Opening a PLLC as a physical therapist

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The tip? Why not just hire an accountant?

Not a CPA, so take this as one person's experience rather than advice. On QuickBooks vs Excel: for your first stretch, either works — you won't have enough transactions for the tool to matter. The higher-leverage move is a separate business checking account and card from day one, before you worry about software. Almost everything bookkeeping software does for you quietly stops working if business and personal are mixed, and untangling a commingled year is the thing that actually costs money at tax time. Where QuickBooks starts earning its keep in a PT practice specifically is when payer remittances start arriving — different rates from different payers, partial payments, write-offs. Reconciling that in a spreadsheet is where most people quit. If cost is the concern, Wave is free and fine for a solo practice. Honestly the tool matters less than whether you'll sit down and do it monthly. A few PT-specific things I'd flag, since you asked for unrelated tips: Start credentialing with payers before you think you need to. It routinely runs several months, and it's the thing that most often delays a new practice from actually billing. Track your average reimbursement per visit, by payer. Not overall — by payer. Most new practices know their total collections and can't tell you which contract is the worst one, and that's the number that tells you which to renegotiate or drop. Model break-even in visits per week before you sign a lease. Space is the hardest cost to reverse if volume comes in under plan. Don't let one referring physician become most of your schedule. If that relationship ends, so does the schedule. Three sources that don't depend on each other is the goal. Watch your no-show rate from the start. In this business you usually can't refill the slot same day, so it hits revenue directly and it's easy to normalise. Slightly personal aside: I was pre-PT in undergrad and never went on to the doctorate — ended up in IT instead, which I don't regret but the interest never went anywhere. I build a small analytics web app now, and PT is one of the industries I deliberately added a walkthrough for because of that. It reads a spreadsheet or export and shows you the picture — it's free with no signup if you want to poke at it: https://plainsightai.app/?tour=pt. Underneath the dashboard there's a free write-up on how PT practices typically grow, what each revenue stream is actually worth, and where reimbursement pressure usually bites. Ignore it entirely if it's not useful — the bank account tip above is the one that matters most on day one. Congrats on the PLLC, and good luck! 🙏 https://youtu.be/i7rXPb98XJQ?is=1kCLYNdlvzrf8DMc

Im a CPA and if you truly don’t have any expenses or revenue yet then sure excel is fine. But as soon as you start making money yeah you need quickbooks or xero. Xero is cheaper and built for the cloud so thats what I usually recommend. Main thing is you want to keep up with the books during the year, not wait till tax time or you’ll be paying the tax cpa 1.5 times the rate due to time constraints. If you want tips on set up feel free to pm me.