[caption id="attachment_74028" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Image by Fran • @welcometotheanimalKINdom from Pixabay[/caption] A busy small animal clinic can see twenty to thirty patients in a single day. Each one deserves the same level of attention as the first appointment of the morning. Fatigue, time pressure, and freeform note-taking work against that goal. A vet who relies on memory and a blank page will skip body systems, miss subtle findings, and write records that are hard to defend later. Structured physical exam templates address all three problems at once. They force the clinician to touch every body system and record findings in the same order, every time.