Clinicians can create customized journals in SimplePractice, such as Food or Sleep journals, and send them to clients to complete via the Client Portal.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Adding the journal template from the Template Library
• Creating your own journal template
• Sending a journal to a client
• Completing a journal as a client
• Preparing journals for clients to fill out regularly

Adding the journal template from the Template Library

To start creating journals, you can first add our journal template from the Template Library to the My Notes & Forms page. 

To add this template: 

• Navigate to Settings > Notes & Forms > Template Library
• Scroll down and locate the Food Journal Week 1 template
• Click +Add

Once you click +Add, you’ll be taken to My Notes & Forms, where the Food Journal Week 1 template will appear under Intake Forms. 

Here, you have the following options:

• Customize the title and contents of the Food Journal Week 1 template
• Preview the template
• Duplicate the template to regularly share the template with clients 
• Delete the template

For more information on these options, see Creating customized templates in My Notes and Forms.

Creating your own journal template

If you’d prefer to create your own journal template from scratch:

• Navigate to Settings > Notes & Forms
• Click + Create new template > Create new template
• Add a title
• From the Select template type drop down menu, select for Intake Forms

• Click Add New to add a question, divider, or text
  • To learn more about adding these to your template, see Customizing your note or form
• Click Save

Sending a journal to a client

After adding the journal template to the My Notes & Forms page, you can send it to a client. To do this:

• ​​Navigate to the client’s Overview page
• Click Share in the top right corner
• Under Questionnaires, select the journal you’d like to send

• Click Continue to Email > Continue to Review > Share & Send Now

Note: To learn more about sharing forms with clients, see Sharing documents with existing clients.

Completing a journal as a client

Once you've shared the journal, your client can complete and submit it through the Client Portal. To do this, they can:

• Log into the Client Portal

Note: For an overview of how clients can log into the Client Portal, see our client-facing guide to Getting started with the Client Portal.

• Navigate to the Documents tab
• Click the journal under Needs to be completed

• Fill in the appropriate fields
• Click Review to see their answers
• Click Edit or Submit

Important: While the client is completing the journal, they can click Edit to continue to have the ability to edit the form. Clients should only select Submit when the entire form is ready to be submitted for review. The client will no longer be able to make changes to the form once they’ve selected Submit.

Preparing journals for clients to fill out regularly

If you’d like clients to fill out and submit journals to you regularly, you can prepare multiple forms with the correct amount of fields for them to complete. The fastest way to do this is to duplicate the original journal template. To do this:

• Navigate to Settings > Notes & Forms 
• From the My Notes & Forms tab, find the original journal you created 
• Click the duplicate icon

• Select the copy below the original template to edit the title and contents as needed

• Click Save

Note: You can duplicate the journal form as many times as needed.