GoHighLevel for Veterinary Clinics: Setup Guide (2026)
GoHighLevel for Veterinary Clinics: Setup Guide (2026)
By Dr Priya Jaganathan, GoHighLevel Certified Admin · HL Growth Partner, Australia · Updated 4 September 2026 · 9 min read
GoHighLevel for veterinary clinics works best when you treat it as the communication and follow-up layer that sits in front of your practice management system, not as a replacement for it. ezyVet, RxWorks, VetlinkPRO and Covetrus remain the clinical record and the appointment book. GoHighLevel handles what those systems do poorly or not at all: answering the phone when the front desk is flat out, chasing overdue vaccinations by SMS, nurturing new puppy owners, collecting Google reviews after a visit, taking wellness-plan payments and winning back clients who have quietly drifted to the clinic down the road.
This guide walks through how we set up HighLevel for vet clinics in Australia: the contact model, the pipelines, the recall Workflows, after-hours AI triage that never gives clinical advice, the compliance settings you need under the Spam Act, and what it realistically costs in Australian dollars. It is written for practice owners and practice managers, and it assumes you already have a PMS you are not planning to leave.
Where GoHighLevel fits alongside your PMS
The single most important design decision is the boundary between the two systems. Your PMS owns the patient record, clinical notes, prescriptions, invoicing for consults, and the appointment schedule that your vets and nurses actually work from. GoHighLevel owns marketing consent, two-way SMS and email conversations, phone call handling, review requests, lead pipelines for new clients, and recurring wellness-plan billing if you choose to run it there.
Data moves in one direction most of the time: from the PMS into GoHighLevel. ezyVet has a public API and works well with a middleware connector such as Make or Zapier pushing new clients, upcoming appointments and vaccination due dates into GoHighLevel custom fields. RxWorks and VetlinkPRO are more limited, so many clinics run a scheduled CSV export and use GoHighLevel's bulk import with an update-on-match rule keyed to email or mobile. Covetrus platforms vary by product; check what your version exposes before you promise anyone real-time sync. Whatever the method, the PMS remains the source of truth and GoHighLevel is refreshed from it, never the other way around.
Contact model: pet owners, pets and custom fields
In GoHighLevel the contact is the pet owner, because the owner is the person who receives the SMS, pays the invoice and leaves the review. Pets are recorded against that owner. For a clinic where most households have one or two animals, a set of pet-specific custom fields is enough. We typically create a folder called Pets with fields for pet name, species, breed, date of birth, desexed status, microchip number, weight at last visit, last vaccination date, next vaccination due date, next dental check due date, and preferred vet. Duplicate the set for a second pet if you need it.
For clinics with multiple-pet households, breeders or shelters, GoHighLevel's custom objects are a cleaner fit. A Pet object linked to the contact lets you hold unlimited animals per owner, each with its own vaccination and dental due dates. The trade-off is that Workflow triggers on custom object fields are less mature than on contact custom fields, so for date-based recalls we still mirror the next due date up to the contact level. Our guide to GoHighLevel custom fields covers naming conventions and field types in more depth.
Tags do the lightweight categorisation: species-dog, species-cat, wellness-plan-active, new-puppy, new-kitten, lapsed-18m, sms-consent-yes, sms-consent-no. Keep them lower-case, hyphenated and few. Tags drive segmentation and Workflow branching; custom fields hold the actual data.
Pipelines: from enquiry to recall
We run two pipelines. The first is New Client Enquiry with stages for New Enquiry, Contacted, Booked, Attended and Recall Active. Every website form, missed-call text back, Facebook lead or Voice AI booking creates an opportunity at New Enquiry. Moving the card to Booked happens automatically when a GoHighLevel calendar appointment is created, or manually by reception if the booking is placed directly in the PMS. Attended is set from the PMS sync or by reception marking the appointment as showed. Recall Active is the resting state for every current client and is where the recall Workflows take over.
The second pipeline is Wellness Plan Sales, with stages for Interested, Quote Sent, Signed Up and Cancelled. It tracks the conversion of ordinary clients onto a monthly preventive-care subscription, which is the highest-value automation most clinics never build.
Vaccination and dental recall Workflows
This is where GoHighLevel for veterinary clinics earns its subscription. Most PMS recall systems send one letter or one SMS at a fixed interval and then give up. A GoHighLevel Workflow can run a sequence, branch on whether the client has booked, stop the moment an appointment appears, and escalate to a human task if nothing happens.
The trigger is Contact Date Reminder on the custom field Next Vaccination Due, set to fire 21 days before the date. Step one is an SMS: a short reminder with the pet's name, what is due, and a booking link to the clinic's GoHighLevel calendar or a prompt to reply to book. Step two, after a three-day wait, is a branch: if an appointment has been booked (checked via an If/Else on the Appointment Status or a booked tag pushed from the PMS), end the Workflow. If not, send an email with a little more detail on why the vaccination matters. Step three, seven days later, is a second SMS. Step four, at the due date, creates a task for reception to call. Dental recall runs the same shape off Next Dental Check Due, with a longer lead time because dental bookings are less urgent in the owner's mind and need more nudging.
Two practical notes. First, always include an internal Wait step that respects your sending window, typically 9am to 6pm local time, so that nobody gets a reminder at 2am because the field was updated overnight by the sync. Second, when the client books, update Last Vaccination Date and Next Vaccination Due from the PMS after the visit, which automatically re-arms the Workflow for next year.
The automation map at a glance
| Trigger | Workflow | Channel | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound call not answered | Missed call text back | SMS | Caller engaged within 60 seconds, booking captured |
| Call after hours | Voice AI triage | Phone | Emergencies routed to on-call number, routine requests booked or messaged |
| Appointment created | Reminder sequence | SMS and email | Fewer no-shows, confirmations logged |
| Next Vaccination Due minus 21 days | Vaccination recall | SMS, email, task | Vaccination booked without reception chasing |
| Next Dental Check Due minus 30 days | Dental recall | SMS, email, task | Dental revenue recovered |
| Appointment marked showed | Review request | SMS | Google review volume and rating lift |
| Tag new-puppy or new-kitten added | Onboarding nurture | Email and SMS | Owner educated, second and third visits booked |
| No visit in 18 months | Reactivation | SMS then email | Lapsed clients rebooked or cleanly unsubscribed |
Appointment reminders and no-show reduction
If your PMS already sends a reminder, resist the urge to duplicate it. Either switch the PMS reminder off and run everything through GoHighLevel, or leave the PMS reminder in place and use GoHighLevel only for the confirmation loop. We prefer the first, because a two-way SMS where the owner can reply C to confirm or R to reschedule, with the reply updating the opportunity and notifying reception, is something no PMS does well. A standard sequence is an SMS at booking, an SMS 48 hours prior asking for confirmation, and a final SMS the morning of the appointment with parking or fasting instructions. Our GoHighLevel appointment reminder workflows guide has the exact steps and copy we use.
Missed calls and after-hours triage
A busy suburban clinic misses a surprising share of its inbound calls between 8am and 10am and again from 4pm to 6pm, exactly when new-client enquiries peak. The GoHighLevel missed call text back Workflow sends an SMS the moment a LeadConnector number rings out: an apology, a note that the team is with patients, and a question about how the clinic can help. Reception picks up the thread in the Conversations inbox when they surface. For a clinic, this alone typically pays for the platform.
Voice AI and Conversation AI: strict boundaries
After hours is where clinics get nervous, and rightly so. We configure a GoHighLevel Voice AI after-hours receptionist with a narrow brief. It can tell callers the opening hours, take a message, book a routine appointment into an available slot, and answer logistical questions such as whether the clinic bulk-bills nothing (it does not) or whether you need to fast a pet before surgery when that instruction has already been given. It is explicitly instructed never to offer clinical advice, never to assess whether a symptom is serious, and to treat any mention of injury, poisoning, breathing difficulty, collapse, bloat, seizure, or a distressed owner as an emergency. For emergencies it reads out the on-call or after-hours emergency hospital number, offers to transfer if call forwarding is configured, and ends the conversation. Conversation AI on SMS and web chat follows the same rules. Test the prompts with a nurse role-playing worried owners before you go live, and review the call transcripts weekly for the first month.
Google reviews and new-pet onboarding
Review requests fire when an appointment is marked showed, with a Wait of about three hours so the owner is home and settled. The SMS uses the pet's name and links straight to the Google review form. We exclude euthanasia consults, oncology and hospitalisation discharges with a tag filter, because nobody wants a review request after a difficult day. The GoHighLevel reputation management and Reviews AI tools can draft replies for your team to approve.
Puppy and kitten onboarding is a twelve-week nurture triggered by the new-puppy or new-kitten tag. It covers the vaccination schedule, toilet training and socialisation, desexing timing, pet insurance basics and, at week ten, the wellness-plan offer. Each email is short, written by your head nurse and sent from a named team member through Mailgun with your clinic's sending domain authenticated.
Wellness-plan payments and lapsed-patient reactivation
GoHighLevel Payments with Stripe supports recurring products, so a monthly wellness plan covering vaccinations, parasite prevention and a dental check can be sold through a GoHighLevel order form and billed automatically. Successful payments add the wellness-plan-active tag; a failed payment triggers a Workflow that sends a card-update link and creates a task if it remains unpaid after seven days. Keep the plan inclusions documented in the PMS so the vets know what is covered at the consult.
Reactivation targets owners with no visit in eighteen months and a valid SMS consent. The GoHighLevel database reactivation campaign is a two-message sequence: an SMS asking whether the pet is still with them and whether they would like a health check, followed a week later by an email. Owners whose pets have passed away reply and are tagged deceased-pet so they never receive another reminder, which matters more than any rebooking figure.
SMS compliance and privacy in Australia
The Spam Act 2003 applies to every commercial SMS and email a clinic sends. You need consent, which can be express (a ticked box on the new-client form) or inferred from an existing client relationship for messages relevant to the service; you must identify the sender; and every marketing message needs a functional unsubscribe. The ACMA sets out the rules plainly at acma.gov.au/spam. In GoHighLevel, that means recording consent in a custom field with the date and source, using the built-in STOP handling on LeadConnector numbers, and adding an opt-out line to every promotional SMS. Transactional reminders about a booked appointment are lower risk, but a vaccination recall to someone who has not visited in two years is marketing, so treat it that way. Our full GoHighLevel SMS compliance in Australia guide covers sender ID registration and the consent-log setup.
On privacy, pet health data is not sensitive information under the Privacy Act, but the owner's name, mobile, address and payment details are personal information. Limit the fields you sync from the PMS to what the Workflows actually need, restrict GoHighLevel user permissions so casual staff cannot export contacts, enable two-factor authentication on every login, and update your clinic privacy policy to name the platform and its offshore data hosting.
Realistic costs in Australian dollars
GoHighLevel's published plans are US$97, US$297 and US$497 per month (see gohighlevel.com/pricing). A single clinic buying direct usually needs the US$297 Unlimited tier for API access to the PMS connector; the US$497 tier adds SaaS mode and AI features that a solo clinic rarely needs unless it wants unlimited AI usage. Working through an agency, clinics more often pay a bundled monthly fee that includes the platform, phone numbers and support.
SMS via LeadConnector in Australia costs roughly AUD 0.10 to 0.12 per segment, and an Australian mobile number is a few dollars a month. A clinic with 2,500 active clients sending recalls, reminders and review requests typically lands between AUD 150 and 350 a month in messaging. Voice AI is billed per minute on top. For the build itself, a scoped agency implementation of the model described here, using a veterinary snapshot as the starting point and customising fields, Workflows and AI prompts, generally runs AUD 4,000 to 9,000, with ongoing management from about AUD 500 a month if you want someone else watching the Workflows.
A 30-day rollout plan
Week one is foundations: sub-account setup, LeadConnector number with a compliant sender ID, Mailgun domain authentication, custom fields and tags, and the first PMS export imported with consent flags. Week two is inbound: missed-call text back, calendar configuration, the reminder sequence and the review request, all tested with staff mobiles. Week three is recalls: vaccination and dental Workflows switched on for a segment of a few hundred owners so reception can watch the replies and refine the copy. Week four is after-hours: Voice AI and Conversation AI prompts drafted, role-play tested, emergency routing verified with a real call to the on-call number, then live. Onboarding nurture, wellness-plan payments and reactivation follow in month two once the team trusts the basics.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Trying to use GoHighLevel as the appointment book while the PMS also holds the schedule, which produces double bookings within a week.
- Letting Voice AI or Conversation AI answer anything that sounds like a clinical question instead of routing every symptom mention to the emergency number.
- Importing the whole PMS database without consent flags and sending recalls to owners who never agreed to marketing or whose pets have died.
- Running PMS reminders and GoHighLevel reminders at the same time so that clients receive two or three messages for one visit.
- Skipping the sending-window Wait step, then wondering why a recall went out at midnight after a data sync.
- Building every Workflow at once rather than proving one recall on a small segment before scaling to the full database.
If you want a recall, reminder and follow-up system built for your veterinary practice, book a strategy call with the HL Growth Partner team.
Frequently asked questions
Can GoHighLevel for veterinary clinics replace ezyVet or RxWorks?
No. GoHighLevel has no clinical records, prescribing, pathology integration or stock control. It sits in front of your PMS to manage marketing consent, two-way communication, phone handling, reviews and follow-up. The PMS stays the source of truth and GoHighLevel is refreshed from it.
How do vaccination recalls work if the due date lives in the PMS?
The due date is synced or imported into a GoHighLevel custom field such as Next Vaccination Due. A Workflow using the Contact Date Reminder trigger fires a set number of days before that date, sends the SMS and email sequence, and stops as soon as a booking is detected.
Is it safe to let Voice AI answer the clinic phone after hours?
Yes, provided the prompt is tightly scoped. It should handle hours, messages and routine bookings only, give no clinical advice, and route any mention of injury, poisoning, breathing trouble or distress straight to the on-call or emergency hospital number. Test it with role-play before going live and review transcripts weekly at first.
What does SMS cost for an Australian vet clinic on GoHighLevel?
Roughly AUD 0.10 to 0.12 per segment through LeadConnector, plus a few dollars a month for the number. A clinic with around 2,500 active clients usually spends AUD 150 to 350 a month on reminders, recalls and review requests.
Do I need consent to send vaccination reminders by SMS?
Under the Spam Act you need express or inferred consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe on commercial messages. Reminders for a booked appointment are lower risk, but recalls to inactive clients are marketing. Record consent with date and source in a custom field and honour STOP replies automatically.
