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.
| Type | Best for |
|---|---|
| General | Quick observations, comments, anything that doesn't need a fixed schema. Free-text by default. |
| Treatment | A record of what was done in a session — products used, settings, technique, areas treated, outcome. |
| Progress | Tracking change over time — comparison against a previous baseline, photo updates, response to ongoing care. |
| SOAP | Clinical 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:
| Setting | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Note type | SOAP Note, Treatment Record, or Progress Note — the default note type when this form is used |
| Require review | If on, every note created from this form moves to Pending review when completed (instead of going straight to Completed) |
| Reviewer | Pick 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:
| Property | Options |
|---|---|
| Photo type | Before, After, Progress, Reference |
| Body area | Face (Front / Left / Right), Body (Front / Back), Hands, Feet, Scalp, Neck, Arms, Legs, Teeth / Mouth, Nails, or Other |
| Tags | Free-form for your own filtering |
| Notes | Per-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:
| Tool | Use for |
|---|---|
| Move / Pan | Reposition existing annotations |
| Freehand | Sketching, hatching, free strokes |
| Line | Straight lines, measurements |
| Circle | Highlight a single area |
| Rectangle | Bounding boxes around regions |
| Arrow | Point to a specific spot |
| Text | Labels, dimensions, callouts |
| Pin marker | Drop 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:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Work in progress, only visible to the author |
| Completed | Finalised. Terminal state when no review is required. |
| Pending review | Awaiting reviewer sign-off (only used when the form requires review) |
| Approved | Reviewer accepted the note. Marked complete with reviewer + timestamp captured. |
| Rejected | Reviewer 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.
The reviewer is configured per Staff Form, not per note. If you change the reviewer on a form, only future notes use the new reviewer — notes already in flight keep their original assignment.
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:
- Listens to or reads your dictation
- Maps what you said to the fields in the chosen form
- Drafts a complete note with the structured responses pre-filled
- 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:
| Concern | How it's handled |
|---|---|
| Photo storage | Photos are uploaded to region-locked encrypted storage. They never appear on any public URL. |
| Annotation files | Both the editable canvas JSON and the flattened export are stored in the same region-locked storage as photos. |
| Access control | Only authenticated staff with permission to view a contact can view their notes and photos. Sub-admins are restricted by your menu configuration. |
| Author attribution | Every note records who authored it. If the form requires review, the reviewer's identity and review timestamp are captured too. |
| Edit history | Updates 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.
Related Guides
Contacts
Where treatment notes live — on each contact's Notes tab
Forms
Authoring guide for the form builder — Staff Forms use the same primitives
Diagram Templates
Body diagrams, face charts, and other annotation base images
Syntra AI — Internal Assistant
Configure the dictation flow that powers Create with Syntra