Business Process Automation for a Small Catford Practice: The Paperwork Behind Every Appointment

A process is a chain of small steps

Take any job in a small practice and write the steps down. An appointment is booked, a confirmation goes out, a reminder follows, the visit happens, an invoice is raised, someone checks it was paid, a figure goes into the week’s summary. None of those steps is hard. The trouble is that each depends on someone remembering, usually at the end of a busy day.

Process automation means the steps happen on their own, with a person stepping in only where judgement is needed.

A vet practice as the example

Catford.co lists 2 vets (counted 10 October 2026). A practice like that handles bookings, reminders, invoices and updates to owners. Clinical decisions belong to the vets and nobody should hand those to software. The administration around them is another matter.

Some of that administration is a good candidate: sending the appointment confirmation and reminder, raising the invoice after the visit, chasing the one that has not been paid, copying a client’s changed details from one system to another, and producing a weekly summary. Anything involving animal health records or personal data needs care about where the information goes, and a sensible installer asks about that first.

The jobs on Dean Keating’s list

His website lists quotes sent and chased, jobs booked into the diary, confirmations and reminders, invoices raised, late payments chased, details copied between systems and the weekly report. It also lists quick replies to new enquiries, routing messages to the right person and passing awkward cases to a human.

What to leave alone

Anything where a mistake is expensive and cannot be undone, anything that needs empathy, and anything you have not yet written down. If you cannot describe the steps, nobody can automate them.

How it runs

There are four steps: a free call, an audit of the work worth automating, the build and install, and then training and support. He starts with the single process that makes the most difference. You finish the free call with a plan you can use with or without him.

The work is installed in the tools you already use. It is not a course, not phone answering and not a chatbot product.

Cost and distance

There is no published price list; the cost is given after the free call, with no obligation. He is based in Horndean, Hampshire, and works with south-east London businesses remotely. If you want someone in the room, say so on the first call and look at providers nearer to you as well.

Related guides: admin automation and lead follow-up. Local context: vets in Catford.

Contact

Call or WhatsApp Dean Keating on 07418 627304, or email dean@deankeating.com. See the Dean Keating profile on Catford.co. Websites: ai-agent.deankeating.com and deankeating.com.

About this guide

Catford.co is published by Dean Keating, who also runs the service described here. He is based in Horndean, Hampshire, not in Catford, and works with Catford and south-east London businesses remotely. If you want someone in the room, say so on the first call and look at Catford-based providers too. This guide recommends our own service, so compare it with other providers before you decide.