By
Adam Simmons
· Last checked
August 2026
Six things, and only six, before you can see a first client:
Your registration in good standing, with whatever your regulator requires for independent practice in your province.
Professional liability insurance.
A way for someone to reach you that isn't your personal cell number.
A way to keep records that you can still open in ten years.
A consent form covering the work and how you communicate.
A way to take payment and issue a receipt with your registration details on it.
That's the list. Everything else — a website, a logo, a business name, an office, a scheduling tool, a video platform, a fax number — is either optional or can wait until a real client makes it necessary.
The most expensive mistake new grads make is not underbuying. It is buying a five-vendor stack in month one, in the belief that the stack is what makes it a practice, and then discovering three months in that half of it overlaps and none of it brought a client through the door.
Item one deserves a closer look than it usually gets, because being registered and being allowed to practise on your own are not the same thing. Ontario's psychotherapy College is the clearest published example: registrants "will not be permitted to practice independently, i.e. without clinical supervision, until they have completed 1,000 direct client contact (DCC) hours and 150 hours of clinical supervision over the course of their professional careers", a limitation that "applies to all registrants" until the College is satisfied it has been met (CRPO, Supervision Requirements).
Every regulator words this differently and some do not gate it this way at all. The point for a new graduate is that supervision may be a required, recurring cost in your first years rather than an optional one — and it belongs in the budget before any software does.
Six things, and only six, before you can see a first client:
Your registration in good standing, with whatever your regulator requires for independent practice in your province.
Professional liability insurance.
A way for someone to reach you that isn't your personal cell number.
A way to keep records that you can still open in ten years.
A consent form covering the work and how you communicate.
A way to take payment and issue a receipt with your registration details on it.
That's the list. Everything else — a website, a logo, a business name, an office, a scheduling tool, a video platform, a fax number — is either optional or can wait until a real client makes it necessary.
The most expensive mistake new grads make is not underbuying. It is buying a five-vendor stack in month one, in the belief that the stack is what makes it a practice, and then discovering three months in that half of it overlaps and none of it brought a client through the door.
Item one deserves a closer look than it usually gets, because being registered and being allowed to practise on your own are not the same thing. Ontario's psychotherapy College is the clearest published example: registrants "will not be permitted to practice independently, i.e. without clinical supervision, until they have completed 1,000 direct client contact (DCC) hours and 150 hours of clinical supervision over the course of their professional careers", a limitation that "applies to all registrants" until the College is satisfied it has been met (CRPO, Supervision Requirements).
Every regulator words this differently and some do not gate it this way at all. The point for a new graduate is that supervision may be a required, recurring cost in your first years rather than an optional one — and it belongs in the budget before any software does.
What do I need on day one, really?
Registration and insurance are not negotiable and not something to shop on price. Get both settled before anything else, because several of the decisions below depend on them — the wording on your receipts, what you can call yourself, and in some cases whether a directory will list you.
A way to be reached. Practitioners are almost unanimous that this should not be your personal number, and the reasons are less about privacy than about what happens the first time someone in crisis has your cell. You do not need anything sophisticated. You need a number or an inbox that a stranger can use, and a truthful statement of when you reply.
Records. Practice-management software is the usual answer and it is a good one, but a new grad with two clients does not need the top tier of anything. What you need is somewhere records live that is secure, backed up, and exportable — because the software you pick now is probably not the software you will be using in five years.
A consent form. Yours should say what the work is, what the fee is, what the limits of confidentiality are, and — the part people forget — how you and the client will communicate between sessions and how fast you reply.
On content, Ontario's psychotherapy College sets one line worth memorising: "Registrants keep an accurate, complete, and legible clinical record for each client" (CRPO Professional Practice Standards). Its commentary adds that the record carries "a notation of all in-session and out-of-session contacts", naming letters, emails, texts and telephone calls — so the calls and messages count too.
On retention, check your own regulator rather than a number you heard, because they genuinely differ. Ontario's social work College requires records be kept "for at least ten years from the date of the last entry or, if the client was less than eighteen years of age at the date of the last entry, at least ten years from the day the client became or would have become eighteen" (OCSWSSW, Interpretation 4.2.2). BC's health regulator sets sixteen years (CHCPBC, Practice Standard: Records). The counselling therapy standards set seven, explicitly as a floor that yields to whatever law or employer requires, "whichever is longest" (CCPA Standards of Practice).
The practical consequence for a first purchase: whatever you pick has to be readable a decade or more from now, and it has to let you take the data out. That is one requirement, and it rules out more products than any feature list will.
What can wait?
A website. A directory profile will bring you clients faster than a site nobody has a reason to visit. Build the site when you have something to say that the profile can't hold.
A business name and a corporation. Practising under your own name is normal and costs nothing. There are good reasons to register a name later, and almost none to do it in week one.
An office. Virtual-first is a completely ordinary way to start in Canada now, and it removes the single biggest fixed cost from your first year.
A fax number. Get one when a specific referral source asks for one, not before.
Anything with the word "suite" in it. Bundles are priced for practices with staff.
What does the first year cost?
Honestly: less than most of the guides imply, and more than the free tools suggest. The recurring costs that are genuinely hard to avoid are insurance, your registration fees, records software, and some way of being reached. Everything else is elective in year one.
Practitioners discussing phone setups report paying somewhere in the low tens of dollars a month for a work number, and at least one has said plainly that a second line on their phone plan was more than they could afford. That is a real constraint and worth naming — cheap is a legitimate requirement, not a failure of ambition.
Registration is the biggest of the three and varies a lot. Published annual figures run from $373.25 for BC social work (BCCSW) and $400 for social work in Ontario and Alberta (OCSWSSW · ACSW), through $641 plus HST for full Ontario psychotherapy registration and $350 plus HST for Qualifying (CRPO), up to $1,000 for a registered psychologist in Alberta (CAP) and $1,630 for a psychologist in BC (CHCPBC). Budget above the annual fee in your first year: application, examination and jurisprudence fees stack on top, and most of these are not prorated for a mid-year start.
Insurance is the cheap one. Published association group rates for a solo practitioner sit roughly between $100 and $230 a year — one social work plan lists $5,000,000 of professional liability plus $5,000,000 of commercial general liability for "$132" (BMS Canada, CASW coverage highlights). Most other programmes quote after a form, so ask early rather than guessing.
Software you can price yourself in an afternoon, and the phone half is smaller than the guides imply: a prepaid Canadian line publishes at "$19/month" (Koodo), and app-based services start in the teens without stating which currency they mean.
What actually loses new grads their first clients?
Not the missing website. Not the logo.
The pattern that shows up over and over is the unreturned inquiry. Someone calls between two sessions, leaves no message or a short one, and by the time there is a gap in the day it feels too late to call back and look professional. Therapists describe this in almost identical language: no window in the day, exhausted by the end of it, and an inbox of inquiries that have already booked with someone else. Prospective clients contact several therapists and go with whoever replies.
So the practical version of "a way to be reached" is not just a number. It is:
a greeting that says when you return calls, and what to do in an emergency
something that acknowledges a missed call or a message without you having to be free
one channel you actually check, said out loud, rather than three you check unevenly
Getting that right in your first month is worth more than any other setup decision you will make.
The order I'd do it in
Registration and insurance. Then a work number and a work email. Then records software and a consent form. Then a directory profile with your fee and your availability on it. Then, only if you still want it, a website.
If you do those in that order you can take a client the week you finish, and every purchase after that is a response to something real rather than a guess about what a practice is supposed to look like.
About Rivet
Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.
One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.