Tabs is built by Kova Labs, a South African software studio. We built it because allied health practitioners here are running real businesses on tools designed for somewhere else — or on nothing at all.
Every product is the sum of its arguments. These are the ones we had, and where we landed.
It would have been simpler to collect patient payments centrally and pay practices out monthly. We refused: it makes us a middleman in your income, with your cash flow depending on our payout run. Patient payments settle directly into your bank account and we take nothing from them.
Plenty of systems hold your data hostage when a payment fails. If a Tabs subscription lapses, new bookings pause — but every note, invoice and patient history stays readable and exportable. Clinical records are not leverage.
Once you sign a clinical note it locks and carries a fingerprint of its contents. Corrections are dated addenda. It is slightly less convenient and considerably more defensible, which is the right trade for a health record.
Our features page carries a section listing what Tabs does not do — medical aid claim submission, SMS, video calling. We would rather lose a sale at the demo than have you discover a gap after moving your practice across.
Rands and VAT, POPIA rather than HIPAA, local payment methods, patient-facing pages in English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa. Not an international product with a currency switcher bolted on.
Tabs is made by Kova Labs. When you email us, a person who works on the product reads it — there is no support tier between you and the people who can fix your problem.
We are onboarding our first practices now, which means two things worth being straight about. You will get an unusual amount of our attention. And you will be shaping what gets built next, because we would rather build what practices ask for than guess.
Bring the awkward questions about your workflow, your billing and your data. That conversation is more useful to both of us than a polished pitch.