Why move from Doodle to Synchro for your FMG.
Doodle is handy for polling availability. But a poll is not a schedule. In an FMG, the coordinator still spends hours transposing Doodle responses into Excel and adjusting by hand. Here's where it breaks down and what Synchro solves.
What Doodle does well
- Fast for polling 5 to 15 people on a single occasion (team meeting, one-off on-call, training).
- No account required for respondents, shareable link by email.
- Free tier works for simple polls.
- Familiar interface for many professionals.
What Doodle does not do in an FMG
1. Doodle collects, it does not assign
Doodle tells you who is available when. It does not decide who takes Saturday on-call, who sits in office 4 on Tuesday, or who gets the 8 walk-in patients at 1 p.m. Assignment stays fully manual. You end up back in Excel to build the actual schedule.
2. One poll at a time, no recurring schedule
Every Doodle poll is an isolated event. An FMG running 52 weeks a year with regular slots means recreating a poll every period. There's no concept of a recurring shift, a work block, or a master schedule that evolves week after week.
3. No constraints, no equity
Doodle doesn't know that Dr. X wants no more than 2 on-call shifts per month, that Dr. Y can't work before 9 a.m. on Thursdays, or that Friday evening shifts count double in the equity ledger. You collect checkboxes, nothing more. Fairness stays a debate you handle manually.
4. No offices, no clinic slots, no walk-ins
An FMG has to assign shared offices, publish consultation slots, distribute walk-ins, manage shift transfers. Doodle models none of that. It's a generic tool built for "when can we meet on Tuesday", not for running a clinic.
5. No audit trail, no useful history
Once the poll is closed, the information lives in the coordinator's inbox. Six months later, when a physician disputes an assigned shift, there's no structured history. Who said yes, who said no, when, why, all lost.
The ROI calculation
Take a typical 30-user FMG (physicians + staff + coordinator) using Doodle to poll and Excel to build the schedule.
Current cost (Doodle + Excel + coordinator hours)
- Creating and chasing Doodle polls: ~3 h/week.
- Transposing responses into Excel and assembling the schedule: ~17 h/week.
- Total: 20 h/week × 4 = 80 h/month at ~$30/h (loaded salary) = $2,400/month.
- Doodle Pro subscription (if used): ~$9/month.
- + Cost of errors and email back-and-forth, hard to quantify but real.
Cost of Synchro
- Subscription: $10 CAD × 30 users = $300 CAD/month.
- Coordinator time on scheduling: ~6 h/week × 4 = 24 h/month, or $720 of hourly cost.
- Total: $1,020/month.
Net gain
Difference: ~$1,380/month of recovered productivity, or $16,560/year. Without counting the end of email chasing, equity conflicts, and last-minute schedule rebuilds.
The moment to switch
FMGs usually switch from Doodle to Synchro at these moments:
- Polls pile up, one a week, and no one answers on time.
- The coordinator realizes that Doodle saves 30 minutes on collection but costs 3 hours on transposition.
- A physician disputes a shift and there's no structured trace of who said what.
- The FMG needs to handle shared offices or walk-ins, which Doodle doesn't model at all.
Further reading
Close the last Doodle poll.
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