The weekly narrative record of what you did on a case, per claimant — the document that travels behind the bill and answers for it later.
A client tracking log is the per-claimant, dated, narrative record of the work: what you did, when, for how long, under what code, and what came of it. In Ohio it goes in the same fax as the CMS-1500, because the report travels with the bill. In invoice states it is what the adjuster reads before deciding whether the hours look like the work.
A defensible entry has four parts: the date, the code or service, the time (with the actual range if that is your habit), and a note specific enough to reconstruct the activity a year later.
Vague lines get trimmed. “Rec’d/rev’d ES notes [9:04–9:10], W3220” survives an audit and a bill review. “Case management” survives neither.
The second reason to write it as you go is the one nobody says out loud: an activity reconstructed on Sunday from memory is either rounded up, which is a problem, or forgotten, which is worse. Across thirty to forty activities a day, forgetting is where a great deal of real, performed, authorised work quietly goes.
Weekly tracking logs is the one-click-per-claimant version in your own Word template, and the template is the document itself if you would rather keep doing it by hand.
Fifteen minutes, your state’s codes on screen — or start the trial and poke around on your own.