Built by a therapist, not just for one

Therapist & Co. was built inside a working practice, not in a room at a distance from one. It comes out of Lost and Found Psychotherapy, a practising psychotherapy practice in India.

That is the whole difference, and it is not a marketing line. This started at the cusp of practice, from a therapist meeting these problems in their own week, rather than from someone who studied the category from outside and decided it looked underserved.

The problem this came from

The same questions kept arriving, and they never got properly answered. Whether GST applies to a therapy fee. Whether TDS applies when you pay an associate. How long a client record has to be kept, when no Indian law actually sets a period for a therapist. What genuinely changes the day you take on a second practitioner.

None of these are clinical questions. All of them land on a clinician anyway. Usually alone, usually at the end of a day already spent holding other people, and usually with nobody obvious to ask. The work you trained for is the session. Everything around it is the part nobody prepares you for, and it does not get lighter as the practice grows. It gets heavier, and it starts costing you the attention the session needed.

This is a long-standing problem, not a new one, and it is not particular to any one practice. It is the ordinary condition of running a therapy practice in India.

Why the guides came before the software

We had to answer these questions for ourselves before we could build anything that handled them honestly. Having done that work, publishing it cost nothing and withholding it would have been strange: a practitioner searching at eleven at night deserves a real answer, from the Act or the notification itself, rather than the same half-remembered figure repeated across a dozen pages.

So the 5 guides are free, sourced, and say plainly where the law does not give a clean answer instead of inventing one:

• Going from a solo practice to a group in India
• Paying associate therapists in India
• Clinical supervision in India
• How long to keep client records in India
• GST on therapy and counselling in India

They are research, not professional advice, and every one of them says so and tells you to take your own position to a qualified specialist. That is not a disclaimer bolted on afterwards. It is the same standard the rest of this applies to itself.

Who it is built for

A therapist early in private practice, working out what running one actually involves. A practitioner who has outgrown doing it alone. An organisation carrying a roster, payouts and supervision. The shape of the practice changes what the software needs to do:

• A practice with several therapists · What changes when a practice has more than one therapist: per-therapist payouts, role-scoped access to clinical records, supervision, and the money and reporting that come with employing people.
• A solo practice · One price for the whole practice, not per seat. Scheduling, client records, clinical notes, invoicing in rupees, a public booking page, and the data-protection tooling a solo Data Fiduciary needs.

Pricing is public, in rupees, and takes no commission on your session fees. Client payments settle into your own account, never through us.

What we will not claim

We will not tell you that using this makes your practice compliant. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 the practice is the Data Fiduciary and carries that responsibility irrespective of any agreement to the contrary. No software can take it off you, and any vendor who says otherwise is selling you something they cannot deliver. What we can do is make the part that depends on us actually work, and be precise about where that line falls.

We will not claim a certification we do not hold, quote a retention period as legally required when no Indian law sets one, or manufacture certainty where the law is genuinely unsettled.

If you are in the same position

If you are a therapist trying to run a practice as well as a caseload, this was built by someone doing the same thing, for the same reason. If a guide is wrong, or you have something that would let us replace an absence with a fact, write to collective@therapistandco.com and we will correct it and date the correction.