Treatment Notes

Keep a longitudinal record of every client — structured forms, free-text notes, photos with body-area tagging, and annotated diagrams — all attached to the contact and optionally to a specific booking. Notes can flow through a review workflow before they're finalised, and Syntra can draft them for you from a quick voice or text dictation.

Treatment Notes is a module — enable it from Modules > Treatment Notes to turn on Staff Forms and the Notes tab on every contact. Once enabled, you'll see a new note-keeping surface across the CRM.

Who It's For

Anyone who needs to keep a structured, time-stamped record of what was done for a client and what happened. Built for — but not limited to:

  • Medical & clinical — clinics, medspas, dermatology, dental, physiotherapy, chiropractic, podiatry, occupational therapy, counselling
  • Beauty & aesthetics — salons, lash & brow artists, PMU, tattoo & piercing, hair colour, nail technicians, skincare practitioners
  • Wellness & fitness — personal trainers, sports therapists, massage, pilates instructors, nutrition coaches
  • Animal care — veterinary practices, groomers, behaviourists
  • Anywhere a service is performed and a record matters — the form schema is yours to define, so the module adapts to your practice

If your business takes ongoing notes about a client, this is for you.


What You Can Record

Each note can hold any combination of:

  • Form responses — structured fields you define (assessment scales, checklists, dosages, products used, settings, after-care instructions)
  • Free-text content — for general notes that don't need a fixed schema
  • Photos — typed by purpose (before / after / progress / reference) and tagged by body area
  • Annotated diagrams — draw on a body diagram, face chart, or directly on a customer photo to mark areas of interest, treatment locations, or measurements
  • A linked booking — connect the note to the appointment it relates to
  • A reviewer's sign-off — when the form requires peer review

All of it is stored against the contact and shows up in chronological order on their Notes tab.


Note Types

When creating a note, pick the type that best matches what you're recording. The type is purely for organisation and filtering — it doesn't change the editor's capabilities.

TypeBest for
GeneralQuick observations, comments, anything that doesn't need a fixed schema. Free-text by default.
TreatmentA record of what was done in a session — products used, settings, technique, areas treated, outcome.
ProgressTracking change over time — comparison against a previous baseline, photo updates, response to ongoing care.
SOAPClinical SOAP notation — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. Used in medical and allied-health practice.

You can run as many or as few types as your practice needs. A salon might only ever use Treatment; a physiotherapist might use all four.


Staff Forms

Staff Forms are the structured templates that drive treatment notes. They're a form type within the regular form builder — turn the Treatment Notes module on, and Staff Form appears as a new option in CRM > Forms > New Form alongside Intake, Public, and Quote Request forms.

A Staff Form differs from a customer-facing form in that it's filled by your team about a client rather than by the client themselves.

Authoring a Staff Form

In the form builder, when you pick Staff Form, you'll get extra options:

SettingPurpose
Note typeSOAP Note, Treatment Record, or Progress Note — the default note type when this form is used
Require reviewIf on, every note created from this form moves to Pending review when completed (instead of going straight to Completed)
ReviewerPick which sub-admin reviews notes from this form. They get notified when a note needs sign-off.

The fields themselves use the same form-builder primitives as customer forms — text, multi-line text, dropdowns, checkboxes, dates, ratings, sliders, file uploads, and so on. See the Customer Forms guide for the field reference.

Examples

  • A medspa might author a Botox Treatment form with fields for units, brand, injection sites (with a face diagram), photos before/after, and aftercare given
  • A physiotherapist might author a SOAP Visit form with separate sections for each SOAP component plus a body-diagram annotation
  • A tattoo artist might author a Session Record with stencil placement photos, ink brands and needle configurations, healing instructions, and consent confirmation

Creating a Note

Open any contact from CRM > Contacts, then go to the Notes tab. You'll see two areas:

  • A General notes field at the top for quick free-text observations (auto-saves)
  • A Treatment notes list below for structured notes from forms

To create a structured note, click New note and pick a Staff Form. Syntra opens the editor with that form's fields, the right note type pre-selected, and any default values applied.

Fill in the fields, attach photos, draw annotations, and either:

  • Save as draft — keep working on it later. Drafts are never visible to reviewers.
  • Mark as completed — finalise the note. If the form requires review, this moves it to Pending review instead of Completed.

You can also start a new note from the contacts list using the Add Note action — Syntra opens the form picker on the contact's Notes tab automatically.


Photos & Annotations

Photos are first-class citizens. Each photo on a note carries:

PropertyOptions
Photo typeBefore, After, Progress, Reference
Body areaFace (Front / Left / Right), Body (Front / Back), Hands, Feet, Scalp, Neck, Arms, Legs, Teeth / Mouth, Nails, or Other
TagsFree-form for your own filtering
NotesPer-photo caption

The photo type and body area make it trivial to pull "all before/after pairs for this client" or "all face-front photos taken this year" later.

Annotations

Any photo (or diagram template) can be annotated with a built-in canvas editor. Tools:

ToolUse for
Move / PanReposition existing annotations
FreehandSketching, hatching, free strokes
LineStraight lines, measurements
CircleHighlight a single area
RectangleBounding boxes around regions
ArrowPoint to a specific spot
TextLabels, dimensions, callouts
Pin markerDrop a numbered pin (treatment site numbering)

Strokes use a 9-colour palette with adjustable thickness.

Annotations are stored as editable canvas JSON (so you can re-open and adjust them later) plus a flattened image export for quick display, PDF embedding, and printing. The base image — your photo or a diagram template — is preserved separately.

Diagram Templates as base images

Instead of drawing on a customer photo, you can pick a Diagram Template as the base — body diagrams, face charts, dental charts, hand & foot maps, spine diagrams, anything you've uploaded under CRM > Diagram Templates. The annotation canvas opens with the diagram pre-loaded and ready to mark up.


Review Workflow

Forms that require review move notes through a five-stage lifecycle:

StatusMeaning
DraftWork in progress, only visible to the author
CompletedFinalised. Terminal state when no review is required.
Pending reviewAwaiting reviewer sign-off (only used when the form requires review)
ApprovedReviewer accepted the note. Marked complete with reviewer + timestamp captured.
RejectedReviewer rejected the note with comments. The author can edit and resubmit.

When a note enters Pending review, the assigned reviewer receives an email with a deep-link to open the note. They can:

  • Approve — sign off with optional comments. The note flips to Approved with their identity and a timestamp recorded.
  • Reject — return the note to the author with comments explaining what needs to change. The author edits and resubmits, and a new review cycle begins.

The original author and the reviewer are both surfaced on the note, alongside the timestamps for completion and review. This gives you a clear audit trail of who wrote what, who signed it off, and when.


Create with Syntra

Syntra can draft a treatment note for you from a quick dictation — useful when you're between clients and don't want to type out a full SOAP from scratch.

From a contact's Notes tab, click Create with Syntra. Pick the Staff Form you want to fill, then dictate what happened — by typing or by voice, depending on how your internal assistant is configured. Syntra:

  1. Listens to or reads your dictation
  2. Maps what you said to the fields in the chosen form
  3. Drafts a complete note with the structured responses pre-filled
  4. Opens a draft summary modal so you can review the result

You always get the final say. From the summary modal you can:

  • Accept — Syntra creates the note as a Draft so you can refine and finalise it
  • Edit manually — open the regular note editor pre-filled with what Syntra drafted

Syntra never marks a note as Completed on its own — it always saves as Draft and hands control back to you.

Prerequisites

Create with Syntra is available when:

  • Your internal assistant is configured (see Internal Assistant)
  • The Create staff note tool is enabled in Tools & Actions
  • For voice dictation: voice mode is enabled in the internal assistant settings

If any prerequisite is missing, the button surfaces a tooltip telling you what's needed and links straight to the relevant settings page.


Linking to Bookings

A note can be linked to a specific booking — the appointment that the note is about. The booking link:

  • Is settable when you create the note (Syntra picks it up automatically when you start a note from a booking)
  • Shows the linked booking on the note view (date, time, service)
  • Lets you jump from the booking to the note and vice versa

For practices that bill per session or report on outcomes per appointment, this gives you a clean one-to-one between the work performed and the record of it.


Privacy & Storage

Treatment notes carry sensitive client information. Syntra keeps them locked down:

ConcernHow it's handled
Photo storagePhotos are uploaded to region-locked encrypted storage. They never appear on any public URL.
Annotation filesBoth the editable canvas JSON and the flattened export are stored in the same region-locked storage as photos.
Access controlOnly authenticated staff with permission to view a contact can view their notes and photos. Sub-admins are restricted by your menu configuration.
Author attributionEvery note records who authored it. If the form requires review, the reviewer's identity and review timestamp are captured too.
Edit historyUpdates to notes preserve the audit trail — created_at, updated_at, completed_at, and reviewed_at are all stamped.

For practices with regulatory requirements (HIPAA, GDPR, CQC, MHRA, your local equivalent), this gives you defensible records for compliance audits.


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