The challenge
Vishwas is small and deliberately so. Dr. Shukla does the reporting himself and has one assistant. The lab had never used software, on the reasonable grounds that everything it needed fitted in a register.
The register worked for records. It did not work for dues. Patients who paid part of a bill were noted in a separate notebook, and following them up required someone to sit down with it — which, between reporting and running the lab, never happened.
The assumption was that lab software was for bigger labs, priced accordingly, and would take weeks to set up.
What we did
Setup took a single day. A small lab has a short test list, one rate card and no branches, so there is genuinely not much to configure. We entered the test master, set up the report format from a sample of his existing reports, and trained both staff in an afternoon.
Historical data was not migrated — six years of handwritten registers would have cost more to enter than it was worth. The registers were kept for reference and Diagnosuya started clean, which Dr. Shukla preferred.
The dues register replaced the notebook. Every part payment creates an outstanding balance attached to a patient with a phone number, and it stays on a list until it is settled.
The outcome
In the first four months, about ninety-four thousand rupees of dues were collected — money that was owed and had simply never been chased because chasing it required an afternoon with a notebook.
Dr. Shukla estimates he saves around six hours a month on record-keeping, most of it recovered from month-end reconstruction that now does not need to happen.
He remains on the Basic plan and has not needed more, which he mentions as the thing that surprised him most.
I assumed software like this was priced for labs ten times my size and would take a month to set up. It took an afternoon, and it found me ninety-four thousand rupees I had written off.