There are two screens you will spend most of your time on: the client form (the one-off setup for each person you see) and the dashboard (where you write notes after each session). This article walks through both, and explains a handful of fields that look optional but actually do useful work in the background.
Both screens are reached from the Therapy dropdown in the navigation bar at the top: Clients for the list, Notes for the dashboard.
Adding a client
Open Therapy > Clients and click Add Client. The first time, the dashboard will show a friendly prompt nudging you here.
The empty form looks like this:
And once filled in:
Use a code, never a name. The Client ID field accepts letters, digits, dash, underscore, and space, up to 64 characters. Pick something you can recognise but that means nothing to anyone else: "C-001", "Mon-1030", "TUE-A". The vault stores nothing that could identify a client, by design. Keep your private mapping (code to real name) somewhere offline, like a paper book in a locked drawer.
If the "client" is actually a group, tick Group. The Gender label is replaced by Group Description, where you can write a short note about who is in the group. Statistics treat groups separately if you want to filter them.
Frequency is required and feeds the smart ordering on the dashboard. Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly and Ad-Hoc all behave the way they sound. Pick Ad-Hoc for clients you see irregularly; the dashboard will still let you write notes for them, just without nudging you when one is "due".
The Schedule Day and Default Session Time set the regular slot. If a client is always at 10:00 on Tuesdays, set those, and the new note form will pre-populate when you select that client. The clock icon next to the time selector lets you enter a non-standard time directly if your slot is, say, 10:45.
Therapy start date is for your records. Statistics use it for tenure-based summaries.
The Session duration field is a per-client override. If your global default in Advanced > Defaults is 50 minutes but this client books 60, set 60 here and the dashboard will pre-fill 60 every time you pick this client. Leave it blank to use the global default.
Location options is another override. The dashboard's Location dropdown normally shows the global defaults set in Advanced > Defaults. If you set a comma-separated list here for a single client (for example "Online (Home), Clinic A"), the dashboard's Location dropdown shows only those when this client is selected. Useful for clients who alternate between specific physical rooms.
Always show at bottom of client list is an opt-out from the smart ordering. It pins this client below everything else, regardless of when their next session is. Use it for archive clients you keep for retention but no longer actively work with.
When you click Save Client, the record is encrypted in your browser and committed to your local vault. If Drive Sync is on, it pushes to your hidden Drive folder about thirty seconds later.
Writing your first session note
Go to Therapy > Notes. This is the dashboard where every note is written.
Pick the client from the dropdown. The list is ordered intelligently, with whoever is most likely to need a note next at the top.
Here is the same logic playing out in the live dashboard, with the client dropdown open:
Smart ordering takes account of frequency, schedule day, the time since the last note, and any session that is due today. A client whose session is today and who has no note saved yet rises to the top with a due now tag. A client who is overdue rises higher still. Ad-hoc and low-frequency clients sit below the scheduled ones. The Always at bottom override puts a client below everything else regardless.
If you want to write a note for someone who is not in your client list (a one-off contact, or before you have created the formal record), tick Ad-hoc above the client dropdown and type a short identifier in its place. Ad-hoc notes are kept separately and can be filtered in or out on the Manage Notes and Statistics screens.
Date and time pre-populate from today's date and the client's default time. Adjust them if you are writing up a session from yesterday. Duration pre-populates from the client's per-client setting (or the global default), and Location from the same logic.
If a session did not happen, tick No session in the Session Summary header and pick a reason: missed, cancelled, away, illness, or holiday. The session row is still recorded so your statistics reflect it, but the body fields are skipped.
The four sections of a note
The body of every note has four sections, each in its own textarea.
A populated note looks like this in the live app, with the four sections clearly visible:
Session Summary is what happened in the session. Risk and Safeguarding Observations is anything you would want a future you, or a supervisor, or an audit, to be able to find quickly. Clinical Decisions or Interventions is what you did and why. Agreed Actions is what you and the client agreed for between this session and the next.
The Risk, Interventions, and Actions sections all pre-fill from your default templates if you have set them in Advanced > Defaults. Most therapists find that a short prompt list ("Suicidal ideation: not present / present, see below") in the default template is more useful than a blank field, because it nudges you to comment on each item rather than skipping past it.
Two helpers run on every textarea, both inside your browser:
The spellcheck dictionary is bundled into the app and runs locally. Browser-native spellcheck is deliberately disabled on these fields because some browsers (Chrome's Enhanced spell check, Edge's Microsoft Editor) send what you type to remote servers. You can switch the in-app spellcheck off in Advanced > Privacy if you prefer no spellcheck at all, but you cannot fall back to the browser's version.
Autocomplete suggests sentences and phrases learned from your own past notes. The first time you use the dashboard, it back-fills from every existing note summary so you get suggestions immediately rather than having to save a few notes first. Press Tab or the right arrow to accept a suggestion. The dictionary is per-device and never leaves your browser.
Saving, editing, and seeing the last note
Click Save note at the bottom. The note is encrypted and persisted, and the Recent Notes list below the form refreshes.
The See last note button to the right of the client dropdown loads the most recent note for the selected client into the form. Useful at the start of a session to remind yourself what was agreed last time. Click New note to clear the form again.
If you save a note for a client and then realise you wrote in the wrong section, you can re-open the saved note from Therapy > Manage and edit it.
When the form is greyed out: read-only mode
You may, occasionally, find every form on the dashboard greyed out and the Save button disabled. A banner at the top of the page will tell you the app is in read-only mode. This is not a bug.
Read-only mode kicks in when Google Drive sync is broken: you have revoked the app's Drive permission in your Google Account, your token has expired and silent re-auth failed, the network keeps dropping, or the Drive vault file has been deleted. Editing is paused so that work you do does not silently exist on this device alone, ready to be lost the next time the browser is cleared.
To get back to full read-write, open Advanced > Drive and click Reconnect Google account. If you cannot reconnect Google for some reason, you can also restore from a Local Backup file via Advanced > Backup > Restore from backup. Either route re-enables the forms.
A few small things that pay off later
Set sensible defaults in Advanced > Defaults before you start adding clients. Default duration, default location list, and the default templates for Risk, Interventions, and Actions all save you typing across every note.
Take a backup after a busy day. Advanced > Backup, Download backup now. The session of writing notes you just did represents real work; it is worth thirty seconds to make sure it is not only on this device.
Use Manage > Statistics to spot patterns. The date filters and the include deactivated, ad-hoc, groups tickboxes let you cut your data in different ways, including for supervision purposes if a supervisor asks for an aggregate view.