Your registration number arrived. Whether the prefix reads ASW, AMFT, or APCC, the road ahead is the same shape: 3,000 supervised hours over at least 104 weeks. Most associates take somewhere between two and six years, and the far edge is real, since hours generally must fall within the six years before the BBS receives your licensure application.

That makes week one worth taking seriously for a practical reason, not a motivational one. The rules that decide whether hours count are largely weekly rules, satisfied in real time or not at all. A week either had its supervision unit or it did not, and that fact is easy to record as it happens and nearly impossible to reconstruct from memory at application. The log you start now is also the record a BBS evaluator reads years from now. Five steps, in order.

Record the three dates that follow you to application

Three dates decide whether the hours you work between your degree and your registration being issued count: your degree award date, the date the BBS received your registration application (it must fall within 90 days of the degree), and, for graduates from 2020 onward, the date on the Request for Live Scan Service form your employer required. The 90-day rule walks through how they interact. Record all three now, in the same place your hours will live, while the documents are still easy to find.

Learn your pathway's categories before your first entry

The 3,000-hour total is not one bucket. An LCSW candidate needs at least 2,000 clinical hours, with 750 of face-to-face psychotherapy inside them, and can count at most 1,000 non-clinical hours. LMFT and LPCC candidates need at least 1,750 hours of direct counseling against a 1,250-hour non-clinical cap, and AMFTs owe 500 of those hours to work with couples, families, and children. An hour logged under the wrong category misstates two numbers at once. Read your pathway's full structure before you log anything: LCSW, LMFT, or LPCC.

Build the log around categories, supervisor, and cadence

Every entry needs a date, a duration, a category, and the supervisor it happened under. Then build the weekly supervision cadence into the structure itself: every week you claim hours needs at least one supervision unit (one hour of individual or triadic supervision, or two hours of group), and any week with more than 10 hours of direct clinical work needs two. At least 52 of your weeks must include individual or triadic supervision, so the log has to distinguish supervision formats from the start. A totals-only spreadsheet cannot answer the question an evaluator will actually ask, which is whether each claimed week was covered. Building a strong hour log goes deeper on what to capture.

This checklist is the setup

Licentio's setup walks through these same steps: it creates the categories for your pathway, mapped to the BBS requirements above, invites your supervisor into a shared review and approval workflow, and tracks the weekly cadence and caps in real time from your first entry. If you have already been tracking in a spreadsheet, import your existing log when you start. The full picture is on the features page.

Log hours in the week they happen

Month-end logging fails in a specific way: you can usually reconstruct what you did, but rarely which week a supervision unit landed in, and the week is what the rules measure. The regulations also expect a weekly rhythm on paper. You are required to keep a weekly log of hours by category, signed by your supervisor each week and retained until you are licensed. Ten minutes at the end of each week keeps the habit and the paperwork honest at the same time.

Confirm the supervision paperwork

Your supervisor must hold a qualifying California license: LCSW, LMFT, LPCC, licensed psychologist, or board-certified psychiatrist, with LEPs qualifying inside a 1,200-hour cap. On the LCSW pathway, at least 1,700 of your hours, across at least 13 weeks, must be supervised by an LCSW specifically, so the license type behind your hours matters from the first one. Where your arrangement calls for a signed supervision agreement, get it signed now and keep your own copy alongside the three dates from step one.

Key takeaway

Record the degree, application-received, and Live Scan dates. Learn your pathway's floors and caps before your first entry. Build the log around categories, supervisor, and the weekly cadence, then keep it weekly and keep the paperwork signed. These rules are far easier to satisfy in real time than to reconstruct, and the log you start this week is the one an evaluator reads at the end.