Custom software
Practice management
The management system for people who see one client at a time and today keep the calendar in one place, the files in another and the money in a notebook.
Who it's for Practices, small firms and independent professionals billing by session, hour or consultation.
The problem
The calendar is in one app, the documents in the cloud, and what each person owes is in a notebook or a spreadsheet only its author understands. None of it talks to each other, so "is this client up to date?" is answered by reconstructing.
And there are two things generic tools get wrong exactly where it hurts: they confuse what's owed with what's been collected, and when you update your rate they rewrite the price of sessions that already happened.
How I solve it
01Appointment, session, payment and record, joined
A scheduled appointment becomes an attended session, which creates a charge, which is settled by a payment. All of it hangs off the same person's record. Nothing gets copied from one place to another.
02Accrued is not collected
A charge and a payment are different things, and the gap between them is the balance owed. Nobody has to calculate it: it's shown, current, per person and in total.
03Rates with effective dates
Every rate has a date it takes effect from. Raising your fee doesn't rewrite what last year's sessions cost. Under inflation this isn't a luxury: it's the difference between having numbers and not having them.
04The today screen competes with a notebook
That was the design criterion. If logging a payment takes more effort than writing it in the notebook, the system loses. The main screen shows the day and lets you log in two taps.
05Documents, with the person
Reports, files and paperwork stay attached to the record, not scattered across cloud folders with names you have to remember.
What I've already built
- System in production for a private practice, with the professional logging her own payments from the first month.
- It replaced the calendar-plus-cloud-plus-notebook combination with a single place where each person's balance is current.
- 212 automated tests covering account balance calculation and rate effective dates.