How to fill out a BBS Weekly Summary of Experience (2026 walkthrough)

Welcome to the most repeated piece of paperwork in California pre-licensure. If you are an ASW, AMFT, or APCC, you will fill out a Weekly Summary of Experience for every single week of your supervised work, from your first day after registration until the day you sit for your clinical exam. Three thousand hours, roughly 104 weeks of work, one form per week, per supervisor, per setting. Yes, you really do have to do this every week.

The good news: the form itself is not actually that complicated once someone walks you through it. The bad news: nobody walks you through it. Most associates I have talked to learned the form the hard way, by getting their application kicked back from the BBS or by realizing at month eighteen that they had been miscounting a column for a year and a half. This guide is the walkthrough I wish someone had given me.

The form, in plain English

The BBS calls it the Weekly Log of Experience Hours. Same form, three flavors:

• Form 37A-638 for ASWs (Associate Clinical Social Workers, on the path to LCSW)
• Form 37A-525 for AMFTs (Associate Marriage and Family Therapists, on the path to LMFT)
• Form 37A-638 (LPCC version) for APCCs (Associate Professional Clinical Counselors, on the path to LPCC)

The structure is nearly identical across all three. You have header info at the top — your name, your associate registration number, your supervisor's name and license, your work setting, and the year. Then a grid: one row per week, columns for hour categories, a weekly total, and a signature box. At the end, your supervisor signs each week, and you sign the bottom of the form.

The BBS wants this weekly, not monthly, for one reason: they want a contemporaneous record. If you are sitting down in March to “remember” what you did in November, you are guessing, and the board knows it. A form signed off the week it happened is evidence. A form filled in nine months later is a story.

One more rule before we get into the form itself: one form per supervisor, per work setting, per week. If you have two jobs, you have two forms running in parallel. If your supervisor changes mid-year, the old form stops and a new one starts. Do not try to be clever and consolidate.

Section-by-section walkthrough

1. Identifying information at the top

Your full legal name (the one on your registration), your associate number, your supervisor's full name and license number and license type, the work setting name and address, and the year. This sounds trivial. It is the single most common thing the BBS flags.

The mistake: people put their preferred name instead of legal name, or they leave the associate number blank because “the BBS knows who I am.” The BBS does not know who you are when 8,000 logs land in their queue. Match your registration exactly.

2. Hour categories — the columns

This is where most associates lose the plot. Each form has a small number of primary columns and a couple of nested subcategories. On the AMFT form (37A-525), it looks roughly like this:

The ASW and APCC forms have the same logic with slightly different category names. The math rule is identical and worth tattooing on the inside of your wrist: subcategories are not added to the weekly total. They are already counted inside their parent column. If you put 18 hours in A and 4 hours in B, your weekly total is 22, even if A1 is 6 and B1 is 1 and B2 is 1.

3. Supervision specifics

You need at least one unit of supervision in any week you log experience in a setting. One unit = one hour of individual or triadic supervision, or two hours of group. If you log more than 10 hours of direct clinical contact at a setting in a week, you need a second unit at that setting that week. The BBS will only credit a maximum of 6 supervision hours per week across all settings and formats combined.

Triadic supervision (one supervisor, two supervisees) counts the same as individual for BBS purposes. Group supervision (one supervisor, up to eight) is its own column. You also have a 52-week minimum requirement of individual or triadic supervision specifically — you cannot satisfy the whole 104 weeks with group alone.

4. The weekly total and the cumulative running total

Each week gets its own row. At the bottom of the page you have a cumulative total carried forward from the previous form. Forty hours is the maximum you can earn in any week, regardless of how many hours you actually worked. If you put in a 55-hour week at a community mental health agency, you can write down 40. The other 15 are a gift to your clients.

The cumulative running total matters because the BBS reviewer checks that your sum on the final form equals the sum of every weekly total across every form you submit. If they don't add up, your application sits in queue until somebody figures out which form has the typo.

5. Signatures

Your supervisor signs the box for the week, that week. Not at the end of the month, not when they remember, not in a batch of 12 weeks at year-end. The BBS regulations are explicit that the supervisor is verifying the week as it happened, and a signature dated five months after the fact undermines the entire premise of contemporaneous documentation.

You sign the bottom of the form when it's full or when your relationship with that supervisor or setting ends. The BBS recently rolled out updated logs that support digital signatures, which means you can finally stop printing, scanning, and emailing PDFs back and forth. If your supervisor is still doing the print-and-scan dance, send them the new form.

The 5 most common mistakes

1. Adding subcategories to the weekly total. The single most frequent error. Your weekly total is A + B (or whatever the two parent columns are called on your form). The subcategories are inside those numbers, not in addition to them.
2. Missing a supervision week. Logging clinical hours in a week with no supervision at that setting. Those clinical hours don't count, and if you submit them anyway, the board will subtract them and you will be short.
3. Late or batch supervisor signatures. Twelve weeks signed in one sitting at year-end is a red flag. Even if every hour is real, the form is supposed to be a contemporaneous record.
4. Mismatched cumulative totals. The running total on form 7 doesn't equal the sum of forms 1 through 6. Math errors compound, and the reviewer has to chase down where the discrepancy started.
5. Wrong supervisor license type for the hours logged. The supervisor's license has to be authorized to supervise your license track for the kind of hours on the form. A perfectly licensed LPCC may not be able to sign off on every category of hours an ASW is collecting. Confirm before, not after.

If you have years of these to back-fill

A common situation: you registered as an associate three years ago, you have been collecting hours, and you have a folder somewhere with 80 partially-filled forms, 30 complete forms, and a vague sense that some weeks are missing entirely. You are not alone. Back-filling is one of the most common reasons people stall on submitting their application.

A few honest observations. First, do not start over. Whatever you have is more reliable than what you can reconstruct from scratch nine months in. Second, the limiting factor is almost always supervisor cooperation — your former supervisor has to sign weeks they actually witnessed, and chasing down a supervisor who has changed agencies, moved, or retired is harder than the paperwork itself. Third, weeks where you genuinely have no documentation and no supervisor to verify them are weeks you probably cannot count, and the sooner you accept that the sooner you can finish.

Practical advice if you are deep in a back-fill:

• Pull every calendar, EHR record, payroll record, and supervision note you have. They are your evidence base for which weeks happened and what you did.
• Reconstruct one supervisor at a time, in chronological order. Mixing supervisors guarantees confusion.
• Send your former supervisor a clean stack of pre-filled forms with a single ask: “please verify and sign.” Do not ask them to do the math.
• If a former supervisor is unreachable, the hours under their supervision may be unrecoverable. The BBS does not have a workaround for this. Check the current rules carefully and, if it is a lot of hours, contact the board directly.

When in doubt

The BBS is the final authority on its own forms. They cannot give you legal advice, and they will not tell you whether your specific situation qualifies, but they answer process questions and they do it reasonably quickly. If you have a genuine ambiguity — a setting that doesn't fit cleanly, a supervisor whose qualifications you are not sure about, a gap in your weeks — email or call the board. You can find current contact info at bbs.ca.gov.

Your supervisor is your other resource. They have been through this. Even if their licensure was a decade ago and the form has changed, the underlying logic has not. Ask them. The first time my own supervisor watched me hand-tally subcategories into a weekly total, she stopped me, drew a line through the page, and re-explained the math in about ninety seconds. That conversation saved me a year of bad forms.

If you would rather not deal with any of this, that is reasonable, and that is what we built ClearPath for. But the form is not impossible. Plenty of people get through it on a clipboard and a pen.

Three thousand hours sounds like a lot until you start doing it. One week at a time, one signed form at a time, and at some point the cumulative total on the bottom of the page passes a number that means you can apply. That's the whole game. You can do this — go fill out this week's log.