By Julia W.
File Under general Question Beginner
In this day and age, technology rules everything around us. Whether it’s security, real estate, medicine, you name it. While technology has its downsides, the upsides outweigh them by far. Because of this, technology has become an essential part of the mental health space as well. Thanks to technology, therapists and clients can be linked in a second; counselors can see their clients from the comfort of not only their offices but their homes as well, and marketing can be done with ease.
This article is for you: whether you are a therapist who is thinking of starting your private practice and wondering what you need, or a therapist who already owns a practice and is looking for ideas to improve. Below, we have listed helpful apps which we believe will help you run your practice effectively.
Accounting Apps
Not everyone was bitten by the mathematics bug at birth. Some of us can barely use a calculator without swooning. Imagine being one of these people and then being told you have to track finances from start to finish. This is where software apps like Wave and Quickbooks come in handy. They come highly recommended by hundreds of private practice owners. These applications help you track your revenue easily for a reasonable price.
Security Apps
An ethical mental health provider should strive to take client confidentiality seriously. This means client information should be secure at all times. When it comes to email confidentiality, Hushmail is highly recommended. Hushmail is a software that encrypts your emails such that no one else can access them except you and your client. Like any other email service, you can easily read and compose your email but a passphrase is required to access this service.
Another recommended app is 1password. In a nutshell, 1password saves all your passwords for you so that you don’t have to write them down somewhere they can be found by the wrong people. Once you sign up, you create one unique passkey then once you are signed up, you can save your passwords to all of your different accounts there. The only way to access these passwords is through the passkey.
Payment Apps
Top of the list is Square. Square is a credit card processing system which also supports Point of Sale. What stands out the most with Square is that they do not charge a business merchant fees but rather, charge a flat-rate fee per transaction. For a counselor trying to save some coins, that is a big plus.
Other good payment alternatives include Intuit QuickBooks, GoPayment, Clover, and Paypal Here. Make sure to research them to find one that suits your needs the best.
Planning and Scheduling Apps
Being a therapist means that you spend most of your time in session. This means that at the end of the day you have to deal with responding to potential clients, clearing your voicemail log, sending reminders to clients in between sessions etc. Full Slate helps you do this. As the name suggests, you can do almost all of it here. Among a variety of useful features, the app helps you accept appointments and send reminders to your clients. You can also use it to send thank-you notes and automated messages.
Another app in this category is Evernote. Evernote is a note-taking app that records and organizes your notes both in voice and written form. It comes in Windows, Apple, and Android versions and has basic and premium and basic options. It is up to you to decide which suits you best.
These apps will help you run our practice more easily and efficiently. In the next article, ‘Best Tech Gadgets to run my Private Practice’, we also give you a list of tech gadgets that we think will help you make your private practice life a little easier. Hop on over and have a look!