Category: Minding Your Practice

  • VAT on Counselling and Psychotherapy Fees

    When Counsellors and Psychotherapists provide services to clients for a fee, and, where those fees exceed the €37,500pa threshold, those services are liable to VAT at 13.5%. Once the threshold is reached, all of your fees are subject to VAT, not just the excess over the threshold amount. Last July, Counselling and Psychotherapy services were…

  • Willingness to Create a Practice

    There’s a saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Taking that first step, and each of the steps that comes after it asks our willingness to move. Willingness is an essential attribute of being a small therapy practice owner. Not just willingness to do the client work, but also…

  • That’s A Great Question!

    I’ve been doing some workshops recently, and have been asked a couple of great questions: What happens to my clients and my files when I die? This is something you need to think about. Obviously, we’d all like to think that we will have some warning of the end of our practising life, and most…

  • New Year Slump? Time to Get Your Affairs in Order!

    Many practitioners find their work slow at the beginning of the year. Clients are feeling the pinch from spending too much at Christmas and are full of good intentions to implement resolutions that will change their lives for good, such as losing weight or taking a degree course, but not necessarily going to therapy. If…

  • What Do Therapy and Criminal Law Have in Common?

    It’s hard to imagine two professions that are less alike than psychotherapy and criminal law. Or so you’d think! After all, criminal law deals with laws and rules, with evidence, argument and ultimately, with winning or losing. Not concepts that you learn in therapy training! I had the pleasure recently of meeting a group of…

  • The Sound of a Train in the Distance

    Did you see the recent IAHIP bulletin in relation to Statutory Registration of Counsellors and Psychotherapists? It directed members’ attention to the website of CORU, the body charged with regulation. Or perhaps you saw the announcement from IACP that mandatory Garda vetting is to take place for all IACP members from late 2014, and will…

  • In Case of Emergency

    In case of emergency… It’s the scenario we don’t want to think about, but it could happen to any of us in the morning. If you suddenly became ill or incapacitated, what would happen to your practice? Would your family and colleagues know what to do? During my career in the accountancy profession, on several…

  • 5 Strategies for Having a Stress Free Practice

    “Work would be great if it weren’t for the clients” was something I heard regularly in my former occupation as an accountant. It was said tongue in cheek, but really spoke to a truth about the ambivalence that many feel about their work, and not just in accountancy. We’d like it to be easy and…

  • Starting a Therapy Practice – a Ten Point Plan

    Ray Pembroke is a Chartered Accountant and Partner in Pembroke & Pembroke Chartered Accountants, 15 Ormonde Road, KilkennyTel: 056 7762027 email: [email protected] Firm specialises in dealing with the affairs of Medical Doctors and related Para-Medical Practitioners.Ray says: “The initial meeting with us is always free, and, we would be pleased to advise how we might…

  • Setting up In Practice: 8 Important Steps to Looking After Yourself in the Work

    There is a serious danger in this work that the practitioner’s needs become eclipsed by the needs of her clients.  This is particularly so in the early years, when a therapist may not have enough clients and takes on everything that comes their way for fear that there will never be any more.It can also…