Bookkeeping for Austin Mental Health Practices
Monthly bookkeeping for therapists, counselors, and group practices in Austin. Work directly with Aretha Dirden, remotely, coast to coast.
Bookkeeping for Austin Mental Health Practices
Bookkeeping for therapists is the only kind of bookkeeping I do. My name is Aretha Dirden, and before this I spent more than 15 years as a licensed nurse working in mental health, so the language of your practice is already familiar to me. Intakes, no-shows, supervision hours, a Tuesday stacked with back-to-back sessions. None of that needs explaining before we can talk about your numbers.
Austin keeps adding people, and the number of private practices has grown right along with it. Some of the owners I hear from left an agency job with a waitlist already forming. Some rent a room in a shared suite and split the overhead with other clinicians. Some see every client by video from a home office up north or out toward Cedar Park. The books look a little different for each of them, and every one of them would rather spend Sunday afternoon on something other than a bank reconciliation.
Monthly Bookkeeping
Monthly Bookkeeping
Transactions categorized, bank and credit card accounts reconciled, and reports you can read between sessions. Full-service bookkeeping starts at $165 a month and keeps the practice current instead of nine months behind.
Catch-Up and Clean-Up
Catch-Up and Clean-Up
Books that were never started and books that were started badly both land on my desk regularly. I record what is missing, correct what was miscategorized, reconcile every account, and give you numbers you can believe again.
Payroll and 1099s
Payroll and 1099s
If your payroll system is already running, I process the pay runs each period so payday stops living in your head. Year-end 1099s for associate clinicians, contract supervisors, and vendors are handled too.
Tax-Ready Books
Tax-Ready Books
Your tax preparer handles the return. My part is making sure they receive reconciled accounts, sensible categories, and reports that answer their questions the first time they ask.
Austin Practices I Work With
Austin has a deep bench of mental health providers. Solo counselors renting an afternoon in a shared office, group practices with a handful of associates and a few contract supervisors, prescribers running medication management panels, ABA teams with technicians on the schedule all week. It is also one of the more online cities I work in, since plenty of Austin clinicians built their caseloads over video and never returned to a full-time office.
Most of the practices I work with have somewhere between one and ten people on the payroll, and the owner is usually still carrying a caseload of their own. That is the size where accurate books matter most, because a wrong assumption about profitability can follow you for a year before anyone catches it. If that sounds like your practice, book a consultation and tell me where things stand.
Solo Therapists and Counselors
Solo Therapists and Counselors
Private pay deposits, insurance payments, and card processing all arrive on their own schedule. I reconcile them against your practice reports so you can see what a week of clinical hours actually earned, sliding scale and all.
Telehealth-First Practices
Telehealth-First Practices
Telehealth practices carry a subscription stack and merchant fees that add up quietly. I track the platform costs, match payouts to sessions, and keep home office and equipment records tidy for your tax preparer.
Group Practices
Group Practices
Associate splits, W-2 staff, and 1099 contractors recorded the way they actually happened, with reporting that shows what each clinician contributes. Useful when you are weighing whether to bring on the next associate.
Prescribers and ABA Teams
Prescribers and ABA Teams
Psychiatric nurse practitioners and ABA providers run higher visit volume and bigger teams, which makes the books busier every month. My nursing years were spent in mental health, so this corner of the field is home ground for me.
Questions About This Area
You are in California and I am in Austin. How does that work?
It works the same way it does for my clients everywhere else. I get secure access to your bank feeds and your practice reports, do the work from my desk in Lancaster, and we talk by phone or video whenever you want. You always talk to me, never to a rotating team.
What does monthly bookkeeping cost?
Full-service bookkeeping starts at $165 a month. Where your practice lands depends on how many accounts and transactions we are working with, and I quote it after I look at your books so there are no surprises later.
My books are months behind. Where do we start?
We start with a look at what exists. If the books were never done, that is catch-up work. If they were done in a hurry and nobody trusts the numbers, that is clean-up work. Either way I price it per engagement, get you current, then keep it current with monthly service. You will not hear a lecture from me about how it got this way.
What do you not handle?
I do not prepare tax returns. Your books are kept tax-ready so your tax preparer has what they need. I also do not do insurance billing, claims, credentialing, or coding, and I run payroll only for practices whose payroll system is already up and running.
I see clients in Texas and a couple of other states by video. Does that change the bookkeeping?
It changes how we organize things more than it changes the work itself. I keep revenue and platform payouts recorded cleanly so the picture stays clear as you add states. Licensing questions belong with your board and multi-state tax questions belong with your tax preparer, and I am glad to hand either of them the reports they ask for.
Helping the People Who Help Others
Let's Start With
a Short Conversation
Tell me where your books stand right now, even if the honest answer is that nobody has looked at them in a year. I'll ask a few questions and give you a clear idea of how I can help.
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