Your practice preferences are responsible for holding much of the important information about your practice, such as your contact details, practice letterhead, image folder pathways, internal pathology and radiology import settings, and many more.
Before you begin
If you have multiple practices set up, you will be asked upon logging into Genie which practice you wish to access. It's important to select the correct practice at login as each practice may have different settings. To change practices at any time, navigate to File > Change Practice.
The practice preferences can be found by navigating to File > Practice Preferences, and double-clicking on your existing practice or clicking the blue plus 
icon to add a new practice record.
The first tab that opens will be the Practice Details tab. This is the tab where you will fill out all the important contact information for your practice including the Clinic name, address, phone/fax number, email, ABN number, and HPI-O (for use with My Health Record). These are located on the left-hand side of the window.
| Clinic Name | This is the name of your practice. |
| Address 1 Address 2 Suburb/State/Code Country |
This is the address of your practice. |
| Phone Phone 2 |
This is the phone number/s of your practice. |
| Fax | This is the fax number of your practice. |
| This is the email address of your practice. | |
| Website | This is the website address of your practice. |
| VSP Number | This is your Vaccine Service Provider Number. |
| ACN No | This is your Australian Company Number. |
| ABN No Use ABN No for... |
This is your Australian Business Number. If you have one ABN across the practice, leave the Practice ABN radio button selected. If your doctors have specific ABNs, change this to Doctor's ABN. |
| HPI-O | This is your Healthcare Provider Identifier - Organistion, which allows organisations (i.e. hospitals and medical practices) to deliver healthcare. |
| SCP ID | This is your Specimen Collection Point Identification Number. |
| My server is hosted in a time zone [x] hours ahead | If your server machine is hosted in a different time zone, you will need to specify this here to ensure that the correct time displays throughout Genie. |
| No Default Site of Services on Invoices | If this preference is ticked, no site of service (as set in the provider's User Preferences > Practice Sites) will be selected by default on invoice, and instead will need to be manually selected. |
| Allow Invoices to be Deleted | This preference can only be checked by the Administrator of your Genie. If this setting is not ticked, invoices will not be able to be deleted from a patient's account history. |
| Print Medicare Claim Forms | Allows Medicare forms to be printed for your private billing. Once this is ticked, the radio buttons will determine if a form is printed for all accounts, or only for unpaid accounts. Commonly the Only for unpaid accounts option is selected as the patient doesn't usually need a claim form if they have fully paid the account. |
| Print Overseas Student Claim Forms | This preference is mainly used by university medical centers. The fields below this checkbox allow you to determine the Fee Type and Provider Code for the overseas student claims form printouts. See Invoicing for Overseas Students for more information. |
| Make Default Practice | This will allow you to set a practice as your default practice. Only one practice can have this box ticked at a time. |
| GST Rate | This determines the amount of GST charged on each item number as specified. |
| Financial Year starting | This allows you to change the start of the financial year within your Genie practice. |
| Inactive |
This will make the practice record inactive and will not be available to choose from when logging into Genie. You cannot make the default practice inactive, so you will firstly need to make another practice your default, then make the original one inactive. |
| Purged from Last Purged |
The Purged from date will indicate the end date of the last Cull Old Invoices that was performed via File > Maintenance & Reports > Monthly, meaning invoices created prior to this date were culled. The Last Purged will indicate the last time the Cull Old Invoices was performed. |
In the Miscellaneous tab, you will find fields and information regarding several areas of Genie, mainly to do with different billing and financial settings that can be used throughout Genie.
| Coding System | This refers to the type of disease and procedure coding that is used throughout the practice - either ICPC or ICD10. If you do not use either of these, you can leave the None radio button selected. |
| Auto-Generate Chart Numbers for New Patients | This will generate a chart number for new patients in ascending numerical order. Note: If you have this preference checked and manually enter in a chart number for a patient, the auto-generated chart numbers will then continue on numerically from your manually entered number. |
| Make the Chart Number the same as the Patient ID | This allows Genie to make the auto-generated chart number the same as the patient ID, which can simplify patient searches in the future. |
| Auto-Create Folders for New Patients | This is used if you do not attach images into patient files within Genie, but would prefer to add these images directly into the patient's Images folder on the server machine. |
| Make Surnames Uppercase | With this preference turned on, Genie will ensure that the first letter of a surname (in the patient list or address book) is capitalised. |
Medicare Online |
|
| Minor ID | This is your GEN number, which can be found in the top-right of your Appointment Book. |
| Use Bulk Bill Use Patient Claims Use DVA Use Online Verification |
If you are using Bulk Bill/DVA transmissions and patient claiming, it is recommended that all these boxes are checked, including the Run Real-time by Default checkbox, which will allow patient claims to be sent automatically when an invoice is completed, rather than having these stored to be sent in a batch later. |
| Default Receipt Type | This drop-down determines which payment type is selected by default when you first open the receipting window to receipt a payment. |
| Auto-Clean Data when Saving | It is recommended that you keep this box ticked so that Genie will perform a clean up of the database whenever a record is saved in the system. This will help prevent indexing issues and database corruption in your Genie. This should not change the performance of your software, however, you can elect to un-tick this box if this does begin to impact your practice in any way. |
| Import changes to appts modified offsite | This checkbox can be ticked in the event that you would like to make changes to your appointments when offsite after performing database replication. Please note: All changes will import back into your live data, including the removal of appointments that were deleted offsite. |
| Disable PHP calls (My Health Record and HI lookups will not work) | This will prevent Genie from searching for a patient's My Health Record when opening their clinical file, and will also prevent any IHI lookups from working successfully through the demographics window. |
Give me a warning if account... |
|
| Overdue by more than ... or Balance is greater than ... |
This section is useful for providing an indication of which patients have an outstanding balance on their account. The warning will appear in the form of a "$" symbol in front of the patient's name in the appointment book. |
Invoicing |
|
| Default Patient Type | This drop-down menu allows you to set a default patient type that will apply to all new patient records that are created. While this defaults all new patients as a specific account type, you can change this at any time in their demographic information. |
| Print Remittance Advice | This will display a remittance advice at the bottom of all of your invoices, and will vary in appearance depending on which payment methods you choose to accept. For more information, see our Printing your Remittance Slip article. |
| Require a Referrer Provider Number on Invoices | This setting will only be visible if your practice type is set to anything other than General Practice. If no referring provider number is selected on your invoices you will receive an alert. |
| Print Facility ID on Invoices Available in Genie v9.4.1 and above |
The Facility ID listed against the Site of Service (File > User Preferences > Practice Sites) will be displayed on printed invoices. |
| Print Invoice Full Descriptions | This will ensure that the full description for each item number is displayed on printed invoices. If this is un-ticked, only a short description will be supplied instead. |
| Print doctor and patient DB4 forms on same page | This allows you to print the doctor's and patient's copy of the Medicare DB4 form on the same A4 page, instead of printing this on two separate A4 pages. |
| Print Total Balance on Invoices | This will print the total outstanding account balance for the relevant account holder on the invoice. |
| Credit Terms | If you have a value entered into this box, the "With Compliments" text will appear above the remittance advice on printed invoices. If you prefer this text not to be present, you can enter a "0" in this box to remove it. |
| Patient Label | This determines the label you wish to identify the patient as. For example, allied health professionals may wish to use the term 'Client' instead of 'Patient'. |
| Invoice Memos | If you would like to add an invoice memo onto your invoices, you can add, edit and delete these from this drop-down. Please note the default memo will display on all invoices unless another invoice memo is selected at the time of invoicing. This is often helpful for displaying bank details for a certain provider or printing a message directed to the patient. |
| Give a warning if referral expires within ... weeks | This setting will only be visible if your practice type is set to anything other than General Practice. When invoicing you will receive a red alert box stating that the patient referral expires within your given time frame. |
This letterhead will appear on all printed invoices and account statements for your practice. If your providers would prefer to use their own letterhead, you will need to tick the Use Individual Letterheads checkbox, and ensure that their individual letterheads are configured in their User Preferences > Correspondence tab.
The 
button will create a very basic default letterhead in this window, which contains the name of the practice, the address of the practice, and practice contact details. You can then add a logo using the 
button.
If you are using a practice-wide letterhead, you can use the Your Letterhead expression when creating letters to pull this into your correspondence.
When you are printing statements for unpaid invoices from under File > Maintenance and Reports > Monthly > Unpaid Invoices, you can tick the Use Single Letterhead for Statements box to use the letterhead in this window for all statements.
In order to be able to view images that are saved in your database, you will need ensure the correct folder pathway is listed in this window.
The default images folder on the server machine (C:\Genie\Images or Macintosh HD:Applications:Genie:Images) is typically where your images are stored. If you have changed the location of your Images folder (perhaps after a server migration), you will need to update this window accordingly by using the Browse button.
If you have more than one Practice Preference record , you will need to ensure this folder pathway is the same for all practice records, to avoid the possibility of Genie using the incorrect folder pathway to search for your Images folder. If this folder pathway does not match the folder pathway on the server, you may receive an error message when trying to access images from a client workstation.
Use FTP for file transfers between client and server enables the FTP communication between the Genie Clients and the Genie Server application. By default, this is deselected, which prevents practices from becoming dependant on third-party FTP software for file transfers.
In this window, you are able to determine how your pathology downloads are configured for your practice. It is important to know the difference between the options provided here, as if you select the incorrect option, you may encounter issues with your result downloads.
| Allow Pathology Import on Server | This box should be ticked if your pathology software is installed on your server machine as it will allow these results to be imported automatically onto each client machine that is connected to the server. |
| Import Pathology Automatically on Client | This box should be ticked if your pathology software is installed on a client workstation. This will allow the pathology results to be imported into Genie automatically from the client machine that the software is installed on. |
| It is only possible to have one of the above options selected at a time. It is recommended you have all of your third-party correspondence software installed on one machine at your location to avoid confusion and loss of functionality. | |
| Set Printing by User Name | This allows you to associate the File > Printing Preferences to specific usernames, rather than computer names. This can be especially useful if your computer name changes often, and is most commonly used by practices connecting to Genie via terminal services. |
| Select CDA Stylesheet Download CDA Stylesheet |
This allows you to browse your computer for a CDA stylesheet to download and use in Genie. |
| My Health Record | This section must be complete if you are wanting to access My Health Record using a NASH certificate. This can be left blank if you are using the CSP method. See Configuring My Health Record for more information. |
| Import RTF Letters to 4D Write | This allows Genie to import RTF letters sent via third-party correspondence as 4D Write documents, and will be placed into Open > Incoming Letters. If these letters appear as blank, you may need to uncheck this setting and revert back to importing the letter as an attachment directly into the patient file. |
| Create a Task When Importing a Letter | This will determine if a task is created when importing letters. If Genie can determine the recipient of the letter, the task will be sent to that user. However, if the recipient is not able to be determined, the task will be sent to the administrator of Genie. |
| Alltalk/EQuery DivisionReport |
If you are sending and receiving electronic correspondence using either Alltalk/EQuery or DivisionReport, you can enter the Carrier Identifier for these software providers in the relevant fields. |