Challenge

SimplePractice launched in 2012 as a practice management solution, largely for scheduling appointments. As the company grew, its team realised that challenges like billing and accounting were particularly time-consuming for clinicians. “The payments part of running a small business is critical,” says Fletcher Dennison, COO of SimplePractice. “If our customers don’t get payments right, their business won’t be operating.”

SimplePractice wanted to help these clinicians eliminate inaccurate and cumbersome paper-based processes for accepting payments. In order to launch payments on the SimplePractice platform, the company needed to be able to manage money movement between clients and clinicians without having to focus internal resources on building software from scratch or integrating multiple new systems.

Solution

SimplePractice chose Stripe because it easily integrated with its platform to bring powerful payment management tools to the SimplePractice mobile app. Within weeks of choosing Stripe Connect, SimplePractice rolled out patient billing and payments to users, fully integrated into the SimplePractice suite of tools. This meant that clinicians could collect client payment information once and then let SimplePractice and Stripe take care of management payments and billing.

With Stripe, SimplePractice also launched an autopay feature, which
allows clinicians to set up automated payments for regular clients and receive a payment summary every evening via email that lists the day’s client payments to be charged.

Results

SimplePractice's co-founder and CTO, Ralph Zimmermann, notes that Stripe's flexible, unified API has made maintaining SimplePractice's high bar for product quality and building new products markedly easier. "Stripe allows us to enable health and wellness professionals to start accepting credit cards within minutes instead of days, and without Stripe Connect, we would likely have to create a four-person team just to handle credit card payments."

SimplePractice's new autopay offering also received a positive response from clinicians. Over 30% of SimplePractice’s health and wellness professionals were using autopay shortly after launch. “The great thing about automated payments is that SimplePractice and Stripe are working while clinicians are sleeping – taking care of all the tasks they had to do after caring for clients,” Spector says. “It gives back time to clinicians, so they have the freedom to work with more clients or go home to their families, even as they’re receiving payments.”