Logging hours in Texas and New York

Applicants for LPC licensure in Texas and LMHC or LCSW licensure in New York can use Track Your Hours to log experience and supervision hours. If your recorded hours don’t meet your license requirements, you’ll be notified by alerts generated in your account.

You can review alerts and edit your recorded hours to help ensure that the hours you track stay accurate as you work toward licensure and prepare forms for your application.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Logging your hours
• Editing or deleting your hours
• Understanding recorded vs. valid hours
• Explaining alerts for Texas LPC requirements
• Reviewing your alerts
• FAQs

Logging your hours

You need a site and supervisor in your account before you can log hours. For more information with initial setup, see Getting started with Getting started with Track Your Hours in Texas and New York. 

After adding your site(s) and supervisor(s), you can start logging your hours in your Track Your Hours account. To do this:

• Navigate to the Hours page
• Click Add hours

• Select a site and supervisor from the dropdown

• Enter your hours
  • For Texas LPC, enter your Experience hours and Supervision hours
  • For New York LCSW, enter your Client contact and Supervision hours
  • For New York LMHC, enter your Direct contact with clients and Other activities hours

• Scroll down to enter any additional information in the optional Notes section

• Click Save
  • If you’d like to log hours under a different site and supervisor, click Save and add more

Your hours will populate in the weekly calendar view and weekly total after they’re saved.

Important: Don’t record protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII) in Track Your Hours. We recommend using your clinical record system to store client information and documentation.

Editing or deleting your hours

Important: Before you make changes to your recorded hours, keep in mind that there’s no way to recover deleted data.

To edit or delete your recorded hours:

• Navigate to the Hours page
• Select the day you’d like to make changes to

• Edit or delete the number you previously entered, as needed
• Click Save

Understanding recorded vs. valid hours

Recorded hours are all of the hours you log in Track Your Hours. Track Your Hours doesn’t make any adjustments to your recorded hours.

Valid hours are calculated by comparing your recorded hours against your license requirements and subtracting any hours that are invalid based on those requirements.

To see your total recorded hours for a given week:

• Navigate to the Hours page
• Check the Total recorded column

To view your valid hours:

• Navigate to the Progress page
• Click View details next to the category you’d like to view
• Compare your valid hours against your required hours

Note: License regulations are complex. Track Your Hours provides you with an estimate of your valid hours, or the total number of hours you’ll be able to claim when you submit your application.

Reviewing your alerts

As you log hours, Track Your Hours will alert you if you aren’t meeting a certain requirement. To view your alerts:

• Navigate to the Hours page 
• Select the alerts icon in the top right

You'll see new, Unread alerts above your Read alerts:

Explaining alerts

Texas LPC

The following alerts will appear in your Track Your Hours account for Texas LPCs:

Note: For more information, see Understanding your requirements.

New York LMHC

If you’re working toward New York LMHC licensure, Track Your Hours will alert you if you haven’t logged enough supervision for the week.

This alert is based on the expectation that you log:

• 1 supervision hour per week, or
• 2 supervision hours every other week

This alert is informational, and doesn’t automatically invalidate any logged hours.

New York LCSW

If you’re working toward New York LCSW licensure, you should not expect license-specific alerts in your account at this time.

FAQs

• Can I log hours as weekly totals instead of daily?
• Can I log partial hours?
• How can I review my previous notes?

Can I log hours as weekly totals instead of daily?

The Supervised Experience Documentation Form totals all hours logged under each supervisor, and the Supervision Log totals all hours logged under each supervisor by week. Since neither form displays the exact day an hour was logged under, you can log your hours as weekly totals.

We recommend that you log your first and last hours at a site on the exact date they were earned. This will ensure that your forms correctly reflect your start and end date(s). All other hours can be logged weekly.

For example, if you gained experience on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, instead of logging your hours in each day’s column, you can enter the combined hours for each category under Sunday.

Can I log partial hours?

You can log increments of an hour in decimals. For example:

• 15 minutes = .25
• 20 minutes = .33
• 30 minutes = .5
• 40 minutes = .66
• 45 minutes = .75
• 60 minutes = 1

How can I review my previous notes?

You can view past notes that you logged with your hours by generating a Notes report. To do this:

• Navigate to the Forms page
• Select Notes report

• Select the Supervisor and site you want to view notes for
• Specify a date range
• Click Download PDF

For more information about generating forms, see Generating forms and submitting your application to the Texas state licensing board and Submitting hours to the New York state licensing board.