Owl Practice has a feature designed specifically for those customers who do Couples and Family Therapy. It is called Linked Accounts and it lets you link two or more client profiles together. Linked Accounts allows you as a therapist to have a full clinical history of your clients in their individual file, whether they came in as a family, a couple, or otherwise, while enjoying the convenience of booking sessions and recording financial information for multiple Clients at once when you choose to. To set these up:
- Create a unique Client Account for each member of the family.
- Next, head to one of the Client Accounts > Contact & Clinical > Circle of Care.
- Click Add Linked Account.
- Search for and select a client name (the one whom you are trying to link).
- You also have the option to note this person as the emergency contact, set them as the Bill-To Party (to be included on invoices and receipts) and set appointment reminders for them.
- Press the green Save button to save your work!
Scheduling Sessions for Linked Accounts
Once you’ve linked accounts, you can schedule Family or Couple sessions (for Services described as “Family” or “Couple” Types in your Fee Schedule), and you’ll see Owl automatically include a list of suggested attendees based on the type of session.
For example, if you set up a Family session for Megan, Owl will include Daniel, Luke and Violet as attendees. You can always remove a person from the session by clicking on the “x” next to their name in the Edit Session window. Meanwhile, a Couples session will only show the partners Daniel and Megan, as the children aren’t involved.
Sessions with multiple attendees also show up differently on invoices, receipts, account summaries, and notes. For multi-person sessions, you’ll see that the “Attended” Attendance state is replaced by a list of the people who attended that session. No Shows and Cancellations still show up as before. When creating a note, you’ll see a list of session attendees, which will also be displayed on printed and PDF notes.
Since these sessions apply to multiple people – all the attendees of a session – both the Session and the Note for that session will appear on the Sessions & Notes tab of each attendee. From a billing perspective, however, the amount charged only shows up in the primary client’s profile (the “Client” as described in the Edit Session window when the session was originally set up).
Note: If the client you are trying to link is not appearing when searching for them in the Add Linked Account window, this means that this client is linked to another circle of care already, as a client can only be in one circle of care at a time. In this case, you will need to re-link everyone in one client's circle of care. To do this, go to Clients > Linked Accounts and delete the existing circle of care. From here, go to one client's profile then re-link everyone from all associations in one circle of care. When you are booking, you would then only add the appropriate members for billing and session scheduling purposes.