Power Diary Virtual Assistant for AU Allied Health

If you’ve landed on this page, you already know what Power Diary is and you’re past the point of researching it for fun. The reason is simpler and more frustrating than that: your appointment book holds the entire practice, and every confirmation, every claim, every half-finished intake form and every freed waitlist slot lands back on the one person trying to treat patients at the same time. That person is you. The bee badge on the login says Zanda now, but a decade of muscle memory still types the old name, and the bottleneck never changed.

Here’s the part that stings. Of the cloud allied health platforms, Power Diary is one of the few genuinely engineered around clinic admin: its waitlist matches clients to a freed slot for you, its recall templates are properly built per service, its claiming talks to Medicare directly with no terminal in the way, and its Client Portal accepts bookings at 2am without anyone awake. The features are excellent. The problem is that nearly all of them stop one step short of finished, leaving a human action that only happens if a human is actually there to take it.

A weekday inside your Power Diary, hour by hour

The first job lands before any patient does. Your VA opens the calendar and reads it like a front desk would: who hasn’t confirmed yet gets an SMS, an empty 11am between two longer appointments gets flagged, a standing fortnightly block gets eyeballed to confirm it actually recurred, and a stray double-entry on one practitioner’s column gets pulled apart before two people arrive for the same time. Then the feature Power Diary is quietly famous for kicks in. The moment a cancellation is entered against a slot, the platform pops up the waitlisted clients whose preferred clinician, location and availability fit the hole, ready to text. Your VA fires that offer, sits on the replies as they come back, and locks in whoever says yes first, so the freed 10:15 is usually full again before the practitioner has even noticed it opened.

Next come the bookings that arrived while everyone slept and the intake forms that didn’t. Overnight Client Portal bookings get confirmed, then run against existing records so the same person doesn’t quietly become two profiles. Tomorrow’s new clients get pulled up, and any intake or consent form still sitting unfinished gets a warm reminder pushed back through the portal, so the practitioner reads a completed history at the start of the session rather than scribbling one during it. Where the booking is a telehealth one, your VA generates the video link early, sends it with the join steps, and keeps Telehealth Lite and Plus+ assigned correctly per appointment type, which is the difference between a session that starts on time and a practitioner squinting at a frozen camera.

The financial pass runs through the afternoon. Every attended appointment is checked against an invoice so none of them slip out the door unbilled, the invoice-chasing routine you signed off gets worked through, and the day’s Tyro EFTPOS takings are reconciled back against the appointments they belong to so the diary and the till tell the same story. Claiming lives in Tools > Medicare: bulk bill and patient claims go in through Power Diary’s native Medicare integration, the statuses get watched right there, and anything that drops to Pended is chased the same week instead of surfacing as a nasty line at BAS time. Veterans aren’t a separate project either, because DVA submits through the identical pathway. All of this medical and NDIS billing work is administrative submission and follow-up, which is precisely the half of claiming a VA is allowed to own.

The weekly and monthly layer is the one that almost never gets done when the practitioner is also the receptionist: recalls. Your VA sets client recalls against the correct service template so a course of treatment doesn’t just evaporate after the last booked session, and works the Inactive Clients report as a live reactivation list so the people who quietly stopped coming get an actual phone call. Of everything on this page, that single weekly habit is the one that most often covers the VA’s invoice by itself.

A few things Power Diary won’t do for you

Worth being blunt about two limits before you sign anyone up. The waitlist magic only triggers when the cancellation is genuinely processed against the calendar slot. A patient who rings to cancel, gets a sympathetic “no worries” and is never actually removed from the diary, generates precisely nothing from the waitlist, which is exactly why the value here is somebody whose whole shift is the discipline of entering things properly. Likewise, the recall and reactivation work rewards a person who actually knows their way around the reports: the Inactive Clients report and Advanced Search filters carry the load, but there’s no one-tap button that does it, and we won’t dress one up as if there is.

If you’re choosing between this and Cliniko, the honest contrast is that Cliniko gives you a tidier one-click rebooking report while Power Diary gives you a stronger native waitlist and a Medicare path that never touches a terminal. The VA’s job ends up looking much the same in either.

The line we don’t cross

Treatment notes, every clinical message, the fees and item numbers, and anything a client raises that veers into clinical territory all stay firmly on your side, escalated to you under a written rule and never answered by the VA. That isn’t a promise we’re asking you to trust on faith; it’s a setting the software enforces. With the clinical Records pages and Access all Client File Uploads toggled off, and Profile Access tightened on top, the VA’s login literally has no route into that part of Power Diary. The boundary is already drawn in the permissions, and we leave it exactly where it sits.

A nice quirk that came through the rebrand untouched: Power Diary charges per practitioner and treats admin logins as free. Adding your VA to the account changes the subscription line by precisely zero dollars.

Pricing, and the first move

Running Power Diary admin falls on our admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, usually 10-15 hours a week for a one-to-five practitioner clinic, climbing a little if the VA also fields the front-of-house enquiries. Getting someone in place takes 7-10 business days, the opening 5-7 of which are supervised inside your own Power Diary account before they touch anything solo, and the arrangement carries a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee with no lock-in past 14 days notice. The refundable $500 deposit isn’t an extra cost; it credits straight onto your first month’s invoice.

For the wider industry view there’s the allied health page, and the VA cost guide lays out every figure in detail. When you’re ready, book a discovery call with Jenn, who has settled 87+ Australian placements since 2024 and will tell you plainly if your clinic isn’t set up to make a VA worthwhile yet. Have your waitlist open and pull up the last month of appointments that never got invoiced. The hours are sitting in those two screens.