SLP bookkeeping: packages, contracts, and one exempt ledger

Three payers, three speeds

Private-pay families, school boards, and insurers do not pay on the same clock, and the books need to hold them apart to be useful:

• Private-pay settles fastest — card on file per session, or a package purchased upfront — but a package is the one that needs special handling, covered below.
• Insurer direct billing follows the same pattern as most allied health practices: the insurer's portion arrives on its own schedule, the client's copay at the session, and both need to reconcile to a single invoice.
• School board contracts run on invoicing terms set by the board, often thirty, forty-five, or sixty days out, and the receivable sits on the books far longer than a private session ever does.

Blending these into one "therapy income" line erases the one number a practice owner actually needs: how much cash is genuinely available this month versus how much is committed to a school board receivable that will not clear for another six weeks.

A session package is a liability until it is delivered

When a family buys a block of ten sessions upfront, the temptation is to book the full amount as revenue the day the payment clears. That overstates your income and creates a real problem if the family relocates, the child ages out of a program, or a refund is requested with sessions unused — the money was never fully earned in the first place. We record the payment as unearned revenue, a liability, and recognize a slice of it as income only as each session is actually delivered. It is more bookkeeping than a single deposit entry, but it is the only version of your revenue that matches what you have actually done for the client.

The same logic applies to a no-show or a cancelled session charged under your policy — that fee is real revenue with no clinical service behind it, and it deserves its own account rather than a seat inside session income, where it would quietly inflate your per-session average and make a slow month look busier than it was.

Mileage adds up across three kinds of visits

Home visits for early intervention, drop-ins at a daycare or preschool under a board contract, and travel between a clinic and a satellite location all belong on the same mileage log, tracked by actual kilometres rather than reconstructed at year-end — see how to track vehicle mileage for the CRA. A practice running several contracted school visits a week can accumulate a deduction that is genuinely material, but only if the log exists in the first place; an estimate made in April rarely survives a CRA request for support. Associates who travel between the clinic and their own home-visit caseload need the same log kept separately from yours, since their mileage supports their own return, not the practice's.

Reconcile the practice system outward, not the bank inward

Practice management software such as Jane knows your bookings, invoices, and client payments, but it does not know your rent, your CASLPO and OSLA dues, your liability insurance, or what actually cleared into the bank net of processing fees. We treat it as the revenue sub-ledger and reconcile outward — booking system to processor payout, payout to bank deposit, and any unpaid school board or insurer invoice to an aged receivable that gets reviewed rather than forgotten. Clinical services delivered by a CASLPO-registered SLP are exempt from HST, so that reconciliation never touches a GST/HST account; the moment a practice sells anything beyond clinical care — a communication device, a home program kit, a paid parent workshop — that revenue needs its own line, which we cover on our SLP tax services page.

Telepractice adds a currency line, not a new revenue category

A growing share of SLP caseloads run by video, and once a session is billed to a family or a payer outside Canada, the deposit arrives in USD and needs converting at the transaction-date rate rather than a month-end average. That is a bookkeeping mechanic, not a tax event by itself, but it only stays clean if each USD receipt is converted and recorded when it lands rather than batched at year-end from a bank statement — see how to record USD transactions in Canadian books for the routine we use.