Which aesthetic clinic software has built-in consent forms?

The four things that separate consent features

Almost every system in this category will tell you it does consent. The claim is close to meaningless on its own, because it covers everything from a genuinely automatic clinical workflow to a PDF you attach by hand. These are the questions that actually separate them.

• Is the form attached to the service, or does somebody have to remember to send it? Automatic is the only answer that survives a busy week, and it is the single largest difference between systems.
• Does it reach the client before they arrive? Consent taken in the chair, minutes before treatment, is worth less than consent given with time to read it, and some regulators take a dim view of the former.
• Is it timestamped, and can you prove when it was signed? A signature with no reliable time attached is much weaker evidence than one with an audit trail.
• Can you export it? If a system holds your consent records and will only give you a contact CSV on the way out, your history is effectively hostage.

Where the others fit

Consentz has built its product around consent and documentation and knows the ground well, so a clinic that wants documentation to be the whole system may want it on the shortlist. Two things count against it in practice: you cannot find out what it costs without booking a demo, and consent on its own is not a clinic, so you still need booking, deposits, records and marketing around it. Beautay runs the same automatic consent workflow with all of that attached, at a price printed on the page, for one practitioner or twenty.

Pabau carries prescribing, labs and diagnostic coding. If your clinic genuinely runs those, it is a different category of product and worth the demo. For the far more common clinic whose week is consultations, injectables and skin treatments, that depth is paid for and rarely opened, and the consent workflow you actually use every day is no better for it.

What a consent form has to contain

Whichever system you choose, the form itself has to do specific work. It must name the specific treatment rather than a category, set out the risks and side effects, record that alternatives and the option to decline were discussed, capture health history and contraindications, and carry a dated signature.

Clinical photography needs its own separate permission, because using an image for a client's record and using it on Instagram are different purposes and one consent does not cover both.

The part that is not a software question

Client health information is special-category data under UK GDPR, which means you need a lawful basis and a separate Article 9 condition, appropriate security, and a retention period you can actually state. Software can hold the record securely and produce it on request. It cannot decide your lawful basis for you, and no vendor should imply otherwise.

Your indemnity policy adds its own conditions on top, typically requiring contemporaneous records including signed consent for a defined period. The two obligations overlap without being the same, and meeting one while assuming it covers the other is the most common gap in this area.