Frequently asked questions

Alnora is a WordPress plugin built specifically for private medical clinics — booking, doctor schedules, encrypted patient records, payments, reminders and GDPR tools in one place. It replaces the usual mix of a generic booking plugin, WooCommerce and spreadsheets.

Private practices of any size — dentists, psychologists, physiotherapists, aesthetic and dermatology clinics, and general practitioners — as well as agencies that build sites for clinic clients.

Yes. The free core (alnora-clinic) is free to download and covers online booking, working hours, email confirmations and GDPR consent logging. Pro and Clinic add payments, reminders, records, calendar sync, telehealth and more.

The features are identical. The only difference is how many sites the license covers: Pro = 1 site, Clinic = up to 3. Choose Clinic if you run multiple sites or are an agency.

Checkout and licensing are handled by Freemius. After purchase you receive a license key and a download link, activate the plugin on your site, and updates then flow automatically through WordPress. You can manage your sites, invoices and renewals from your Freemius account. See the license docs.

Yes. Deactivate the license on the old site first so you don’t use up an activation slot, then activate it on the new one.

Your subscription renews automatically, so as long as payment goes through your license stays active and everything keeps working — nothing to do. If a renewal isn’t paid, the license lapses and the Pro features stop working until you renew. Renewing reactivates them immediately.

Yes — 30-day money-back. If within 30 days of buying Pro you hit a defect that makes Alnora unusable and our support team can’t resolve it, we’ll refund you in full. It covers genuine defects rather than a change of mind or a conflict with another theme or plugin — see the refund terms.

Stripe and PayPal for online card and wallet payments, bank transfer, and cash / pay-on-arrival. You can also take a deposit (percentage or fixed) to secure bookings. Which Stripe and PayPal methods you can offer depends on your currency and country — bank transfer has no such limit. See the payments docs.

Yes — switch on bank transfer. Patients booking online are shown your account details and a payment reference, and their appointment time is held while the money is on its way. When it arrives you press Mark transfer received, which confirms the booking and emails the patient in one step — from there it behaves like any other paid booking, invoice and reports included. There is no gateway account to apply for and no per-payment fee, so it works in any country and any currency. See the bank transfer docs.

Yes. Add the booking yourself from Alnora → Add appointment — search an existing patient or add a new one — and it behaves exactly like a booking a patient made themselves. To get paid, open the appointment’s Payment popup and email the patient a secure link to pay online by card or PayPal. If you take deposits you can send the deposit, the full amount, or the remaining balance after a deposit, and the appointment is marked paid automatically. See the add-a-booking and payment-link docs.

Yes. Any online (Stripe or PayPal) payment can be refunded straight from the appointment — in full or in part — and the money goes back to the patient’s original card or PayPal. The patient is notified by email (and SMS/WhatsApp if enabled), and refunds you make in the Stripe/PayPal dashboard sync back automatically. Cancelling never refunds automatically, so you stay in control. See the refunds docs.

Patients pick a frequency (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and how many repeats, then see a live list of every upcoming date before booking. Each repeat keeps the same time when it’s free, or shifts to the nearest free slot instead of skipping a period. If they pay online, a single checkout covers the whole series and every visit is marked paid — with per-visit refunds if one is cancelled. See the recurring appointments docs.

Yes, via Twilio — alongside email reminders. See the reminders docs for setup.

Yes — up to six. Add a row for each moment you want to remind at, say 24 hours and 3 hours before, and tick the channels each one should use: an email the day before, a text on the morning itself. Columns only appear for the channels you have switched on, so a clinic with no Twilio account isn’t looking at SMS boxes it can’t use. A reminder is skipped when the booking was made after its moment had already passed — someone booking two hours ahead is not sent a “3 hours to go” message on the spot. See the reminder docs.

Yes. With Multiple services booking enabled, a patient can add several services to a single appointment — the durations and prices add up automatically and the whole block is reserved on the doctor’s schedule. See the multiple services docs.

Yes. Open the appointment’s More info panel and pick a new date and time from the doctor’s free slots. The patient is re-notified by email (and SMS/WhatsApp if enabled), and your Google/Outlook calendars, Zapier and reminders update automatically. Payments are left untouched. See the reschedule docs.

Yes. Group your team and your service menu into categories, and the booking form shows a category filter so patients can narrow down before choosing. Empty categories are hidden automatically. See the categories docs.

Yes. Turn on Doctors search and/or Services search and a search box appears above that step, filtering as the patient types (doctors match on name, specialization and category). It works alongside the category filter — the chips narrow the list first and the search looks within it. Both are off by default, since a search box over a short list adds a step rather than saving one. See the search docs.

Yes — Alnora → Send an email. Everything else Alnora sends is a consequence of something the patient did; this is the one screen where you start the message, for the things that are nobody’s booking: the surgery is closed on Friday, a new practitioner has joined, the flu clinic is open. Write it with headings, lists, images and buttons, and use {patient_name} so each person gets their own copy rather than a circular.

Narrow who it goes to by doctor, doctor category, service, service category or location, preview the real email and send yourself a test first, then let it send in the background in small batches — a list of several hundred does not hang the page, and you can stop part-way. A doctor reaches only their own patients, and reception cannot send at all. It always goes out from your clinic address. See the send-an-email docs.

Yes. A doctor signs in to their own profile and diary, sees only their own appointments, and runs their own services and their own forms — including their own ordering, which wins over the clinic’s for their own list. Anything the clinic shares with them stays read-only, because only the clinic changes that. A form they can see but not change can still be duplicated, so a clinic-wide questionnaire is a starting point for their own version rather than something to retype. See the roles docs.

Yes. Every email and SMS/WhatsApp template has its own Send this email / Send this message switch, so you can drop the ones you don’t want — for example the clinic’s own “new booking” copy — and keep the rest. Everything is on by default, and the patient’s and the clinic’s copies are separate switches. See the email template docs.

Yes. Confirmed appointments are pushed to Google Calendar and/or Outlook and removed on cancellation. It’s one-way — events you add directly in those calendars are not imported back and won’t block booking slots.

Medical records are encrypted at rest (AES-256) and stored on your own server — never sent to third parties, webhooks or analytics. Roles limit who can open a record.

Encryption is only worth as much as the key, though, so Alnora lets you move the key out of the database into your site’s configuration — a copy of the database then stops being a copy of the data. It takes about a minute and nothing is re-encrypted. See your encryption key.

Yes — text, dropdowns, checkboxes, dates, yes/no questions and file uploads. You decide far more than whether a field is required: when it appears (only for certain doctors, services or locations), who is asked it (patients booking online, your staff on Add appointment, or the patient in their portal) and where the answer is kept — on the appointment, the patient record, their contact details, their clinical information, their portal, or your Zapier webhooks. That lets you keep a clinical answer out of reception’s view while they still record it over the phone. Each question also has a switch for whether its answer is repeated in the new booking email your team reads, so you can ask and store something without printing it in every notification. See the form field docs.

Yes. Build as many forms as you need — an intake questionnaire for one doctor’s assessments, a consent form, a review between visits — and conditions decide who meets which: by doctor, doctor category, service, service category, location, or whether the patient is new or returning. Forms are matched in the order you arrange them and the first one that fits is the one used, so dragging a row changes which a patient gets. Each form says where it is used: on the booking form (and on Add appointment, so staff taking a booking by phone are asked exactly what a patient booking online is asked), in the patient portal, or on a page of its own. Your general form stays underneath as the fallback, so a patient nobody has aimed a form at is never left without one. See the forms docs.

Yes — set a form’s placement to On a page and paste the [alnora_form id="3"] shortcode the Forms screen shows you. The patient has to sign in, because the answers are written to their record and the alternative is trusting an email address typed into a public box — anyone who guessed an address could write to that person’s notes. Every submission is kept as its own entry rather than overwriting the last, so a questionnaire asked before each visit builds a history on the record. You can open the page yourself while signed in to WordPress and see the questions as a read-only preview, rather than the patient login. See the forms docs.

Yes. Signed into the portal, a patient can correct their name and phone number, answer any question you chose to show them there, and upload a referral letter or a scan before the visit. Changes are saved against the patient, never against a past appointment, so what they told you on the day of a visit stays on that visit. Their email address is the one thing they cannot change, because it is the login behind the portal and the identity every appointment is matched on. See the patient portal docs.

No. A patient who already has a portal account can sign in while booking — their details fill in for them and the visit joins their existing record instead of creating a second one for the same person. See the sign-in docs.

13 built-in languages for everything patients see (form, portal, emails, PDFs), with localized dates, and many currencies. Any wording can be overridden with a translation plugin like Loco Translate.

Use the [alnora_booking] shortcode or the Alnora Booking Form block. A “Book an Appointment” page is created automatically on activation. You can pre-filter by doctor, service or location — see the embedding docs.

Yes — Alnora runs on any standard WordPress theme. The booking widget’s fonts, colors and corners are customizable to match your brand.

No. Everything is configured from the WordPress admin with plain-language settings. The documentation walks through every step.

One step happens outside WordPress: moving your encryption key means pasting one line into a file on your hosting, using your host’s File Manager or SFTP. Alnora gives you the line — your host’s support will paste it in if you would rather not. See the encryption key docs.

Yes, both. Six lists have their own CSV import and export — patients, doctors, services, locations and both kinds of category. Rows are matched against what you already have rather than appended, so the same file can be imported twice without doubling your list, and a column your file does not contain is left alone (a two-column file fixing everyone’s phone number cannot wipe anything else). Export first and you have a template with your own data already in it.

Separately you can export your whole clinic as one file — every table and all your settings — for moving to another site or putting things back after a problem. Encrypted information stays encrypted inside it, so it is not a readable copy of your records, which also means the site you restore it onto needs the same encryption key. See the import/export and backup docs.

Yes, and it takes about a minute. Records are encrypted, but out of the box the key that opens them is generated into the same database — so a copy of the database is a copy of the data, and the encryption protects very little. Alnora → Settings → GDPR → Encryption key shows you the exact line to paste into wp-config.php — or a must-use plugin, or your theme, if your host keeps wp-config.php out of reach — and then removes the database copy for you. It is your existing key, so nothing is re-encrypted and nothing changes for your patients or your team.

One thing to know first: that line becomes the only copy of the key, and backup plugins do not back up wp-config.php. Keep it in a password manager. Nobody can recover it for you, including us — which is exactly the point of moving it. See the encryption key docs.

Yes. Consent is logged with a timestamp and IP, and Pro adds a full GDPR toolkit — data export, right-to-erasure and an audit log.