We’ve released a few new features in CoachAccountable. First, our Premium account holders can now enjoy the convenience of online scheduling. To set up appointment types, your general availability and email reminders, go to MyCA, then MySystem and click on Appointment Scheduling. Once you have enabled this feature, your clients will be able to schedule or reschedule appointments with you directly from their Client Pages. These appointments will show up on your Calendar, which brings us to…

Calendar Imports! Regardless of your account type, you can now import your current Outlook, iCal, Google and other calendars into CoachAccountable. Go to your Calendar and click on the “Import Calendar” button an the bottom of the mini-calendar view. There is inline help there to quickly walk you through the process. You can also export iCal using a private data feed URL. We are exploring other sync options and will keep you posted. Also coming up shortly: day, week and agenda views.

Can we get a “woot woot”? Today we successfully completed Beta and launched to the public!

Building this fabulous application has been a long, fascinating and (usually) fun journey. And this is just the beginning. As my mama woould say, “There’s no rest for the wicked.” We are working out the technical details for our Affiliate program and should be launching that soon. We are working on some new solutions to some of our Beta coaches’ feedback. We are also working on a major revamp of the Calendar so that it will sync with your other calendars and will feature online scheduling for Premium accounts. Whew!

We’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all of our Beta coaches who tested the system and got their clients on board and gave us such great feedback and positive support.  You guys totally rock! We couldn’t have done it without you.

Alright, folks. No one is as anxious as we are to get this bad puppy up and running. We can’t wait to get our BETA testers plugged in. And it’s coming…very soon.

November was a bit crazy. Much-needed vacations, cross-Atlantic visits from family, and a lot of outside work kept us from launching Beta last month. However, that turned out to be a really good thing. We’ve been getting some great feedback from coaches (thank you! please keep it coming, every bit is super useful.) Looking at these pearls of real-life wisdom, we realized we needed to rethink some of the design and functionality to make it more intuitive and versatile.That led to a major re-think and redesign, which is complete as of today. Woot!

Included in the changes are a more customizable system to that coaches can truly set up their business any way that works for them. Drag-and-drop widgets allow you to choose which things you want to be able to see at a glance, such as to-do lists (for you or your VA) outstanding invoices, your upcoming appointments, etc. A brand new template system lets you to input your intake forms, questionnaires, and worksheets easily into the system and have your clients fill them out on-line, where they can always be accessed in a moment by both of you or emailed as a pdf. There’s also a great Library for uploading and sharing newsletters, audio files, anything you want. We’ve been working on the Billing system and think we’ve found a great intuitive way for coaches & clients to manage their financial agreements and clients can even pay online from within their system. All in all, it’s looking fantastic. We sure hope you’ll agree.

Final development has begun (and knowing John, it’ll go QUICK – particularly if we bring him hot meals occasionally!) With the holidays coming up, we are aiming for a late-January Beta launch. There’s still space for testers, so sign up and tell your coaching friends to do the same. There’s no long-term commitment, you get early access to a fully-functioning system and you’ll get 6 months FREE upgrade once we’ve released to the public. Sweet!

The design and layout work is all in place and it is now time to build the calendar and schedule manager component of CoachAccountable. I’m excited by the challenge. We have it worked out to be an elegant work of cutting edge user interface widgets featuring drag-and-drop, zero-latency loading of key info, and not a page reload to be seen. With homage to the experts who have gone before us (such as the team behind google calendars) we are excited to be creating something of a comparable caliber.

After we get the basics built, we will gather feedback from coaches on specific features they would like to see for their online scheduling system. Looking forward to it!