Referral sources are a complex topic. They require a "special" field in the web form editor, they need to be updated in Cliniko then refreshed in Finger-Ink in order to update your forms, and they don't always go where you'd expect on the patient record.

This article aims to address that last point. In the interest of brevity, here's the general rule:

Referral sources you setup manually in Cliniko will populate correctly on the patient record, but the Contact and Patient (or Client) referral sources do not.

To understand the specifics, read on.

As per our article on changing your referral sources, the referral sources in your forms come from the referral sources setup in your Cliniko account, e.g.:
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In the above list, only the Contact, Patient (or Client) and Other referral source types appear by default in our Cliniko account. All the others (Facebook, Flyer etc.) have been added manually by us.

Any manually-added referral sources can have sub-categories, such as the podcast type above:

When we pull your referral sources into a Finger-Ink form, we pull in all of them, sub-categories and all, but we merge the Contact and Patient (or Client) referral sources into one we call Person (more on that here).

These referral sources show up in the app in the form of one field with multiple options, like this:

Choosing any of the manually-added referral sources will either show another field with its sub-categories, or progress the screen if no sub-categories exist. Here's our podcast example selected:

Selecting one of these will populate the correct place on the patient record. For example, if I had selected "Cliniko podcast" above, then this is how the patient record would have ended up:

If I had selected Person, however, we're prompted to enter a name in Finger-Ink:

And here's how it would have ended in up Cliniko:

Which, if we look behind the scenes, is this:

Why does this happen? It's because we don't currently synchronise your list of contacts, and thus don't match the entered name against a list of possible matching contacts. Why not? It's because we haven't yet figured out the best way to deal with matching a patient's entry into this field with your Cliniko contact's database — while still maintaining privacy of your contacts database.

The other type works in a similar manner to the Person type, except instead of bring prompted for a name, you're prompted for details:

And when this flows through into Cliniko, it is entered as you'd expect:

Hope this clears things up. Please do reach out if something's still a bit murky. 😊