Start from the receipt, not the ledger
The first document your accounting has to serve is the receipt a client submits to their extended health plan after a session. Plans reimburse Registered Dietitian visits, and adjudicators reject receipts that miss the basics: your name and RD designation, your College of Dietitians of Ontario registration number, the client's name, the date and a plain description of the service, the fee and how it was paid. A bounced receipt becomes your admin problem twice, because in Ontario dietitians are also on the CRA's list of authorized medical practitioners, so the same client may claim the visit under the medical expense tax credit at tax time.
We set the receipt template up once, inside the platform you already run, and keep the books in agreement with what was issued. Where a plan's direct-billing network includes dietitians, each deposit still has to be tied back to the sessions it covers, and that reconciliation is ours, not yours.
Two kinds of income, one clean chart of accounts
Counselling fees from individual clients carry no HST; workshops, consulting and brand work billed to businesses usually do once a practice is registered. The filing mechanics are a tax question, but the bookkeeping question comes first: the two streams need separate income accounts and separate invoice templates from the start, so an HST return, if you ever need one, is a report rather than an archaeology project.
The smaller lines deserve their own lanes too. If you dispense through Fullscript, the platform pays you a margin share, and the books should show that margin as its own income line instead of letting it blur into session revenue. Subscriptions to Practice Better, That Clean Life or a telehealth add-on get tagged by what they support, so any future input-tax-credit split already has its paper trail.
Virtual practice, records that hold up
Telepractice moved the sessions to video; the record-keeping duties stayed put. A dietitian in private practice is a health information custodian under PHIPA, so charts, meal plans and messages live in the clinical platform under its safeguards, never in the accounting file. We keep the two systems pointed at each other without mixing them: Practice Better, Healthie or Jane holds the clinical and payment record, QuickBooks Online holds the financial one, and month-end confirms they tell the same story.
Retention is where solo practices drift, because three clocks run at once:
| Record | Where it lives | How long to keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Client charts, plans and telepractice notes | Practice Better, Healthie or Jane | Your College's standard: ten years from the last entry, longer for clients who were minors |
| Invoices and insurer receipts | Issued from the platform, mirrored to the books | Six years from the end of the tax year they relate to |
| Bank, card-processor and Fullscript statements | QuickBooks Online, via feeds | Six years, with the reconciliations that used them |
| HST working papers, if registered | The accounting file | Six years, split calculations included |
A month-end sized for a practice of one
Most nutrition practices are one clinician and a laptop, and the books should respect that. Our End-to-End Accounting service runs the whole loop from our Mississauga office: one business bank account on a live feed, Dext catching receipts from your phone, the platform's payout reports mapped into the ledger, and a monthly close you can read in five minutes. Payroll only enters the picture when you hire, and then it runs inside the same engagement rather than as a bolt-on.
If the practice is still small enough that full monthly accounting feels heavy, CPA Quick Support at $99 a month keeps a CPA on call for receipt questions, CRA letters and the register-or-not conversation until the caseload justifies more. Either way the scope is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, so the fee is a decision you make once, not a meter you watch.
