One of August's updates began with an ordinary need in my own practice: I needed to send an appointment reminder directly to a minor client, and PracticeRunner would not let me.
PracticeRunner was intended to be cautious with child profiles, but it treated access as an all-or-nothing decision. Making this more flexible became part of a broader month of work shaped by my clinical days and further conversations with therapists and group practices during onboarding. A common thread emerged: I wasn't adding features for their own sake, but finding spots where work was awkward and reducing friction without losing important clinical or financial boundaries.
A clearer clinical day
Living in San Francisco, I really appreciate watching the fog gradually lift, revealing Twin Peaks, the blue sky, the ocean. I hope that in PracticeRunner, the new Today view will show appointments, unfinished notes, and prioritized follow-up emerging from the fog. Tasks such as overdue balances, unsigned supervisee notes, scheduling conflicts, and incomplete forms have a home, no longer competing for attention with all the other tasks. I had also found myself leaving Session Workspace whenever I needed to check an earlier note, so I added an unobtrusive view of recent session notes directly to the workspace.
Appointments can now identify which members of a couple or family are attending. A young person's portal access can be managed separately from a parent or guardian's access, so an appropriate reminder can reach the young person without automatically granting billing access. Communication and financial responsibility are connected to the case. A couple, family, or group remains a cohesive case that can be managed independently of appointments. Read more about relationship cases.
The first inquiry doesn't always tell you what the work will become. Someone who gets in touch individually may end up in a couple or family case, or join an existing group. A couple may get in touch and one person continue in individual therapy. Prospect setup now lets you choose and confirm that arrangement before clinical or billing history has accumulated. You initiate the change; the software doesn't decide it for you. See how to set up the prospect case.
Making it easier to pay for therapy
I use Apple Pay online, at the bakery and grocery store all the time, and it occurred to me that we could bring it into PracticeRunner too. This month, I added Apple Pay and Google Pay to the client portal. When a client has Apple or Google pay set up, they can pay or add a payment method with a few familiar taps instead of finding a card and carefully entering all the details. If you don't want to automatically charge clients or you run workshops in your practice, clients or workshop attendees can make one-off payments instead of being required to store a card on file.
For a while before the pandemic, I had been in the habit of asking for payment at the beginning of each session. Later on, I moved away from this to monthly billing, but I know that many therapists still work that way, and that we need to support therapists who work like this. This led to Pay by Phone: the therapist opens or creates an invoice, shows a QR code or sends a secure link, and lets the client pay privately on their own phone using a credit card, bank transfer, or follows the practice's instructions for paying outside PracticeRunner. Pay by Phone creates a simple in-session handoff without requiring card-present equipment or turning the therapist's device into a payment terminal.
Payment setup became simpler too. I found that configuring payment method profiles separately for each client was too complex, as I'm moving from offline to bank payments with new clients. Practices can now create reusable payment profiles with their preferred methods, discounts, and instructions, then assign one to a particular client or case. Credits, refunds, saved methods, retries, and reconciliation also became more consistent.
Treatment plans, reporting, and claims
PracticeRunner now has a fuller treatment-plan workflow for creating, revising, activating, and reviewing a plan. Group practices can route a plan to a supervisor and return it for changes without relying on a separate email thread. As with other AI features in PracticeRunner, treatment plan drafting starts disabled. When enabled, it can propose changes from a clinician-selected set of signed notes and submitted forms. Every proposal identifies its source and must be accepted, edited, or rejected by the clinician. Treatment plans themselves are a type of form that can be customized to meet the needs of each practice.
Collaboration with a group practice helped shape new reports for understanding services, payments, unpaid balances, attendance, clinician activity, scheduling, and financial handoffs across a team. The reports distinguish recorded payments from uncertain imported history and provide CSV copies for further review.
Separate work with another colleague is moving the CMS-1500 workflow closer to being ready for use in their practice, with better review, corrections, and manual payer-response reconciliation. PracticeRunner can apply a recorded payer payment and contractual adjustment to the related invoices, though it still does not submit claims electronically. I'm not quite ready to take on that whole enchilada, as long as I'm still focused on polishing the core product.
Migration shaped by real onboarding
I continued strengthening the SimplePractice importer while onboarding another therapist. SimplePractice exports can contain missing relationships, inconsistent documents, uncertain appointment details, and billing history that needs interpretation. The importer now provides clearer review, stronger safeguards, better case reconstruction, and repair tools while keeping uncertain results visible for human review. Switching systems should not require blindly trusting that every relationship, appointment, document, and balance landed correctly.
Read what the importer can move or see the SimplePractice and PracticeRunner comparison.
A more concrete offer for founding practices
Founding practices receive hands-on onboarding, direct access to me during setup, and an opportunity to inform what I build next. Under the current offer, AI note drafting is included at no additional charge, and associates can be added for $11 per month each. If you're curious about joining as a founding practice, send me a note about how you work and what you'd like to make easier. We can talk through whether PracticeRunner is a good fit and what getting started would involve.
The direction we're going in is increasingly clear: keep clinical work connected to practical operations, support therapy as it is actually practiced, and avoid turning useful improvements into another expensive add-on. If any of this sounds familiar in your practice, I'd like to hear about it.