Your Clinic Has Thousands of Dollars Outstanding Invoices

Transform Your Cashflow flow Before July 2026 changes.
AskLuci Shows You in our $1M Allied Health oustanding invoice challenge.

Why We Created AMCA (Admin Minutes Per Completed Appointment)

We created AMCA because, in so many clinics, the numbers just didn’t add up.

On the surface, things looked fine. Diaries were full, therapists were busy, invoices were going out. But behind that, we kept seeing the same story:

  • Admin teams feeling constantly behind

  • Therapists staying back to finish notes or fix admin issues

  • Claims and payments getting stuck or delayed

  • Owners feeling tired and unsure where all the time and money was going

When we started building AskLuci, our question wasn’t just “How do we make admin easier?”

It was a deeper one:

What are the real levers that drive customer experience and sustainable performance in allied health?

Very quickly, our attention turned to something almost no one was measuring.

For any given appointment, how much admin work does it actually take to get from first contact to fully completed?

That’s where AMCA – Admin Minutes Per Completed Appointment – came from.

We (Monique and Joshua Iaquinto) created AMCA as part of our research and investigation into the levers that drive customer experience in Australian allied health during the creation of AskLuci. Over time, the acronym has become shorthand for something bigger:

AMCA is now synonymous with reducing admin inefficiency, cost, double handling and redundant work in allied health clinics.

What We Mean by AMCA

In simple terms, AMCA stands for Admin Minutes Per Completed Appointment.

It’s our way of putting a number on the invisible “admin shadow” wrapped around each appointment: everything that happens before, during and after the session that isn’t the clinical encounter itself.

In working terms, we often start with a simple formula:

AMCA ≈ Total Admin Minutes in a Period ÷ Number of Completed Appointments in that Period

That gives us a rough number we can work with.

But we very quickly found that if you only count the obvious pieces of admin (like a few calls and some basic invoicing), you massively understate the reality.

To really understand AMCA, we have to talk about its complete form.

AMCA in Its Complete Form

When we talk about AMCA in its complete form, we mean:

The total time it takes every person involved to complete all of the admin work attached to a single completed appointment.

That total includes every admin touch point in the client’s journey for that appointment, such as:

  • The phone calls, emails, SMS and social media messages

  • Reception conversations before or after sessions

  • Letter writing and written communication

  • Treatment notes and any transcribing or rewriting of those notes

  • Making the booking, rescheduling, confirming, or managing cancellations and DNAs

  • Entering or updating contact details and funding information

  • Changing appointment status due to cancellation, rebooking or non‑arrival

  • Managing pre‑payment and post‑appointment payment

  • Submitting payments and claims to third parties:

○ banks and payment providers

○ government institutions like NDIS, WorkCover, Medicare, DVA, Comcare

○ private health insurers and other funders

  • Managing outstanding invoices, resolving issues and closing them properly in the system

  • Processing invoices and reconciling them in:

○ the PMS

○ spreadsheets

○ bookkeeping and accounting software

  • Handling refunds, credits, receipts and all related client enquiries

  • The admin work behind payroll, super and commissions related to that appointment

  • Reconciling the transactions associated with that appointment for bookkeeping and reporting

  • Communicating with therapists and owners about the client:

○ arrival status

○ lateness

○ sickness

○ rebookings, DNAs or changes in plan

  • Handling onboarding and intake forms, plus presenting the client appropriately to the therapist

  • Managing reviews and feedback (and our replies) that relate back to that episode of care

  • Managing offers, packs and plans of care that the appointment sits inside

And any other admin or communication touch point connected to that single completed appointment.

When we take AMCA seriously, we’re not just counting “reception time”.

We’re counting the entire administrative footprint of an episode of care.

Why AMCA Is So Hard to Measure Perfectly

In truth, AMCA is exhaustive and non‑linear.

The work is spread across:

  • seconds and minutes in the moment,

  • sometimes hours across a week,

  • sometimes days, weeks, months or even years for complex cases and funding cycles.

Tasks don’t happen in a neat, single block. They’re scattered, interrupted, and revisited. Each appointment may involve:

  • multiple team members,

  • multiple systems,

  • and sometimes the same task being repeated because something wasn’t recorded or processed properly the first time.

On top of that, AMCA is the combined work of everyone involved – admin staff, therapists, practice managers, clinic owners, bookkeepers and sometimes external billing teams.

We can define AMCA very precisely, but measuring it in absolute detail for every appointment is difficult and often impractical. That’s why we use AMCA in two ways:

  • as a conceptual definition of all the work wrapped around one appointment, and

  • as a practical working metric that we approximate, track and improve over time.

A More Realistic AMCA Example

Early on, people tended to underestimate AMCA. Numbers like “a few minutes per appointment” were common guesses.

But when we mapped a full day of real work in a busy clinic and actually counted time across the whole set of touch points, the picture changed dramatically.

Imagine a typical day where the team (admin + therapists doing admin tasks) log their time roughly as follows:

We think about it differently depending on the type of appointment:

  • Pre‑appointment communication and booking work

Confirming, rescheduling and answering questions across phone, SMS, email and social media:

240 minutes

  • Onboarding and intake

Sending and chasing intake forms, checking and updating client details and funding:

120 minutes

  • Clinical communication and documentation

Writing and editing treatment notes, transcribing, messaging therapists and owners about client status (late, sick, DNA, rebooked):

240 minutes

  • Claims and third‑party administration

Submitting to NDIS, WorkCover, Medicare, DVA, Comcare and private health funds; responding to issues:

180 minutes

  • Invoicing and payment handling

Raising invoices, taking payments, managing pre‑payments and part‑payments, sending receipts:

180 minutes

  • Reconciliation and bookkeeping

Entering everything into the PMS, spreadsheets, bookkeeping and accounting software; closing open invoices:

120 minutes

  • Refunds, credits and receipt queries

Handling client questions and issuing credits or refunds:

60 minutes

  • Payroll, super and commissions

Allocating and checking the financial side of the day’s work:

60 minutes

If we add all that together, the total admin minutes for the day is:

240 + 120 + 240 + 180 + 180 + 120 + 60 + 60 = 1,200 minutes

Now let’s say that on that same day, the clinic delivers 40 completed appointments – “completed” meaning the clinical care is provided, the financial piece is fully closed off, and all associated admin is resolved for that episode.

Our AMCA for that day is:

AMCA = 1,200 ÷ 40 = 30 minutes per completed appointment

So on average, each appointment carries half an hour of admin work.

That half hour is not done in one sitting, and not by one person. It’s spread over time, across people and systems. But the total is real.

This example isn’t a benchmark. Some clinics will sit lower; some, especially those with complex funding and fragmented systems, will be significantly higher.

The point is simple: once we include all touch points, the true AMCA is almost always far higher than people first assume.

What Counts as a “Completed Appointment”?

For AMCA to be meaningful, we need to be clear about what we call “completed”.

We define completion differently depending on the type of appointment:

  • For a standard privately funded consult, an appointment isn’t truly complete until:

○ the client has had their session,

○ the invoice is raised,

○ payment is taken, and

○ any follow‑up bookings or necessary communication are in place.

  • For a third‑party funded visit, completion includes:

○ the session itself,

○ the invoice raised correctly,

○ the claim submitted,

○ remittance received, and

○ the appointment closed off properly in both the PMS and accounting records.

  • For cancellations and DNAs, completion means:

○ we have managed communication with the client,

○ applied our cancellation/DNA policy,

○ and updated the status and notes in the system so the appointment is fully resolved.

Once we define “completed appointment” clearly and apply it consistently, AMCA becomes something we can track, compare and improve over time.

Why We Care So Much About AMCA

We didn’t create AMCA to obsess over minutes for the sake of it.

We created AMCA because we saw the consequences of unchecked admin load in real clinics:

  • Therapists carrying admin home at night—mentally or literally

  • Admin staff always firefighting, rarely feeling caught up

  • Patients getting delayed responses, mixed messages, or poor first impressions

  • Claims and payments quietly leaking out of the system

  • Owners feeling tired, uncertain and unable to see where the effort was going

When we bring AMCA into the light and deliberately work to reduce it, we see the opposite:

  • Better patient experience – smoother journeys, fewer errors, clearer communication

  • Better clinical care – therapists have more time and headspace for clinical thinking

  • Better work environments – less unfulfilling, repetitive admin and more meaningful work

  • Better financial clarity – cleaner rails for payments and rebates, fewer surprises

  • Better confidence for owners – clearer data for decisions about staffing, pricing and growth

For us, AMCA is not just a metric.

It’s a practical way to improve the health of the clinic itself.

Why AMCA Looks Different in Every Clinic

Even among similar clinics, AMCA can vary dramatically.

Two physiotherapy practices might:

  • see roughly the same number of patients,

  • use the same practice management software,

  • and work with similar funders,

yet one operates with a significantly lower AMCA than the other.

The difference usually isn’t the software. It’s:

  • How clearly roles and responsible are defined

  • How well people are trained

  • whether processes are documented and actually followed,

  • How much work lives outside the main system (on paper, in separate spreadsheets, in someone’s memory)

  • and how often tasks are repeated or fixed because they weren’t done properly the first time.

That’s where process design – and one best way – becomes crucial

Our Mission with AskLuci: “One Best Way”

At AskLuci, our mission is to work toward a one best way method for clinic owners and their teams to follow.

We know clinic owners are often therapists first, business operators second. We also know admin staff rarely have the time, training or capacity to research, test and refine optimal processes across all the tools and funding models they’re dealing with.

So clinics end up with:

  • a patchwork of habits and legacy processes,

  • a mix of paper, PMS, emails and spreadsheets,

  • and a lot of human effort trying to hold it all together.

AMCA gives us a clear way to measure the cost of that patchwork.

It’s to free them from unnecessary, uninspiring and redundant work – and create clinics where:

  • client experience is excellent,

  • therapists are more productive and clinically focused,

  • admin teams feel supported by good systems,

  • and owners can run profitable, sustainable businesses with confidence.

How You Can Start Using AMCA in Your Own Clinic

If you’re a health professional or clinic owner, you don’t need a perfect measurement system to start.

You can begin with three simple steps:

1

Define what “completed appointment” means for your main service types.

2

Over a few days or a week, estimate and sample the total admin minutes related to those appointments (including all the touch points we’ve described, not just the obvious

ones).

3

Divide those minutes by the number of completed appointments in that same period to get your working AMCA.

The number you get won’t be perfect – and that’s fine.

What matters is that it gives you and your team a shared language and starting point to ask:

From there, we work on:

  • Where are we double‑handling?

  • What are we doing purely because “we’ve always done it that way”?

  • Which tasks could be redesigned, automated, delegated or removed?

  • How could we redesign our processes so therapists and admin staff are doing more meaningful work and less repetitive admin?

From there, AMCA becomes both:

  • a metric you can track and improve, and

  • a conversation about the kind of clinic you want to build.

We created AMCA because we believe allied health clinics can be places where:

  • clients are well cared for,

  • clinicians can do their best work,

  • admin teams feel valued and effective,

  • and owners can be proud of both the care they deliver and the business they run.

Understanding – and then reducing – AMCA is one powerful step in that direction.