Switching hour trackers mid-licensure without losing anything
3 min readA year or two into supervised experience, your hour log stops being a document and becomes an asset. Hundreds of sessions, each one earned. So when the spreadsheet starts to strain (formulas you no longer quite trust, a tab per supervisor, totals you verify by hand), switching to a purpose-built tracker can feel like the riskier option. The log took years to build. Moving it feels like carrying something fragile across a room.
That instinct deserves a direct answer, because the perceived cost of switching is almost always larger than the real one. If you are still weighing whether the spreadsheet is the problem, start with what a spreadsheet can and cannot do. If you already know, here is what moving actually involves.
What actually has to move
Your log looks like years of work because it is. But the spreadsheet itself (the formulas, the color coding, the tab structure) is not the asset. The BBS will never see it. What matters is the set of facts behind each session, the same attributes that make a strong hour log in the first place.
When each session happened and how long it ran, in hours and minutes. These two fields drive every weekly rule the BBS applies.
Which BBS experience category the hours belong to, and whether supervision was individual, triadic, or group. Both determine how the hours count.
Who supervised the work and what license they hold. Supervisor credentials decide whether hours qualify at all.
Everything else is presentation. The facts transfer. The format is disposable.
Gather these four things first
Consolidate every entry into one place: the spreadsheet, the paper log from your first placement, the notes-app stopgap. Each session needs its date, duration, category, supervision type, and supervisor.
Full name and license type for every supervisor you have worked under, including the ones you no longer see. Hours only qualify under a credential the BBS accepts, so this belongs in the record, not in your memory.
Your degree award date, the date the BBS received your registration application, and your employer Live Scan date. Together they decide whether your pre-registration hours count. The 90-day rule walks through all three.
The BBS requires a weekly log of hours signed by your supervisor, retained until licensure. Locate what you have and note which weeks are covered. You will want that inventory in a moment.
The switch is a free audit
Here is the reframe that changes the calculus. A spreadsheet records whatever you type. It does not know that the BBS credits at most 40 hours of experience and 6 hours of supervision per week. It does not know that a week with more than 10 hours of direct clinical work requires a second supervision unit, or that the LCSW pathway's 3,000 hours carry a 2,000-hour clinical floor with 750 hours of face-to-face psychotherapy inside it and a 1,000-hour ceiling on non-clinical work. It has been accepting entries for years without checking any of that.
Licentio validates every entry against the BBS rules for your license type, and that includes the existing logs you import when you get started. Category floors and caps, weekly maximums, the weekly supervision cadence: your entire history is held up against the same rule set your future hours will be. The full requirements for each pathway are in the requirements guides.
Only two outcomes are possible, and both beat not knowing. Either your history validates cleanly and you gain something a spreadsheet cannot give you, confirmation. Or something surfaces (a week missing its supervision unit, hours over a weekly cap, a category approaching its ceiling), and it surfaces now, with years of runway to adjust, instead of at board review with your application already in.
Importing moves facts, not attestations. A week your supervisor never signed arrives unsigned, and only a signature closes that gap. The same is true of a missing Live Scan date or a supervisor whose license details you never recorded. That is not a reason to stay put. A documentation gap you find with two years left is a task. The same gap found during board review is a delay.
One more thing about risk. Licentio's answer to lock-in is the same one you should demand from any tracker: your complete ledger exports as CSV or JSON at any time, on every plan. Switching in is not a one-way door.
The fear of moving assumes the log is fragile. It is not. It is a set of facts, and facts move.
Your hours are the asset; the spreadsheet is packaging. Gather the session facts, supervisor credentials, the three 90-day-rule dates, and your signed weekly logs, then import them into a tracker that validates every historical entry against BBS rules. Problems surface now, while there is time to fix them, and a clean result is confirmation you have never had.
Import the log you already have and let Licentio validate every historical entry against your pathway's rules.