Assume yes, and design your texting practice around that assumption.

The Colleges that address this in writing do not treat text messages as a separate informal channel that sits outside the file. For registered psychotherapists in Ontario, Standard 3.4.6 says: "Registrants offering modalities requiring written communication (secure text- or email- based) include copies of correspondence and treatment-related communication in the clinical record" (CRPO Standard 3.4).

The same College's list of what a clinical record contains names texts outright. Under Client contact it holds "A notation of all in-session and out-of-session contacts with a client or their authorized representative", with the examples given as "letters, emails, texts, and telephone calls."

British Columbia's regulator sets the scope of its records standard just as wide: it applies to "written, electronic, audio, visual, and other forms of records related to patients or individuals being assessed, services, communications, and professional decisions" (CHCPBC, Practice Standard: Records).

The practical consequence is not really about compliance paperwork. It is that a message you send at 9pm on your phone is a clinical document, and it will be read later by someone who was not in the room.

Does it matter whether the text was "just scheduling"?

It matters to how much of it you keep, not to whether the obligation exists.

The Ontario social work standards describe records that "may include any or all of the following: checklists; correspondence; minutes; client reflections, journals, art, and/or homework (direct/clinical settings); appointment records; and/or audio and/or video recordings" (OCSWSSW 4.1.2). Correspondence and appointment records both appear on that list. A scheduling text is plausibly both.

The same standards then leave you a real decision about the marginal material: tools and data "may include rough or draft notes, messages, test results" and "if placed in the record, these tools cannot be removed... if not placed in the record, they shall be appropriately destroyed."

So the honest answer to "does every 'running 5 min late' text have to be preserved forever" is: your College's standard gives you judgment, and the judgment has to be exercised in advance and consistently, not retroactively when someone asks for the file.

What does "in the chart" actually mean for a text?

This is the part nobody's standard solves for you, because it is a mechanics problem.

A text lives on a phone or in a messaging service. A chart lives somewhere else. Getting one into the other means one of three things, and practitioners describe all three.

Transcribing the substance into a progress note. Cheapest, most common, and the one most likely to be criticised later if the paraphrase is thin. It is a summary, not a copy.

Screenshotting or exporting and attaching. Faithful, ugly, and it produces a second copy of the message in a second place unless you then delete the original.

Using a system where the message thread is itself part of the record. Removes the copying step entirely. It also means the thread is now subject to your retention schedule, which is the trade you are making.

None of these is endorsed by a College over the others. What the Ontario electronic practice guideline says is that the choice is something clients are entitled to hear about: "clients may be interested to know whether email communications are stored separately or in the clinical record" (CRPO Electronic Practice Guideline).

What goes wrong in practice

The Ontario social work College's practice notes work through a scenario worth reading in full. A client emails between sessions; then, as the notes put it, "At the next session, the member discusses the email with the client, explaining that the email is part of the client's clinical record." The client had not known, and the relationship does not survive the discovery (OCSWSSW practice notes).

The failure there is not the documentation. It is that the documentation practice was never disclosed. The College's published guidance asks members to make sure clients are aware of "The fact that messages received through communication technology may become part of their client record?" (OCSWSSW, Top 10 Considerations for Using Communication Technology in Practice).

What most practitioners end up doing

Two rules, decided once, applied without exception.

Decide what the channel is for, and say so out loud at intake. Scheduling and logistics only is a very common line and it is defensible precisely because it is narrow. The moment clinical content starts arriving by text, the channel has quietly become therapy and the documentation burden changes with it.

Decide how the message gets into the record, and use the same method every time. Inconsistency is what makes a file look reconstructed after the fact.

If your practice is entirely scheduling-by-text, the honest observation is that you may not need any new tool at all — a documented policy and a habit of noting material exchanges will carry you a long way. The tooling question only becomes real when the volume, or the content, does.

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