By
Adam Simmons
· Last checked
August 2026
Three things need settling in writing before you post the role, and none of them are about the person you hire.
Whose clients are they? Someone who comes to the practice and is allocated to an associate is a different arrangement from someone who comes to that associate by name. This one decision shapes your website, your phone, your intake, and what happens to a caseload if the associate leaves.
Who holds the records? Not a preference — a regulated question, and the answer determines what system the records live in, who can access them, and who is responsible for retaining them afterwards.
What happens when they leave? They will, eventually. Agreeing it while everyone is optimistic is enormously cheaper than agreeing it later.
Everything else — the fee arrangement, the schedule, the office, the software — is negotiable and adjustable. Those three are structural, and practices that skipped them tend to discover it at exactly the worst moment.
Three things need settling in writing before you post the role, and none of them are about the person you hire.
Whose clients are they? Someone who comes to the practice and is allocated to an associate is a different arrangement from someone who comes to that associate by name. This one decision shapes your website, your phone, your intake, and what happens to a caseload if the associate leaves.
Who holds the records? Not a preference — a regulated question, and the answer determines what system the records live in, who can access them, and who is responsible for retaining them afterwards.
What happens when they leave? They will, eventually. Agreeing it while everyone is optimistic is enormously cheaper than agreeing it later.
Everything else — the fee arrangement, the schedule, the office, the software — is negotiable and adjustable. Those three are structural, and practices that skipped them tend to discover it at exactly the worst moment.
Employee or contractor?
This changes your obligations substantially, and it is not settled by what you call the arrangement or what the contract says. There are established tests, and getting it wrong has consequences that arrive later and cost more than the difference.
The test is published and it is not a labelling exercise. "The facts of the working relationship as a whole decide the employment status", and "workers and payers can choose how they set up their affairs; however, the employment status they choose must reflect their working relationship." What gets examined is the level of control, who provides the tools and equipment, whether the worker can subcontract or hire assistants, the degree of financial risk, responsibility for investment and management, and opportunity for profit (Canada Revenue Agency). Different factors apply where the contract is formed in Quebec.
The exposure sits with the practice, not the associate: an employer who fails to deduct the required contributions and premiums "has to pay both the employer's share and the employee's share of any contributions and premiums owing, plus penalties and interest."
You do not have to guess, either. "If a worker or payer is not sure of the worker's employment status, either can ask the CRA for a ruling." Do that, or take advice from an accountant or an employment lawyer, before the arrangement starts rather than after.
What your College requires
There are profession-specific obligations layered on top of the employment question, and they vary by profession and by province. The ones that most often catch practices out concern supervision, what clients must be told about who they are seeing and under whose supervision, whose name may appear in advertising, and who is accountable for records created by a supervisee.
Ontario's psychotherapy College publishes a section on supervision, and three lines of it settle arguments early.
Whose clients they are is something you are expected to write down. What a supervision agreement should cover includes "clarification regarding who has ultimate responsibility for clients (e.g., is the supervisee treating their own clients, the supervisor's clients, clients of an agency or clinic?)" (CRPO 4.1).
Clients get told. "Registrants are expected to inform clients if they are required to practise with clinical supervision", and to tell them "that they may contact the clinical supervisor directly to ask questions or express concerns about services provided by the supervisee" (CRPO 4.2).
Supervision generates its own records. "Clinical supervisors keep a detailed record of clinical supervision provided" (CRPO 4.1). For psychologists and behaviour analysts those records carry their own retention clock — ten years following the last relevant clinical contact of any client discussed (CPBAO 4.5.2).
The numbered clauses themselves are short: registrants "provide clinical supervision only if they are qualified to do so", and "appropriately supervise persons whom they are professionally obligated to supervise". Titles, advertising and whose name may appear on what are profession-specific, and they belong on your own College's site rather than in anybody's summary of it.
Professional liability coverage is a separate question again, and half of it has a published answer. Each registrant carries their own. Ontario's psychotherapy College requires insurance of every registrant other than an inactive one, "regardless of whether you are practising", and while it "will accept coverage provided through an applicant's or registrant's employer", it adds that "a registrant with employer-specific PLI must not practise the profession in any other setting unless they obtain PLI that covers the other setting" (CRPO). That last line matters the moment an associate also sees a few clients of their own somewhere else.
The other half is not a College question. Whether your own policy responds differently once someone works under you is for your insurer to answer, in writing, before the arrangement starts.
The practical setup
Assume everything you use will need reconsidering, because solo tools are built around one person.
Records and scheduling. Whatever system holds the clinical record needs a second clinician in it, with access limited to their own caseload. Migrate yourself onto whatever you choose before the associate starts — every problem you find while you are the only user is a problem they never encounter.
The phone. A practice line that was a personal boundary tool for you now has to work as a front door for two people. Inquiries have to reach the right person, coverage has to be visible, and nothing can sit unanswered because each of you assumed the other had it. Most single-practitioner lines cannot do this at all.
Email. Give them a practice address, not a personal one, and make sure it is an address you can recover and hand over when they leave. This sounds administrative until the day it isn't.
A written record of who did what. Shared logins are the wrong answer for a lot of reasons; in a practice where communications may form part of a clinical record, the inability to say who replied is a real problem rather than a tidy one.
What to agree before day one
Put all of it in writing, even if the relationship is friendly. Especially if the relationship is friendly.
How they are paid, on what basis, and when
Who supplies what — office, software, insurance, supervision
Whether the associate can see their own clients privately, and where the line is
Whose clients they are, in the sense above
What notice either side gives
What happens to the caseload on departure — who tells the clients, who continues, who transfers
What happens to the records on departure — where they live, who retains them, how long, and who the clients contact afterwards
Whether the associate takes their clients with them, and what that means in practice
How the practice number and email are handed back
The two in bold are the ones that generate disputes. Both are much easier to write down in month one than to negotiate in month twenty.
The economics, honestly
An associate does not add their billings to yours. They add a share of their billings, minus the software seat, minus the supervision, minus the office, minus the admin their presence creates, minus the time you spend on all of it.
That can still work well. But the first hire is usually close to break-even, and practitioners who expected otherwise tend to feel the disappointment in the management work rather than in the money.
Worth asking what problem the hire is actually solving. If it is "I want to see fewer clients and earn the same", a hire may do it. If it is "I cannot keep up with the phone and the admin", the cheaper fix is usually administrative help or better tooling, not a clinician.
Sequencing that works
Settle the three structural questions.
Get advice on employment status and read the College material.
Choose the shared systems and move yourself onto them.
Run your own practice on the new setup for a while.
Write the agreement, including the departure clauses.
Then hire.
Hiring first and building the infrastructure around a new person while they are trying to see clients is the most common ordering mistake, and it leaves a practice with two parallel ways of doing everything.
The short version
Decide whose clients they are, who holds the records, and what happens on departure — in writing, before you advertise. Get real advice on employment status and read your College's own material on supervision rather than a summary of it. Move yourself onto the shared systems first. And be honest about whether the problem you have is a clinical-capacity problem or an admin problem, because only one of them is solved by hiring a therapist.
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