ABA Fieldwork Tracker
The BACB does not publish a form for this#
That single fact explains most of the confusion around RBT supervision documentation, so it is worth stating first. There is no official monthly RBT supervision form. The BACB specifies what your record must contain and how long it must be kept, but it does not hand you a template to fill in.
The result is that RBTs and supervisors invent their own, which is fine right up until someone asks to see two years of it. This article covers what the record has to contain, who keeps it, for how long, and what actually happens with it.
What the record must contain#
The required contents are specific, and each item exists because it answers a question someone might ask later.
The days and times you provided behavior-analytic services. This establishes the denominator. Your supervision minimum is a percentage of service hours, so without the service hours there is nothing to take a percentage of.
The dates and duration of supervision. The numerator, and the reason “we met a few times” is not documentation. Duration matters, not just occurrence.
The format of each contact, individual or group. Because the requirement is not only about quantity. At least one of your monthly contacts has to be individual, meaning no other RBTs or trainees present, and a record that does not distinguish the two cannot demonstrate that.
The dates your supervisor directly observed you working with a client. Observation is its own requirement, distinct from meeting. A record showing plenty of supervision but no observation dates is showing a gap.
The names of your supervisors. Plural, deliberately. Multiple supervisors across a period are expected, not exceptional.
Proof of your supervisor’s relationship to the client. The item most often missing. Supervision means oversight of your work with specific clients by someone responsible for those clients, and this is what demonstrates that link.
Additional documentation where records are discrepant. If your log and the session notes disagree, something has to reconcile them.
The exact monthly thresholds those contents are measured against live on the RBT supervision requirements page, so there is one sourced place for the numbers.
Seven years, and both of you keep it#
Supervision documentation is retained for at least seven years, by both the RBT and the supervisor or coordinator. Not one or the other. Both parties hold their own copy.
Seven years is longer than most people stay at one employer, which is the practical problem. If your records live in a folder on a work drive, or in a system your employer controls, then changing jobs can quietly separate you from documentation you are still responsible for producing years later.
The dual-retention rule is also a hint about what a good record looks like. If only one party can produce it, it is not really satisfying the requirement.
Nobody collects these on a schedule#
Supervision records are retention and audit documents. They are not routinely submitted to the BACB, and there is no monthly deadline to file anything.
This differs from BCBA and BCaBA fieldwork, where the Monthly Fieldwork Verification Form has a signing window. RBT supervision has no equivalent published deadline, so there is no monthly countdown.
The absence of a deadline is exactly why documentation drifts. Nothing forces the issue in month three. It becomes urgent only when someone asks, and by then you are reconstructing rather than recording.
The honest framing: sign each month while you can still remember it, not because a rule requires it that day, but because a contemporaneous record is worth far more than one assembled later.
Why we built our own document#
Since the BACB publishes no official form, ABA Fieldwork Tracker generates its own Monthly Supervision Record. That is stated plainly in the app too, because you should know what you are holding.
It is built to carry exactly the contents above: the month’s services, the supervision received, contacts by format, observations, and every day documented, for one workplace. You review it, sign electronically, and send it to your supervisor to countersign. Both of you keep a copy, which is what the retention rule asks for.
Because it is generated from hours you already logged rather than typed in separately, the record and the log cannot drift apart. There is no second copy to reconcile.
Two honest caveats. Your workplace may have its own documentation policies layered on top of the BACB baseline, and this record does not replace those. And because there is no official form, this is our document, not a BACB one. What it guarantees is that the required contents are present and attested, not that any particular auditor will prefer our layout.
If your documentation is thin#
Most people reading this have some months well documented and some months that are a calendar entry and a memory. That is normal and it is fixable.
Start recording properly from this month forward, because a clean record from today is worth more than a perfect reconstruction of last year. Our RBT supervision log template has a place for each item above, and a month check that shows whether the month met the requirement. Then bring in what you can support with something real, as monthly summaries, and leave out what you cannot. A gap you can explain is better than a figure you invented, and the guide on importing past hours covers what transfers.
If you also accrue BCBA or BCaBA fieldwork, keep the two records separate. They are different requirements with different retention expectations, and how those hours relate is its own subject.
