ABA intake delays trace to process design, not staffing, says ABA Engine Founder Erica Kinnebrew, a BCBA who built and exited three ABA companies.
Key Takeaways
- Intake delays are usually designed in. Kinnebrew says most practices never built intake deliberately, so team handoffs, long paperwork packets, and unexamined scripts quietly add weeks between a first call and a first session.
- ABA Engine began as intake software and has grown into a platform. Its updated 2026 pricing offers an intake-only package alongside a full practice platform that adds scheduling, clinical data collection, billing, and accounting.
- The results on record come from Kinnebrew and a client. Kinnebrew says her Maryland company cut time to services from about 60 days to under 30, and a LittleStar ABA Therapy executive credits ABA Engine with a record enrollment month.
- Her fix starts with the family’s view of the process. She advises operators to map intake by what families experience rather than by department, and to look first at the handoffs, where she says delays accumulate.
For a while, families who called Erica Kinnebrew’s ABA company in Maryland were asked a simple question during intake: when are you available? The answer went into the file so the clinician who later assessed the child would know something about the family’s week. Then the family met the clinician, who explained that the center ran on block scheduling and recommended a schedule based on the hours the child needed. Families began dropping out at the assessment stage, and it took the company a while to understand why.
The question, Kinnebrew concluded, had made a promise nobody intended. “We asked them their availability,” she said, describing the reasoning families carried into that first meeting. “Why else would we ask them their availability if we weren’t going to work around it?” The rapport the intake team had built came apart in a single conversation.
Kinnebrew, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, built, scaled, and exited three ABA companies before founding ABA Engine, which sells intake, onboarding, scheduling, and practice management software to ABA providers. She told the availability story in a July webinar on intake mistakes, and returned to the same argument in a September interview with Acuity: the delays families experience between a first call and a first session are rarely a matter of effort. “Intake is an architecture problem, not an admin problem,” she told webinar attendees. She contacted Acuity after reading a September profile of the intake startup Carelu. “I’ve been saying this forever,” she said.
How a BCBA Went From Running ABA Practices to Building Intake Software
Kinnebrew moved from clinical work into the business side as her companies grew, and she “wore all of the hats,” she said, bootstrapping all three. Her professional biography says those companies operated across five states and reached up to eight figures in revenue. In Maryland, where she said the company grew to seven centers, intake ran on spreadsheets, staff, and training, and the first step was simply measuring it. Time from a request for services to the start of care had run past 60 days, she said, and the company brought it under 30 by reworking the handoffs between departments rather than adding people. Those figures are her own.
The software came out of the pandemic. When COVID-19 arrived, the company weighed moving center-based clients back into homes, and Kinnebrew realized she had no tool to schedule staff and clients outside the block schedules her centers ran on. The shift turned out to be smaller than she feared, but the gap stayed with her. It got her thinking, she said, that “this doesn’t exist in our field.”
Building it was harder than building clinics. A service business could fund itself, she said: she could deliver the service, earn the money, and reinvest it. Software demanded spending first, and a new fluency in translating business problems for engineers who described them differently. “I didn’t go get a degree. I just threw money into a black hole. That’s how I upskilled,” she said. “I didn’t even know what GitHub was.” She went through several development teams before settling on the current one last year. “You hit your stride in any business because you finally get the right people in the right seats,” she said, “and it just took me a couple extra years to figure that out.”
Why ABA Intake Delays Rarely Show Up on a Practice’s P&L
When she first brought the product to market, about three years ago, the harder sell was the problem itself. Enterprise operators were probably tracking intake metrics, Kinnebrew said, but many clinician-run practices were not, including some with $10 million in revenue, and intake tended to be handled by adding administrative staff. In the webinar she described the cost as invisible: every day of delay means lost revenue, idle clinicians, and families who drift away, and none of it appears on a profit-and-loss statement. By her estimate, a practice can get by without a deliberate intake system until it reaches roughly $2 million in revenue, and is forced to confront the question somewhere between $2 million and $8 million.
Her five mistakes run in roughly the order a growing practice commits them: handling intake personally to save money, waiting until the process breaks to fix it, hiring more administrators onto a broken process, treating communication as an afterthought, and letting each department build its piece of intake in isolation. Her point about hiring is structural. A new hire, she said, “is going to inherit my structural problem.” She acknowledged that the reflex to hire still pulls at her, even at ABA Engine. Her second mistake, waiting for a crisis before building the system the next stage of growth will need, echoes a pattern other multi-site operators have described to Acuity, in which providers expand before the infrastructure to support it is in place.
Paperwork is her most consistent example. Across every company she has worked with, she said, the slowest step between first contact and the start of services was getting forms back from families. She finds it odd that behavior analysts in particular send parents intake packets that run to dozens of pages. “I don’t even have a child with special needs that I’m trying to manage, and I’m not going to complete a 27-page intake packet,” she said. “The lens of behavior was not applied to the goal of bringing a client into services.” Breaking the packet into pieces a parent can finish in five minutes is, in her view, the easiest fix available to most practices.
Competing Team Incentives and the Hidden Cost of Siloed ABA Intake
The fifth mistake, building in silos, is the one she tells with the most feeling. At an organization that was not one of her own, she said, the marketing team was rewarded for the length of the waiting list and the intake team for how quickly it placed children into services. Intake worked from marketing’s spreadsheet and could not edit it, and when intake asked for children who were not a fit to be taken off, marketing had little reason to comply. Among the children intake had asked to have removed was one who had died. The list was never corrected, and an intake staff member called the family again to offer a spot. Kinnebrew said the staff member phoned her afterward and took the rest of the day off. “You could tie it directly back to the incentives,” she said.
She offers it as an extreme case of an ordinary failure: teams hitting their own targets without seeing the whole. Her remedy is the one that closes her webinar. Map intake by the family’s experience rather than by department, find every handoff, and ask what the family sees at each one. It is a close cousin of the argument a consultant made to a Boston audience about split clinical and operations management: that siloed departments tend to move problems rather than solve them. The availability question is a smaller version of the same lesson. So is a feature ABA Engine calls a “pizza tracker,” a display showing families where they stand in the process, which Kinnebrew likens to the visual supports clinicians already use with clients. Families who can see the next step, she said, call less and worry less.
Inside ABA Engine’s Intake Automation and Practice Management Platform
ABA Engine treats a practice as two pipelines, clients coming in and employees coming in, on the premise that neither can be managed well without sight of the other. On the client side it tracks each step from a first request for services to the start of care, with a timeline for each step and for the whole. On the employee side it follows applicants through hiring, training, and onboarding. Emails, texts, paperwork, and reminders go out automatically. Kinnebrew said the company started with intake alone and built out scheduling, billing, and accounting after customers kept asking for a full platform. The company is moving its existing intake-only customers onto that platform this month, after running a group of beta users through first, she said. The aim, she said, was “a system of action, of workflows,” rather than a database that holds whatever staff type into it.
The company publishes its pricing, which it updated in September to reflect the change. Its 2026 pricing page offers two packages. Intake Only carries a $100 monthly base fee plus $10 per client each month. The Full Practice Platform, which adds scheduling, clinical data collection, billing, and accounting, carries the same base fee plus $10 a month for each client still in intake and $35 for each client in services, with a client counted as in services once a schedule is published. The page lists eligibility checks, employee development tracking, budgeting and forecasting, and payroll export as coming soon. Most customers are clinician-run practices, Kinnebrew said, along with a few enterprise clients, and most found the company by word of mouth, since it is bootstrapped and spends little on marketing. A testimonial on ABA Engine’s website from Kerri Butts, Vice President of Business Operations at LittleStar ABA Therapy, says the Indiana practice enrolled 20 patients in March 2026 after never having enrolled more than 11 in a single month, and attributes much of the gain to the platform. Butts reported the figures in an April email to Kinnebrew, which Kinnebrew shared with Acuity.
Kinnebrew makes the same argument about employee onboarding, which she believes the field neglects. New hires, she said, are often buried in unsequenced emails from human resources and supervisors before they meet their first client. “If you bring someone through a couple of weeks or a month-long process into your company, and the entire time they feel frazzled and behind and confused, the first time they hit a problem in your company, they’re going to feel like you are literally not setting them up for success,” she said. “You’re killing your workforce before it even has a chance to start.” The concern is a practical one in a field where median annual RBT turnover has been estimated at roughly 65 percent, and where Acuity has reported on one multi-site provider whose technician onboarding had grown to roughly 136 hours as departments added requirements and none were removed.
ABA Practice Management Software Costs and a Crowded Intake Market
Kinnebrew places intake inside a larger squeeze. Reimbursement rates have stagnated while costs have climbed, she said, compressing margins and pushing turnover among direct care staff higher. State fee schedules show how long some rates have held still: in Missouri, the Medicaid rate for analyst-delivered treatment under 97155 still carries a July 2022 effective date. Software, in her view, is among the largest fixed costs an operator carries, and she argues a platform should earn that cost by helping a practice bring in more clients without adding staff.
Kinnebrew knows the established platforms from the operator’s side. She used CentralReach, which Roper Technologies acquired in April 2025 for a net purchase price of about $1.65 billion, for about a decade at her own companies, and said its billing software was a particular strength, citing the metrics it gave her as an operator.
The intake category Kinnebrew set out to build has also filled in. Motivity shipped an intake module earlier this year and AlohaABA introduced its own Intake Manager over the summer, as Acuity has reported. Operators comparing those tools have been advised to press vendors on implementation and contract terms before signing. The front door remains thin, however: an audit of 149 clinic websites reviewed by Acuity this month found fewer than one in ten tell families how quickly they will hear back. Kinnebrew said a larger vendor once told her the product was not needed, and that several now sell intake tools of their own. “It’s a little frustrating, but also validating,” she said.
What Comes Next for ABA Engine and Its Intake Framework
Kinnebrew is candid that the company’s reach is smaller than she wants. “We’re making an impact, not as big as I would like, for sure,” she said, adding that she expects to put more money into marketing soon. She told webinar attendees she plans a companion session on employee onboarding, the other half of the funnel she describes.
Her July presentation closed with an offer of a free strategy call with ABA Engine, and its slides also told owners the framework could be taken and used without one. The first step she asked of them costs nothing: name one intake task the owner handles personally that does not require clinical or strategic judgment. That, she told them, is where to start. The recording, the webinar slide deck, and a sample intake flow chart are available on ABA Engine’s webinar page.
