How Much Time Do Vets Spend on Documentation?

Nobody went to vet school to type. And yet, for a lot of practising vets, writing up the record is the single biggest chunk of the day that isn’t spent with a patient or a client. It’s worth putting real numbers to it, because once you see where the hours actually go, the fix gets a lot clearer.

The rough shape of it

Ask around and the answers land in a similar range: most vets report spending somewhere between one and three hours a day on documentation. Not surgery, not consults, not client calls. Notes.

Break it down and it’s easy to see why. A SOAP note written properly, from a blank page, takes most people eight to ten minutes. Run twenty appointments and even the fast typists are looking at a couple of hours of writing stacked somewhere in the day. Add discharge instructions, referral letters, and the odd surgery report, and the pile grows.

The exact figure varies with caseload, species, and how structured your records have to be. But the direction is always the same: it’s a lot, and it’s more than most people outside the profession would guess.

Why it eats so much of the day

Here’s the part that gets missed. The bottleneck isn’t your typing speed. If it were, faster keyboards would have fixed this years ago.

The slow part is the thinking. Every note asks you to decide what goes in the subjective versus the objective, to structure the history, to shape a differential, to format a plan that reads clearly for the next person who opens the file. That’s cognitive work, and doing it from scratch dozens of times a day is genuinely tiring in a way that raw typing isn’t.

There’s also the defensive layer. A record has to hold up for a colleague, for the owner, and occasionally for a court. That pressure to get it complete and accurate slows everyone down, and rightly so.

Where the time actually goes: after hours

The number that matters most isn’t the total. It’s when it happens.

When records don’t get finished between appointments, they follow you home. Notes at the kitchen table, catching up on charts over the weekend, the mental weight of an unfinished list. This is one of the quietest and most common drivers of veterinary burnout, and it rarely shows up in a job description. The hours are real, but the cost is bigger than the hours.

What gives the time back

Every practical tip helps a little. Charting at the point of care while findings are fresh, standardising templates so you never start from blank, reusing snippets for phrases you write a thousand times a year. Each one trims minutes.

The bigger shift is removing the task rather than speeding it up. A voice-first AI scribe lets you talk through the exam the way you already do, then drafts the structured note for you to review. That changes the maths in a way snippets can’t: a note that took eight to ten minutes of typing becomes a thirty-second read. Across a full day, that’s the difference between charting between rooms and charting at home.

The honest version

You will always spend some time on documentation, and you should — the record matters. The goal isn’t zero. It’s getting the hours back down to something that fits inside your working day, so the writing stops leaking into your evenings.

Coggo drafts your notes, recaps, and letters from a single recorded consult, with vitals from your voice, for you to review and sign. If documentation is quietly eating an hour or two of your day, try it free and see how much of that you can reclaim.