Front Desk (Smartsoft) alternative for physio clinics

What Front Desk (Smartsoft) is good at

An honest description

Front Desk is Smartsoft's desktop practice management system for Australian allied health, which the vendor describes as a trusted legacy solution developed and refined over 30 years. It supports multiple users, practitioners, professions, locations and businesses, from a single user to more than a hundred, and its page emphasises handling even the most complex business structures, with Medicare and DVA details held in the patient file. Smartsoft is an Australian company whose whole team works from one Australian office, with a dedicated helpdesk and more than 30 years in practice management software. The same company now also offers PracSuite, its cloud platform, so Front Desk sits alongside a newer sibling within the one vendor.

Who tends to compare the two

A clinic comparing the two is usually an established Australian practice that has run Front Desk on its own machines for years, often with several practitioners and locations, and is now thinking about cloud software as a category. Practices with complex business structures, many users and a long history in Front Desk have solid reasons to stay with a vendor they know, or to look at Smartsoft's own cloud product first.

We do not run Front Desk (Smartsoft), so we will not tell you what it cannot do — the people who can answer that are Front Desk (Smartsoft) and the clinic down the road who uses it. Everything below is only about us.

What Clinidiary does differently

Built in a clinic that is still running

Clinidiary is written inside a working physiotherapy practice in Adelaide and used on real patients every day. The diary in the screenshots is the one the practice runs on. That is not a slogan about authenticity — it is why a bug a physiotherapist hits on Monday tends to be fixed by Wednesday, because the person who wrote it has to use it on Thursday.

Clinical writing cannot be lost

A note saves itself a couple of seconds after you stop typing, and keeps a copy in the browser while the server is unreachable — so a dropped connection, a closed laptop or a flat battery does not cost you the consultation. A note is very often the only record of something that has already happened, and asking a clinician to reconstruct it a day later is asking them to invent it.

Everything on a screen is also an API

Every capability lands as an API route first, behind the same permission, and the screen is built as a client of it. If a screen can do something a key with the right permissions cannot, we treat that as a bug. It means a report, an integration or a migration is possible without waiting for us to build it.

Free, and no card

The whole workspace, not a crippled tier, and no card. Refer a colleague and you earn points every time one joins, with no limit — they sit on your account and do not expire. No lock-in contract and no exit fee.

Moving your patients across

You can do it yourself

Export your patient list from Front Desk (Smartsoft) as a CSV and load it in Settings → Bring your data. The columns are read from the file's own headings, so you do not have to tell us what shape the export is in or rename anything first.

Nothing is written until you have seen it

The first pass only reads: it shows which columns were recognised, how many patients would be created, and who would be skipped because they are already here. You decide after seeing that, rather than before.

A date it cannot read, it refuses to guess

03/04/1980 is March in one country and April in another. Rather than pick, the import leaves that date blank and tells you the line number. A wrong date of birth decides concession eligibility and which of two same-named patients you have open.

Run both for a fortnight

We would rather you kept Front Desk (Smartsoft) running alongside for the first couple of weeks than trusted a migration on anybody's word, including ours. See what moving involves.

Questions worth asking any vendor

How do I get my data out?

Ask before you sign up, not after. Ours is a CSV export of patients, appointments, notes and invoices, available to you without asking us and without a fee. If the answer involves a support ticket or a quote, that is the answer.

What happens to a note if my internet drops?

In Clinidiary it keeps saving locally and recovers when you come back. It is a dull question until the day it is the only question, which is usually the day somebody loses a consultation.

Can a paid invoice be edited?

Ours cannot. A correction is a credit note plus a replacement, and the original keeps its number and date. Convenient editing of paid invoices is a problem waiting for an audit.

Who is actually building it?

Two people, in a clinic that sees patients. That is a real limitation — we are smaller than everything else on this page — and it is also why the person who fixes a bug is the person who hit it.

Also worth looking at

If you are comparing properly, compare widely. These are the other systems clinics in Australia usually shortlist.

Clinidiary, if you are weighing it against Front Desk (Smartsoft)