How do you keep my financial information secure?
I’m always glad when a practice owner asks me this before we start working together. The short version is that I only need financial records, I use secure standard tools to get them, and I keep my access as narrow as the work allows.
Scope matters most, so let me start there. Bookkeeping runs on bank and credit card activity, merchant processor payouts, payroll reports, and vendor bills. I don’t need your EHR login. I don’t need progress notes, treatment plans, diagnoses, or anything else about the people you see. Those records belong in your clinical system and they stay there. If I need a revenue figure that lives in your practice management software, you can export a financial summary and send that instead of handing me the keys to the whole thing.
For documents, I use secure file sharing rather than email attachments. Bank statements sitting in an inbox for years are a risk nobody needs to carry. In QuickBooks Online, I work as an added user with my own login and my own credentials, so no password is ever shared and my access can be removed at any time. When a bank supports a read-only or accountant-level connection, that’s what I use, so I can see transactions without any ability to move money. When a bank doesn’t offer that, we use statement uploads instead. I would rather do a little extra work than ask you to give me a password.
Names do surface occasionally. A deposit description, a client statement, or a returned payment can carry one. When that happens, I handle it the way I handled everything else during more than fifteen years as a licensed nurse in mental health. Confidentiality was never a policy I read once and filed away. It was simply how the day worked, and that habit came with me into this work. It’s also part of why bookkeeping for therapists is the only kind of bookkeeping I do.
One more thing worth knowing is that I’m a solo bookkeeper. You work directly with me, not a rotating team and not subcontractors you’ve never met. Fewer hands on your records is its own form of protection.
I’ll also be honest about what I won’t claim. I’m not going to tell you that hiring me makes your practice compliant with any particular standard. That conversation belongs with your own attorney or advisor. What I can tell you plainly is which accounts I touch, how your documents reach me, and what I never ask for. If your attorney wants a written confidentiality agreement in place, I’m happy to sign one.
There are a few things that help on your end too. Keep a business bank account and card separate from personal, give each person their own login instead of sharing one, and remove access whenever someone stops working with the practice. Clean access is part of what makes full-service bookkeeping run smoothly month after month.
If you’d like to talk through exactly what access I would need for your practice, book a consultation with me and we’ll walk through it together.
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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.
More Questions
What's the difference between profit and the cash in my account?
Profit measures what your practice earned and spent over a period of time. Your bank balance shows what is sitting there at one moment, after payment lags, big annual bills, tax set-asides, and owner draws. Both numbers are true, and they answer different questions.
Read answerShould my associates be W-2 employees or 1099 contractors?
Classification is not really a preference you get to pick. It turns on how much control the practice has over the associate's work, and associates who see the practice's clients on the practice's schedule often land on the employee side of those tests. The call belongs with employment counsel and your tax professional, and I make sure the books and payroll records match whichever answer is true.
Read answerWhat kind of practice fits AD Keeps The Books best?
Mental health practices with one to about ten people, anywhere in the country. Solo therapists, psychologists, LCSWs, addiction counselors, psychiatric nurse practitioners, group practices, telehealth practices, and ABA providers. If you want your books current and a bookkeeper who already speaks your language, you're the fit.
Read answerHow should associate compensation splits be recorded in a group practice's books?
Record the full amount collected as practice revenue and the clinician's share as a compensation expense, never netted together. Track collections by clinician so the split is calculated from a number both sides can see, and apply the written agreement exactly as it reads.
Read answerWhat software should a small practice run its money on?
Three pieces cover almost every small practice. The practice management platform you already use for scheduling and client payments, QuickBooks Online for the actual books, and a business bank account underneath both, connected so the deposits reconcile.
Read answerWhat's different about bookkeeping for a psychologist who does testing?
Testing behaves like a second business inside the same practice. The engagements run long, the money often arrives on a different schedule than the work, and materials cost real money, so testing revenue and testing costs belong in their own categories.
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