How Do You Keep a Service Menu Decision Log?

Published September 23, 2026 · 2 minute read · General information, not legal advice. Your licensing regulators decide what applies to you.

A service menu decision log is a running record of every service your practice adds, changes, or removes, with the date, the decision owner, the reason, and the documents that had to exist before the change took effect. It keeps the menu tied to the paperwork behind it, so a service never goes live ahead of the forms, oversight, and records it depends on.

Why the menu drifts away from the paperwork

Service menus change quickly. A new treatment gets added because a vendor offered training, or a package gets created for a promotion. The website updates the same day. The intake addendum, the consent, the charting fields, and the medical director's review often lag behind, sometimes by months.

The log does not decide whether a service is appropriate. That decision belongs to the practice and its accountable prescriber. The log records that the decision was made, by whom, and whether the supporting documents existed on the date it went live.

How to run it

Keep one table. Each row is a change, not a service. Adding a service is a row. Changing its price or duration is a row. Removing it is a row. Before a row can be marked live, the dependent documents column must list each required document and its status.

What to record

• Date of the change
• Service name and type of change: add, modify, remove
• Decision owner
• Reason for the change
• Dependent documents and their status
• Oversight review, with reviewer and date
• Date the change went live on the menu and website

This log sits inside the opening sequence described in How to Open a Med Spa. For the underlying format, see checklist versus decision record.