Veterinary clinic management software: pharmacy stock, reminders, margins

Veterinary medicine is one of the few care professions with no mandatory approved component: no carte Vitale, no Ségur track. Three official channels remain, alongside a software market charging per user and consultation volume. Here is what that leaves to build.

Vetup, the only French veterinary publisher displaying a complete price list, charges €29 excluding tax per month for one veterinarian and one veterinary assistant, capped at 100 consultations or sales monthly, plus mandatory hosting at €19 excluding tax per month per clinic (pricing consulted September 2, 2026). The French National Veterinary Council records 23,022 veterinarians in 8,348 establishments as of December 31, 2025.

A price that grows with the team and activity

Vetup's schedule reads like a map of the profession: €65 excluding tax per month for Premium with unlimited consultations, €9 per additional assistant, €39 for an administrator seat, €9 for the SIABV transmission module, €250 activation for a laboratory analyser then €19 monthly maintenance, all excluding tax. Every person you train and device you connect adds a line. The other three publishers encountered, Vetocom beyond its starting price, Bourgelat, and Digivet, publish nothing and direct you to a sales demonstration. It is the mechanism that penalises businesses for hiring, applied to a clinic with three practitioners and five assistants.

Margins dropping to zero after an update

Review platforms cover the French market poorly, so two of the three accounts below concern foreign products and were translated from English in the original article. For the French VES application, a one-star review dated January 27, 2022 reports 'Bugs with every price update: margins dropping to zero on some products'. On ezyVet, Margaret V. writes on January 7, 2026 that the software is 'very cumbersome and inefficient, not intuitive' without extensive customisation. On Cornerstone, Jeremiah E. describes on January 4, 2025 a product that 'does not communicate with our laboratory analysers' and wastes hours waiting for it to load. A margin dropping to zero after a price update becomes visible at stocktake six months later, when the accountant asks.

The three channels that remain official

Veterinarians are exempt from SESAM-Vitale, CNDA approval, and Ségur tracks. Three requirements remain. Reporting antimicrobial data to CalypsoVet, the Council's platform created with the Ministry of Agriculture, depends on what the management software can produce, and Vetup charges for it as an option. Identification of domestic carnivores and changes of keeper must be reported through the national I-CAD register's interfaces, not a homemade tool. From September 1, 2027, a clinic constituted as an SME must issue business invoices through an approved platform: an emailed PDF is not an electronic invoice under Article 289 bis of the French General Tax Code. Invoices to private individuals remain outside that scope; those to breeders, insurers, and groups fall within it. Check your organisation's precise VAT position with your adviser. Laboratory analysers and imaging equipment also use their manufacturers' protocols.

What a tool you own can handle

Prescription and pharmacy records: stock movements by batch and expiry date, prescriptions linked to animal and keeper, and flags on antimicrobial lines to prepare reporting. Vaccination and antiparasitic reminders: schedules per animal, messages at the right time, a list of animals absent from follow-up for over eighteen months, and return rates by reminder type. Inpatient tracking: daily care sheets per cage, administration times, weight and vital signs, and handover between morning and evening teams. Stock thresholds and margins: reorder alerts per reference, purchase and sale prices per presentation, actual margins per procedure and product. Finally, a dashboard: revenue per veterinarian and species, average transaction, share of rural activity, outstanding balances by client, and an accountant-ready export.

The day, and when the tool enters the picture

7:30 a.m., the assistant opens: the tool displays inpatients, administrations due before noon, and the evening team's notes. 9 a.m., a vaccination consultation: the vaccine leaves stock, the tool schedules a reminder in one year, and the keeper receives the message without anyone remembering. 11 a.m., a pharmacy order: thresholds reached yesterday are already listed. 6 p.m., the on-call team takes over and reads the same sheet. This is the day you describe hour by hour to an AI agent team. Margaux divides it into moments, Victor turns it into a French specification you correct, and Marcel breaks it into steps built and verified individually. You approve every document before the next stage. The AI budget depends on the assistant, its plan and the work requested. Our measured AI spending covers specific tests and does not set this tool's price. Also budget for your approval time, any hosting, external services and maintenance.

Where to start

Take your latest publisher invoice and circle anything depending on headcount or procedure count. Then open the storeroom ledger and count the quarter's stockouts. If the first column grows every time you hire and the second never falls, the calculation deserves setting out over five years, subscription included. The document an agent team returns fits in a few pages and is corrected before anything is built, just as at the chair in a dental practice.