Start Here

Welcome to Optomate Touch, Australia & New Zealand’s favourite Practice Management and Electronic Health Record System for independent optometry.

This first overview topic outlines top level information that you need to know before you read the specific help notes relating to each Optomate Touch module.

System Registration

Your business name and address details are linked to the Optomate Touch registration code. Changing business name and/or address details will result in you needing to contact Monkey Software for a new registration code.

Global settings, such as Business Details and Tax Method are accessed via the System Settings tile on the main menu.

Branch specific settings are accessed under the Setup Menu > Branches.

Device specific settings are access under the Setup Menu > Workstation.

Tax

Optomate Touch utilises a proportional tax formula for the purposes of calculating cash-based or payment-based tax on invoices. Previous versions of Optomate, such as the Premier Series, utilised a stock-type formula, attributing tax to GST-Free items first.

For example, a Patient Invoice for Frame $300 ex-tax (taxable item) and Lenses $200 ex-tax (non-taxable item) and a payment of $250 will result in a GST of $13.64 (where GST is 10%) in Optomate Touch and $4.55 in previous editions of Optomate.

If you’re converting from a previous edition of Optomate to Optomate Touch and your business uses the cash-method for tax, the system will produce a report named ‘Cash-Based Tax Adjustments.pdf’ found in the C:\Optomate Touch folder highlighting adjustments that you may need to make in your accounting system or next Activity Statement.

The GST Accrual Method calculation remains unchanged.

Optomate Premier Series Users

If you are converting from the Optomate Premier Series we recommend that, prior to converting, you :-

1. Complete and clear all outstanding banking.
2. If you are using the OzBiz Accounting integration facility, that you export and import all current sales and arrival information.
3. If you are using the Online Medicare/DVA Claiming facility, that you receive all outstanding claims and do not send any new claims until you convert.

All Premier Series equipment integrations are available in Optomate Touch, except the Digital Healthcare/Iris DHClient application which requires an upgrade to be developed by Digital Healthcare. Note that if you are using the Medmont Studio integration then you must be running Release 6.x or above.

Please also note that the formula for recall success has been amended resulting in recall success ratios only being calculated moving forward after conversion. The new formula calculates recall success based on patient consultation invoices. The user can stipulate the time period they deem a recall is successful eg. 100 invoices raised including a consultation for chosen period (all different patients) = 100 attendances. 50 of them were last sent a recall within your chosen period = 50% hit rate.

Both Optomate Touch & Optomate Premier store the cost of items at the time of a sale. The Optomate Touch Series, however, does not store the cost of an item within the line item of a Patient Invoice Return or Cash Sale Return where that item is marked as Non-Inventory. This may result in a slightly different Average Cost for a period, compared with the Premier Series.

All data is converted from the Premier Series to Touch Series, except Letter/Email/SMS Templates, Historical Appointments, Inventory Transactions, Historical Recall Transactions, Completed Inventory Transfers & Inventory Write off’s, due to the new data structures and logic employed in the Touch Series.

Optomate Touch also includes a theme facility that automatically changes the system user interface to reflect holidays for Halloween, Christmas and Valentines Day. If you want to disable the theme option you can tick the System Settings “[ ] Suppress Holiday Themes option.

Backup

If you are not using a third party facility to backup your Optomate Touch database and documents, you can run the OTBackup.exe found in the \Optomate Touch application folder.

We recommend you backup your Database & Documents folders every day.

Technology

Optomate Touch utilises a Microsoft SQL Server database and ships with MS SQL Server 2019 Express edition, providing a 10GB database threshold, more than enough for a single practice.

Larger Enterprise edition installations may require Standard, Business Intelligence or Enterprise editions of MS SQL Server requiring you to purchase an appropriate Microsoft license.

System Requirements

We recommend running Optomate Touch on an Intel-based PC with at least 8GB RAM and Windows 11 Professional Edition. We do not support Windows ‘Home’ editions. When running Optomate Touch on a network, more RAM may be required for the Server (Main PC).

The PC or device running Optomate Touch must support a minimum horizontal display resolution of 1280 and vertical resolution of 900 pixels.

Network workstation PC’s should be cabled where possible, using a minimum 100Mbps connection, although we recommend 1Gigabit connections.

When running wireless devices we recommend utilising 802.11n or 802.11ac technology.

If you are deploying an Enterprise single database, multiple location solution, you will require an instance of MS SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition or above. Application Servers require 200MB RAM per user and Database Server requires 2GB for the Operating System + 4GB per Database instance + 100MB per user. Both Application and Database Servers should be running Windows Server 2019 or above.

For large database utilising MS SQL Server Standard or above, we recommend running a weekly SQL Maintenance Plan, including Check Database Integrity, Shrink Database, Reorganise Index & Update Statistics. Your maintenance plan should run outside of trading hours.

Your chosen anti-virus software must be configured to disable real-time scanning of the Optomate Application folder and all subfolders, the MS SQL Database folder and MS SQL Server Application folder.

If you have any questions, please call Monkey Software on 1300 650 295 (Australia) or 0800 666 539 (New Zealand).