5 SimplePractice Settings Every Private Practice Should Adjust

SimplePractice arrived the way a rental car arrives. It runs fine. But the seat is set for someone else, the mirrors are pointed at their blind spots, and the radio is on their station. You can drive it like that. Most people do. You just spend the whole trip slightly uncomfortable. Let’s not do that!

That is what default settings are. Somebody at the software company had to pick something, so they picked what works for an average practice. Your practice is not the average practice. You have a fee schedule, a scheduling philosophy, a billing rhythm, and a way you like to talk to new clients. None of that was known to the person choosing the defaults.

The cost of leaving them alone is not dramatic. Nothing breaks. You just lose ten minutes here, take a confused phone call there, and issue a refund you should never have had to issue. It adds up quietly.

Below are the five settings I would check first in any EHR. I found each one the slow way, usually after it had already caused a problem. Each takes just a few minutes to fix and keeps paying you back every week after that.

1. Automatic Reminders for Clients

Reminders are the single highest-return setting in your entire system, and in a lot of platforms they are either off by default or controlled by the client rather than by you.

When they are off, the pattern is predictable. Clients forget to fill out documentation. Clients forget when the appointment is. Then you get the email or the phone call five minutes before session asking where the telehealth link is. Every one of those is a small interruption that you did not budget for.

Look for a section in the client's profile along the lines of reminders and notifications. You will usually find controls for two different things:

• Reminders for upcoming appointments

• Reminders for incomplete documents

Both matter. The document reminder is the one people overlook, and it is the one that keeps intake paperwork from becoming your problem.

Two practical notes. First, check where the reminder is actually being sent. A misspelled email address means the reminder is technically on and functionally useless. Second, this is a client communication preference, so get permission before you toggle it on, or walk the client through turning it on themselves inside their portal. Either way, you as the clinician should know where the switch lives.

You can usually set this at the moment you create the client, or later by opening the client's chart and clicking edit. Same setting, two doors into it.

2. Custom FEES for Your CPT Codes

Most systems come preloaded with CPT codes and a default fee attached to each one. That default fee is almost never your fee.

So you create the session, you see a number that has nothing to do with your practice, and you type over it. It takes four seconds. It seems too small to be worth solving. Then you do it again the next session, and the one after that, several times a day, for a year.

The fix is to change the rate at the code level instead of the session level. In most billing settings you will find something like services and products, then services, then the list of CPT codes. Open the code you use most, find the rate field, enter your actual fee, and save.

Go back to your calendar and create a test appointment with that code. The correct number should now populate on its own.

It took me a long time to change this one, and I think that is because it never feels urgent enough to go hunting for. Fix your top three or four codes and you have removed a small tax from every session you have.

While you are in there…

Most platforms also let you set a default duration per code, and let you create your own codes if the preloaded list does not cover what you do. Worth a look while you have the panel open.

3. Client Portal Permissions

The client portal is where most of the surprises live, because it has two separate layers of settings and people usually only find the first one.

The first layer is global, and it applies to everybody. It typically sits under a heading like client care, then scheduling, then client portal permissions. The second layer lives inside each individual client's chart under a client portal tab, and it overrides things for that one person. Change it for Jamie, and Johnny is unaffected.

Three switches in here are worth your attention.

Online appointment requests. This is often on by default. That means clients can request or book time with you whether or not you have deliberately opened availability. I had clients scheduling with me before I knew the feature existed. If you want online booking, great, but then go configure your availability properly so it reflects your real calendar. If you do not want it, turn it off and let people contact the practice to schedule.

Access to billing documents. This one caused me the most trouble. Invoices are frequently not accurate the moment a session ends, because claims still have to go out and adjustments still have to come back. When clients can see and pay invoices immediately, some of them will pay the wrong amount, and then you are processing a refund for a bill that was never correct. For our practice we turn this off.

Secure messaging. By default, clients can often message you through the portal. That is genuinely useful if you want it and you are checking it. It is a real problem if you are not, because now there are messages sitting somewhere you never look while the client wonders why you have gone quiet. Decide deliberately. Turn it on and use it, or turn it off and tell clients how you actually prefer to communicate.

4. Two-Way Calendar Sync

Two-way sync connects your practice calendar to the calendar you actually live in, usually Google, Microsoft, or Apple. You will normally find it under scheduling settings, listed as calendar sync. You pick your provider, click connect, and follow the prompts.

The value is not complicated. Your sessions show up in your personal calendar, and your personal commitments show up in your practice calendar. Your dentist appointment stops being invisible to your booking system. Double bookings mostly stop happening, because for the first time everything is in one place.

5. Custom/Automated Welcome Emails

Your EHR is already sending email on your behalf. The question is whether it is sending your email or the software company's email.

The default welcome email is fine. That is the most you can say about it. It is not personalized, it does not carry your instructions, and it does not answer the questions your new clients actually ask. So the usual workaround is that people write a second email by hand every time they onboard someone, essentially maintaining a manual process next to an automated one that they never turned off.

Go to your client notification settings. You will typically see email, text, and voice, and each can be customized the same way. Open the email list and find the welcome email, since that is the one that goes out most. There is usually an edit control, often a small pencil icon, that opens the template.

Now write the email you have been retyping for months. Your intake instructions. How you prefer to be contacted. The three questions everybody asks before a first session. Save it, and that becomes your new default. Every future client gets the good version automatically.

This is the setting I regret waiting on the longest. The work was already being done. It was just being done by hand.

The Point Is Not the Settings

None of these five things is impressive on its own. Nobody grows a practice because they set a default rate on a 90834.

But go back to the rental car. The reason you adjust the seat is not that the drive is impossible otherwise. It is that you are going to be in that seat for a very long time, and small discomfort repeated a thousand times stops being small. Your EHR is the seat you work from every single day of your practice.

Block off twenty minutes this week and go through all five. You will not feel the difference on Monday. You will absolutely feel it by the end of the month.

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