Your Practice Maintenance Calendar

Here’s a guide I wrote [and keep writing] about the regular tasks you should be doing in your practice.

Weekly Tasks

Here’s what I’ve found useful to do weekly. It’s helpful if it’s the end of the week, but it doesn’t have to be.

1. First, set up a time each week that is ONLY for admin work! If you don’t do that, you’ll never find time to do the rest of this.

2. Clean up your inbox/voicemail! While I fail terribly at this in my personal life, in my practice I make sure it’s all cleaned up at the end of the week. That means the longest I might go forgetting to reply to a client/colleague is a week.

3. Check all payments/deposits. I use SimplePractice for billing, and most clients are either set to autopay or I run the payment at the end of the session. Sometimes if autopay isn’t turned on and I’m really hungry or get distracted after a session I might forget to run the payment. It happens pretty infrequently but when it does it’s annoying to have to tell a client “I forgot to charge you last week, so you’re going to be charged twice this week.”

Monthly Tasks

On the last day of the month, do the following, if applicable:

1. Back up your clients files, if stored digitally. Personally, I export my SimplePractice data to a thumb drive that I keep in a safe. I don’t delete old exports unless I run out of room.

2. Check on profit/loss/number of clients. Depending on what tools you use, how you do this may vary. In SimplePractice you can only see this month and the last month’s profit, number of appointments, and number of clients. So now would be a good time to put that in a spreadsheet.

3. Do you have any outstanding invoices? Deal with those.

4. Check that your website works - the links, the forms, the self-scheduling! This one really caught me by surprise. I’ve had a couple things break:

   1. My self-scheduling link to SimplePractice broke when they changed the structure of the links. I brought it to their attention and they fixed it, but not after it had been broken on my site for who knows how long!

   2. My Wordpress mailing list signup tool for my NVC group got a major update and stopped working. Blech, another reason I ditched Wordpress!

Quarterly Tasks

1. Pay your quarterly taxes! If you have QuickBooks Self Employed it tells you when and how much. See my upcoming article about how to figure out all this stuff yourself.

2. Do you need to realign how you distribute your income to your bank accounts? Do so now.

3. Take a deep breath. Be satisfied in the work you’re doing.

Yearly Tasks

When you do this is up to you, but it’s easy to remember your birthday, so why not do it then?

1. How did your expenses turn out for the year? Do you need to adjust the amount you set aside from income to account for those expenses? Now would be a good time to realign that.

2. What tasks did you HATE doing in the past year? Is there some way you could outsource or automate them?

I’d love to hear what you have on your practice calendar. What tasks do you do regularly? Please share in the comments below!