625 to $1,250 monthly. If new clients fall while spend holds steady, the leak is usually the phones or the Google listing, not the ad.
Number 2 of 8 Calls answered
Pull the month's calls by hour: answered live, missed, and missed with no callback inside an hour. Today's Veterinary Business puts unanswered calls at 25 to 30% for clinics of small and mid size, and says 85% of those callers don't call again.
Look hardest at 8 to 9 a.m., noon to 1:30 and the final hour before close. If one hour loses a quarter of its calls, covering that hour will do more than another ad. Count, too, how many missed callers got a text back within five minutes. That reply is often what keeps the visit.
Number 3 of 8 No-show rate
Divide no-shows by every booked appointment for the month. The average sits near 11%, an AAHA figure reported by Veterinary Practice News. Track new clients and online bookings on their own lines, because they tend to run higher.
When the rate climbs, check the reminders first. Did two go out, from your number, each with a way to reschedule? After that, weigh a deposit for new clients and online bookings. Fees, deposits and the desk's wording are in our post on no-show policies.
Number 4 of 8 Forward booking
Forward booking is the share of visits that leave with the next appointment already on the schedule. At checkout, count the visits with a future appointment booked and divide by all visits. Split it by visit type: rechecks, wellness exams and puppy or kitten series matter most, and a one-off sick visit may need nothing.
A falling number usually means checkout is rushed. Give the CSR one line to say, such as "Should we hold a Tuesday in March for Luna's next visit?" Then let a reminder text catch anyone who says they'll call later.
Number 5 of 8 Reminder compliance
Of the pets that came due for a vaccine or wellness visit this month, how many booked within 30 or 60 days of the due date? One owner on Reddit described sending about 500 reminders a week at roughly 65% compliance. By that owner's math, a single month with them switched off meant over 1,300 missed appointments.
That month isn't hypothetical. An eight-doctor practice in New England posted that its vendor turned its health-care reminders off for over a month, without warning. A number you read every month can't stay broken for six weeks unnoticed.
Households with several pets need their own look. A reminder for one dog and silence about the other two is two visits lost. Timing and wording are covered in our guide to reminders pet parents act on.
Number 6 of 8 Lapsed clients
Count the clients whose pets haven't been seen in 18 months or more. Many practices draw the line there; what matters is picking one line and keeping it. Each month, note how many crossed it and how many came back after a win-back text.
When lapsed clients rise while new clients hold steady, the practice is replacing families instead of growing. Win-back texts that name the pet and offer a booking link bring back visits for the price of a text.
Number 7 of 8 Average client transaction
Divide the month's revenue by the number of invoices. There's no reliable public benchmark for 2025, so your own trend is the yardstick. If it slips while visits hold, look at what families are turning down at checkout, and whether estimates get walked through before the exam ends.
Read it beside the visit count. A higher average on fewer visits can hide a practice that's shrinking.
Number 8 of 8 Google reviews
Note three figures each month: new reviews, the average rating and how many reviews have a reply. A pet parent choosing between three practices on Maps reads all three. If new reviews dry up, someone stopped asking after visits. If replies lag, the next unhappy post sits unanswered where every searcher sees it first.
The monthly meeting
Pick a fixed day, like the first Tuesday. The practice manager puts all eight on one sheet by then, and the owner reads it before you sit down. Circle anything that moved more than a few points against last month or last year. Choose one to work on before the next meeting, and leave the rest alone until then.
How CompanionBooked helps
Reporting gathers most of these on one dashboard: calls by hour and by source, bookings, confirmations, no-shows, reminders, reviews, payments and ad results. Every ad, and your Google listing, gets a separate call-tracking line. New clients are traced to whatever brought them in, and the cost per new client is there without a spreadsheet.
Once a month our team writes up the figures in plain English. Your account manager then walks the owner and manager through them on a strategy call. Since the phones, texts, booking and reminders run through us, the figures come from the work itself rather than from four vendors' exports.
All three come in one monthly plan, priced on a 30-minute call. Month to month, no setup fee, live in 14 days.
CompanionBooked
CompanionBooked sets up phones, online booking and reminders at US veterinary practices, then sends each one a short written recap of the month's figures. These eight numbers open that recap.
