Finding your way around TherapyLock

At a Glance

TherapyLock has four working areas: your dashboard holds your client list, each client record holds everything about one person, the calendar holds everything about your sessions, and Payments is where the money from those sessions shows up.

The map

A rule of thumb worth keeping:

Most of the questions we hear come down to looking for something in the wrong one of those three places. Once the split makes sense, the app does too.

[DIAGRAM: four-box map for the design team. Dashboard at the top. An arrow down to Client record labelled "open a client". Client record and Calendar side by side, joined by two arrows: "book and manage their sessions" pointing to Calendar, "an attended session becomes a note" pointing back to Client record. An arrow from Calendar down to Payments labelled "attended sessions appear here". Practice documents and My Account sit apart from the flow, as places about you rather than about clients.]

Your dashboard: the client list

The dashboard is your client list. There is no separate clients page to go looking for; when you want a client, this is the door.

What lives here:

• Every client and supervisee you hold, searchable by client identifier, with their session count at a glance
• Filters for Active, Inactive, All and CYP, and sorting by most recent, A to Z, Z to A or start date
• Your practice at a glance: active clients, retention alerts, outstanding payments
• Retention alerts, which tell you when records are approaching or have reached their deletion date
• The doorways to everything else: creating a client, the appointments calendar, practice documents and your account

To open a client, select them from the list. Everything about that person is inside their record.

The client record: everything about one person

Open a client from the dashboard and you are in their record. This is where the person lives:

• Session notes, written against sessions, with the amendment trail beneath each one. The record keeps count for you and shows which session number comes next
• Working notes and reasonable adjustments, the practical, non-clinical things worth remembering
• Documents you have uploaded for this client
• Appointment history, including their attendance rate
• Payment history, including their usual rate and anything outstanding
• Their details: contact information, preferred way of being contacted, GP surgery, emergency contact, child and young person information where it applies
• Retention settings, the export of their full record, and deletion

The record and the calendar are connected in both directions. View Calendar at the top of the record takes you straight there, and the appointment history lets you create an appointment or deal with one without leaving the record. The calendar remains the home of session management, which is where we go next.

The calendar: everything about a session

Everything that happens to an appointment happens here, viewed by day, the next 30 days, month or year:

• Booking sessions, including recurring bookings
• Recording enquiry calls before someone becomes a client, with no client record needed
• Marking a session attended, did not attend or cancelled, with who cancelled and why
• Deciding whether a missed session is still charged
• Rescheduling and editing, including the meeting link
• A Needs Action count, which gathers past sessions still waiting for an attendance decision so nothing slips through
• Your practice hours, counted from every session marked attended, split into client and supervision hours, with space to add hours from before TherapyLock and a download for accreditation

When you mark a session attended, TherapyLock offers the next steps in one place: record the payment, write the session note, book the next session. The note you write is kept on the client's record, which is why you will not find your notes in the calendar afterwards.

Payments: where the money surfaces

Payments is a personal record of what you have been paid and what is still owed. It gathers what you record against sessions:

• Anything outstanding, grouped by client, with a shortcut into each client's record
• Not yet recorded, the past sessions you have not given a payment status yet. You can record these from the calendar or from the client's payment history
• Income over time, with filters for the period and the type of work
• A CSV export for your accounts

One thing worth being clear about: TherapyLock records money for your own bookkeeping. It does not take payments from clients, and it does not issue invoices.

Two more places, both about you rather than your clients

Practice documents is your own filing drawer: your clinical will, client agreement, insurance, memberships, qualifications. Nothing stored here ever appears in a client's file or a client export, and it is never touched by retention deletion. It is also where the TherapyLock templates live, ready to download.

My Account holds your plan and billing, your name and practice telephone number, two-step verification, the export of your entire practice, and your Clinical Will arrangements.

Related articles

• Recording attendance and what happens after a session

• Why session notes cannot be edited, and how amendments work

• Bringing an existing practice into TherapyLock

Still Need Help?

If you have any other questions about TherapyLock, our support team is here to help.

Email us at support@counsellingtutor.com and we will be happy to assist.