Ultrasounds are performed every day, and a damaged machine can be costly to repair or replace. An annual audit is a good time to review the equipment. Bigstockphoto.com Every veterinary practice has at least one piece of equipment everyone has quietly agreed to work around. The centrifuge that only runs if you close the lid a certain way. The dental unit that loses suction by mid-afternoon. The analyzer is technically functional, but takes three tries to calibrate. Nobody has put it on a replacement list because it is not broken. It just costs you a little bit every single day—in time, in workarounds, and in the small erosions of a team’s patience. Budget season is when those costs come due, or don’t. Most practices approach equipment planning reactively: something dies, and it gets replaced under duress, usually at full price and on the vendor’s timeline rather than the clinic’s. A deliberate audit flips that dynamic. Done once a year, it turns equipment from a series of emergencies into a line item you can plan around. Here’s how to run one before you build your 2027 budget. The hidden cost of aging equipment The sticker price of a new piece of equipment is the number everyone fixates on, and it is often the least important one. The real expense of aging equipment hides in three places—service and repair, downtime, and staff time—and none of them show up cleanly on a single invoice. Service and repair As equipment ages, service contracts get more expensive or disappear entirely, and out-of-warranty repairs arrive unpredictably. A single emergency repair on a critical analyzer or imaging unit can cost thousands of dollars, and it almost never happens at a convenient time. Downtime When a piece of equipment fails midday, the cost is not just the repair—it is the rescheduled appointments, the samples sent to an outside lab at added expense, the diagnostics postponed, and the clients who leave without answers. For revenue-generating equipment, an afternoon down can quietly cost more than a monthly lease payment. Staff time The third, and the one that is rarely quantified, is staff time lost to workarounds. Every manual step your team takes to compensate for equipment failures is unbilled labor. Ten minutes of coaxing a machine to cooperate, several times a day, across a full team, adds up to real hours over a year—hours your staff would rather spend on patients. This is the cost that never appears on any statement, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged. We kept an older underwater treadmill running for years because it still moved water, and the belt still turned. The temperature control had become unreliable, so the team developed a routine: 10–15 minutes of testing and adjusting before every session, plus the occasional mid-session restart if the water drifted. When I finally timed it across a normal week, we were losing the equivalent of three and a half billable therapist hours every month on that one piece of equipment—time that could have been spent treating more dogs or educating owners. It was not broken. It was expensive, but it never appeared on an invoice. The ‘annoying but not broken’ category The hardest equipment to evaluate is the equipment nobody complains about anymore—because the team stopped complaining and started coping. This is the quiet middle ground between what is working and what is broken, and it is where most of the hidden costs live. Equipment in this category still technically functions, so it never makes a replacement list, but the staff has built an entire layer of unofficial routines around its quirks: the specific order you have to power things on, the workaround for the setting that will not save, the second unit they use instead because the first is unreliable. These habits become so normal that leadership often has no idea they exist. The danger of this category is twofold: first, the accumulated time cost is invisible precisely because it has been absorbed into “how we do things;” second, coping masks risk—equipment being nursed along tends to fail suddenly and completely, usually at the worst possible moment, because the warning signs were normalized long ago. Surfacing this category is the single highest-value part of an audit, and it cannot be done from an office. It requires asking the people who touch the equipment every day. GettyImages/fatcamera Involve the team that uses it Leadership sees the invoices. The team sees the reality. An equipment audit built only from the top is guaranteed to miss the “annoying but not broken” category entirely, because those problems live in the daily workflow, not on any statement. The staff who run the equipment know exactly what is frustrating to use and what slows them down every day. They know which unit everyone avoids, which one has a trick to it, and which one they are secretly bracing to lose. Ask them directly—not “Is anything broken?” but “What do you work around?” The phrasing matters. The first question gets you a “no.” The second gets you the truth. Involving the team does more than surface hidden costs. It builds buy-in for the decisions that follow. Staff who helped identify a problem are far more invested in the solution, and far more forgiving of the training curve that comes with new equipment. A replacement decision handed down from above lands as one more change imposed on a busy day; a replacement decision the team helped shape lands as a fix they asked for. The first time I stopped asking, “Is anything broken?” and asked, “What do you deal with every day?” my technician responded a therapeutic exercise platform was functional on only one side, rendering the other half useless. I was shocked because it never appeared on the service log. To my staff, it was still usable, but to me, it cost time and accommodations to function at half capacity. I never would have known if I hadn’t asked about their day-to-day workflow. 5 questions to ask about every major piece of equipment An audit does not require a spreadsheet full of depreciation schedules. It requires five honest questions, asked about every significant piece of equipment in the building. Walk through the practice room by room and answer them out loud. How old is it? Age alone is not a verdict—plenty of older equipment runs fine—but it sets context. Know the purchase year and where the unit sits relative to its expected service life. What does it cost to maintain? Add up the last 12 months: service contract, repairs, parts, calibration, consumables. Put a real number on it. Maintenance costs tend to climb slowly enough that no one notices until the annual total is startling. How often does it go down? Track failure frequency, not just failure cost. A unit that fails once a quarter is a different risk than one that fails once a year, even if each repair costs the same. Frequency is what disrupts your schedule and erodes team confidence. What would replacing it cost? Get a current number, including installation, training, and any workflow changes. Knowing the replacement cost in advance means you’re never negotiating from a position of emergency. What is it costing us when it doesn’t work? This is the question most practices skip, and it's the most important. Estimate the revenue and rescheduling cost of a day of downtime for that specific unit. For a high-use analyzer or imaging system, that number reframes the entire replace-or-keep decision. Answered together, these five questions turn a vague sense of “we should probably deal with that eventually” into a ranked, defensible list. The unit that is old, expensive to maintain, frequently down, cheap to replace, and costly when idle is your obvious first move. The unit that is old but reliable and cheap to run can wait another year with confidence. Building the budget Once you have your ranked list, the budget almost writes itself. Sort your equipment into three tiers: replace this year (old, costly, frequently down, expensive when idle), watch and budget for next year (aging but currently reliable), and keep (sound and cost-effective). Attach your replacement-cost numbers to the first two tiers, and you have a defensible capital plan instead of a wish list. The advantage of planning this way is the leverage it provides. Equipment bought on your timeline is equipment bought on your terms—you can compare vendors, negotiate, wait for a better price, and schedule installation for a slow week rather than scrambling after a failure. Reactive buying surrenders all of that. Every one of those advantages disappears the moment the decision is made for you by a machine that quits at 8 a.m. on a Monday. Start the audit now, while there is no emergency forcing your hand. Walk the building, ask the five questions, and—most importantly—ask your team what they have quietly been working on. The equipment costing you the most is rarely the piece that is broken. It is the piece everyone stopped mentioning. Find it before it finds you, and next year’s budget becomes a plan instead of a series of surprises. Tom Walsh, DVM, is the owner of PrimePet Rehabilitation Therapy in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He co-wrote this article with the team at Shepherd Veterinary Solutions.
