The CoachAccountable Blog

CoachAccountable has had a rich API for most of its life (the API was originally released in 2015, over 11 years ago!).  For most of that time, using that API was largely limited to larger firms, which makes sense.  Those have traditionally been the ones with operational scale to really benefit from the sort of automations possible by an API, coupled with the resources to actually get something built.

But here in the advent of AI with myriad agents capable of transacting on behalf of users via publicly exposed APIs, the presence of CA’s API is now meaningfully useful for a much broader audience.  And it shows!  There’s been a tidy but quite noticeable surge of requests for additions and enhancements to that API, to suit workflows that are suddenly coming into view as useful.

For example, last week we got this request:

Here’s another thing that would be really nice: the ability to send `isDraft` when I call Session.add so that I can leave session notes in a drafted state, not have them automatically completed.

Here’s my use case: when I complete client sessions, my assistant processes the transcript to get my follow up notes and action items using a private GPT, which gets me to about 75% of the way to a solid follow-up. Then later in the day, I log in to review action items and session notes.

So it would be incredibly helpful to have the draft that I’m still responsible for reviewing and approving, and so helpful if action items would be ready and waiting for me as the coach as well.

This sort of thoughtful request warms my heart, especially because I’m leery of AI crowding out the personalized magic that I, speaking as a coaching client (and by extension, speaking on behalf of some non-zero swathe of coaching clients in general) enjoy receiving from a thoughtful, caring coach.  It speaks to using AI as a leg up towards, rather than a substitute for, the delivery of thoughtful work product to clients.  So I am all too happy to ensure the CoachAccountable API supports such use cases.

As another example, I’ve heard interest in piping session notes in from numerous note-taking AIs.  Because those products are in flux with new ones coming out regularly, it doesn’t make sense for me to build full-on integrations with each one.  But because AI knows how to AI, session notes from whichever source can readily post whatever into CA via the Session.add API function, or one of the ClientFile add functions.

The CA API makes it especially easy to post things to a given client’s file using it’s support for email addresses as user ID aliases: rather than needing a separate step to figure out the internal ID for a given client as a separate step, for example, an external AI agent can use what it probably already knows about your client in an external context (namely their email address), and use that to post some notes or a file for them.

It remains the case as much today as it did back in 2015 that I’m happy to add API functionality to suit use cases that aren’t already supported.  Some things aren’t as practical to do via API as they are in-app (I’m looking at you, Course Builder!), but other, more transactional bits are certainly worth bringing towards feature parity with the app itself as they prove useful.  Now that the coding part to interact with it can be trivially cooked up by AI, we may as well ensure CA API is up to the job of supporting the automations that users seek!

I launched CoachAccountable in September 2012.  I’d like to share a funny thing that happens when a software product has been around and been evolving for a good long while:

What you add in the later years is almost certainly less important than what you added in earlier years.

And this of course makes sense when you stop to think about it: amid continuous work (and assuming a competent and coherent vision for the product), you will prioritize and complete whatever matters most in the moment.  Meaning the next feature you ship will matter less.

Again, and again, and again.

After a decade plus of this, whatever remains to add is pretty niche: of use to only a rather small minority, or of increasingly narrow marginal benefit, or both¹.

There are more whiz-bang features that fall under the banner of being more “advanced”, and those have a certain sizzle!  We like what’s new, and what’s fancy.  Many of my long-term customers like to ask me what’s new or what’s coming in CA.  These days when they do, I ask ’em if they’ve played with any of the features of Version 5.1, released 18 months ago.  Almost 100% of the time the answer is no.  And not because those features wouldn’t be useful; it’s a failure of awareness.  When I talk ’em through those features, they usually land as valuable new goodies worth at least trying out.

So pursuing more whiz-bang features is sort of a dead end at this stage.  Running now contrary to my 12-year-old missive titled Ode to Squeaky Wheels, where in the early days their feedback was invaluable to push the platform to be ever better, the squeaky wheels these days generally want the platform to go down niche paths; paths that would be super great (or at least handy) for their needs, but that nevertheless stray from the core of what CA is meant to do and already does well².

It is that core of what CA is meant to do that I find worth re-focusing on.  These are the raison d’être for this platform, and for good reason!  Many other “coaching” platforms are comprised largely of commodity business management tools (think scheduling, invoicing, signing documents, etc.) with the word “coaching” slapped on it.  They’ll save you clicks running admin, but they won’t materially influence the results your clients ultimately get working with you.

CoachAccountable is different.  It is deliberately built around how your clients show up and get results working with you.

As I wrote last week in The CoachAccountable Perspective (“More than Just Conversations“), the coaching industry and training programs largely consider your job to be little more than having good conversations.  Yet the experience of being coached CAN (and should!) include much more, namely: elements that support real execution and better outcomes.

Without a proper system, those elements are cumbersome and hard to manage.  But with a proper system, it’s another story entirely.

CoachAccountable is that system.

Its foundation consists of four straightforward (but powerful) tools:

• Action Plans for intentional execution
• Metrics to measure and track what matters
• Session Notes to capture and re-presence the key insights
• Worksheets to cause more than passive consumption

They are not whiz-bang features.  They are not complicated to set up.  They simply turn what was cumbersome and impractical into something elegant and practical.

Skillfully weaving these basics into your style will do more for your clients’ results, and thus your efficacy as a coach, than the pursuit of the “fancy” or “advanced”.

It’s never easy to say goodbye to a colleague, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it with a bang.

After a good run of 8 months, Noah is wrapping up his tenure here at CoachAccountable to run operations with a new venture started with a few good friends in his own town.  And frankly, while his leaving CA bums me out and the news hit kinda hard, I’m delighted and I daresay even proud of what he’s got for himself next.

And why is that?

As Noah explained when he first said hello in these parts, it was not easy for him to leave a stable, even if slightly life-draining career for a new opportunity with our merry little band, doing our thing in the coaching world.  Doubly so because that coaching world was, for him at the time, merely the stuff of “hobby” (however passionate).  He left the ranks of 299,999+ other employees of his last company to be with little ol’ me and Jaclyn.

If you’ve ever been a family man with two young children, you of course know that’s a real leap!

What makes me proud is that his departure is NOT back into the warm, pillowy bosom of corporate America, but into a real entrepreneurial adventure, being again part of a small team, and doing it with friends who will get to see and work together face-to-face on the daily.

Because for as awesome and flexible as remote work is, what Noah’s going to makes me more than a little wistful and nostalgic for those days of having colleagues to laugh and lunch with in real life.  Zoom is okay, but it’s not the same.

Noah rocked support and the sort of hand holding calls we like to avail ourselves for.  Just today during my Office Hours an attendee mentioned having had a great call with Noah, and I was not surprised in the least to hear it.

Beyond this, though, Noah created “CA Coffee”, a thrice a week institution of a standing date held on a Google Meet link.  It was a clearing for Noah, Jaclyn, and indeed sometimes I to just show up and hang out for water cooler chat.  Revolutionary?  No.  But it was a stand for having that sort of friendly banter and camaraderie for us staffers, one that is just as easy to NOT have if you didn’t think to do it (and before Noah, we indeed did not).

We’ll miss you, sir!

Thanks Noah, for your service.  You leave in your wake many coaches who were touched by your intelligence, patience and caring during your time here.  I think I speak for many more than just Jaclyn and I when I say: we all wish you good times and great success with your new endeavor!

Webhook are one of those things where if you have to ask what they are, you probably don’t need to worry about ’em. :)

But if you’re looking for Webhooks for the purpose of e.g. integrating CoachAccountable with some other system, we’ve now got you covered on this front!

A Webhook is essentially you giving marching orders to CoachAccountable along the lines of “Hey, anytime _____ happens in my account, please send data about that event to this other place on the web (so that I can have an automated process listening for when that happens and take whatever appropriate action in response)”.

From your Settings >> API Access >> Webhooks area you’ll be able to define one or more Webhooks.

When you create/define a webhook, you give it a name (whatever is handy for your own reference), and the URL to which CA should post data about the event.

Ostensibly scary and technical, turns out there’s not too much to it!

Beyond that, you can add any authorization and custom headers that will be expected on the receiving URL.

Once those key bits are set, you can choose which events you’d like CoachAccountable to send to that URL. Check or uncheck whichever are relevant for your purposes (i.e. which events you’d like to “subscribe” to), and you’re set!

You can easily test your Webhook to see:

1. the exact format of data that CA will send for each type of event, and
2. what CA gets when it posts that data to your URL (with whatever headers)

Do this by clicking the “Test this Webhook URL…” link, as found towards the bottom of that Webhook editor pop up:

Choose the type of event you’re interested from that pop up.

Upon hitting “Send test”, CA will pack up that data and POST it to the URL of choice, and you’ll see the result (i.e. the response that CA got back) immediately.

All green? You can be pretty assured things are set as they need to be:

See red? Chances are you’ll have to adjust something on one end or the other:

And that’s all there is to it! You can create as many Webhooks as you need, and have CA report whichever event types to each respective URL set by a Webhook. These can double up, too, in that you can have more than one Webhook listening for the same event.

You can see the full lowdown on Webhooks here in the CoachAccountable Knowledge Base.

For this initial release a fair number of in-app events are supported, but certainly there are more that could be.  If you need others, just ask!

Okay, so… biz dev.

If you’re like a lot of coaches, that’s the last thing you want to have to work on.  You got into coaching to coach people, not to worry about the business stuff.

But it’s a necessary evil.  And it turns out such efforts can be a little more fun and effective than it might otherwise appear!

How?  Because you’re using CoachAccountable, and therefore you’re offering clients a coaching experience that is more than the conversations themselves.

Predicated on that fact (and thus the stand-out things you’re able to say about what you offer), the CoachAccountable Webinar Series has episodes under the “Running a Better Business” section, and each is full of highly actionable things you can do to shore up your business and win more clients.

This video riff explains how to take advantage of this, and fit these efforts into your week as a series of one-off projects that can each be implemented in a single afternoon:

Much like when we here at CoachAccountable heard early murmurs of Practice.do shutting down from soon-to-be coaching platform refugees, we’re now getting word that Profi.io is in the process of shutting down for good.

I suppose the glaring lack of any “Sign up now!” button is public enough of a smoke signal!

That sinking feeling you get when you learn the coaching platform you chose is closing its doors for good.

(For those of you keeping score at home, this make now THREE coaching platforms that shut down in 2025, Nudge Coach being the first.  This might be a good time to check the funding model and employee count of your platform.  If it’s dumb money itching to get theirs investors who might get impatient, and/or a payroll headcount of anything north of 50, well…¹)

Last time, with Practice.do, we kept it classy and kept our ostensibly insider knowledge close to the vest, and therefore didn’t break the news before they did.  And then they pulled the rug out from under their broader customer base with short notice (our tells came from their larger customers, who presumably merited the courtesy of getting ASAP notice unlike the rest), leaving them precious little time to export data and find a new home (and even then, the final day when their login simply no longer worked was unannounced in advance²).

Our automated mechanism for importing a Practice.do accounts from the export file was ready for prime time exactly one day after they bolted the doors on November 3rd.

So… this time around?  We’re gonna do better for this next wave of coaching platform refugees to be set in motion by Profi’s imminent collapse.

If you’ve been using Profi.io and need an alternative, stat?  Based on those key features named on their home page, here’s what we’ve got for you with CoachAccountable:

Client Portal – Oh yeah.  Sessions, Notifications, Messaging, Programs, Forms?  You’ll find you’re able to do all of that in CA, PLUS bits that are (to us) conspicuously missing from Profi, Actions and Metrics (namely the stuff client participation and tangibly getting results).

Scheduling – Yep!  CA is a full stack scheduler that hangs with the best of ’em.  There is NOT an in-app calendar UI, though.  The idea with CA is you connect your usual calendar that you already know and love (Google, Outlook, or Apple), and CA can thusly sync with that.

Video & Telehealth – Nah, CA never tried to reinvent the wheel of building its own video conferencing platform.  But it integrates REAL NICELY with the ones most coaches already have: Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet.  Connect any of those, and CA will create those meeting rooms automatically for your scheduled appointments with similarly easy ways to find and click those join links for you and your clients.

Programs – Yep, in CA we call those “Courses”.  Forms, videos, content, and indeed more than that.  Super comparable.  Agreements and scheduling live outside of the flow of Courses but are indeed supported, and CA Courses have a number of features Profi Programs don’t (e.g. Courses that progress by either timed dispatch OR self-paced completion, Action items with reminders).

Multi-Provider – CA’s Team Edition allows you to add as many coaches (or admin staff) as you like, no extra charge.

Profile Directory – Okay, Profi’s got that one over CA.  Still, there are ways to cook that up with CA Offerings and/or Offering Collections as embedded into whatever page you like on your website.

Reports – Yeah, CA has a lot of reports covering a lot of things.  They’re different and less dash-boardy, so they might bum you out.  On the bright side, though, most all of ’em are downloadable as spreadsheets, meaning the raw data is easy to export out to do with whatever you like with little fuss.

Memberships – Yep, that’s the stuff of Engagements (which can entail automatic recurring billing with a card on file when you connect either Stripe or Square) and/or membership and participation in a CA Group (which is the stuff of doing coaching things at the level of group, completely analogous to 1-on-1).

And those are the broad strokes, again, as taken from their home page, banner features.

Will you be happy with CoachAccountable coming from Profi?  Possibly!  It’s gonna be different.  With some things, Profi probably does it better.  Others, CA has the advantage (and not just the whole “continuing to exist” thing).  And if you’re open to it, you might find a lot of good stuff you didn’t know to want.

To help you find your way and figure out if CoachAccountable could be a viable alternative to Profi, grab a time with one of us and we’ll be happy to help.

Grab a 1-on-1 time with a CA staffer here.

No sales pitch, just a chance to put our minds together to see if CA’s the right place for you to land, so that you may continue to manage your coaching operations.  AND if you’d like some white glove service to get yourself moved over and trained in how to do the things you’re used to doing in CA, the CoachAccountable Experts are available for hire for that very sort of thing.

Getting Your Data Over to CoachAccountable

So, here it seems is where things get awkward.  It seems there is NO WAY TO EXPORT YOUR DATA out of Profi.  No existing functionality, no API for scraping programmatically, not even a “Hey, sorry we’re shutting our doors, sorry…. here’s a big clumsy dump that mebby you can use somewhere else.”

This to us is borderline criminal negligence.  I mean, we’re not even going anywhere, but there are already myriad ways to get your data instantly out of CA with a few clicks, in nice-to-read HTML files, CSV files, and even a machine-readable JSON dump.

I hope we’re wrong.  Maybe we just missed it.  But until we learn otherwise, that means we can’t whip up an automatic import mechanism to get your Profi data into CoachAccountable, like we did for Practice.do.

This might merit asking Profi nicely for such an export³.  Even a big, clumsy dump is better than nothing.

The Practice.do refugees could move their stuff in real easily. We’re hoping we can make such a thing for the Profi refugees.

Any which way, if you do have a sort of export file, send it on over to us with a note about it and we’ll see what we can do.

Wrapping Up

We really feel for all the Profi users who are soon to be left in the lurch.  If we can help make that transition any more workable and less jarring, we humbly submit CoachAccountable as a viable alternative for your needs, and we’ll do what we can to help you make that determination.

“I’m pretty sure some of what I’ve got to say here is going to ruffle some feathers.”
  – from the About page, I Come in Peace.

I’ve been at this CoachAccountable thing a good long while now, having recently celebrated the 13th birthday of the endeavor.  I’ve also spent years + tens of thousands of dollars being coached myself.

And on account both of these things, there are some nuanced, not-quite conventional viewpoints that inform the design of the platform that have been fomenting all along the way.

I’ve been writing these viewpoints up for a while now, and have published them on an all new companion site called The CoachAccountable Perspective.

Think of me as a fellow coach who’s been there, yes, but also think of me as the advocate for your most earnest client who desperately wants the difference that working with you is capable of making.

I’m here to whisper in your ear what they wish you would do, telling you things they don’t specifically know to want, informed by years of powerful and not-so-powerful coaching experiences they don’t yet have.

A shortcut in you knowing how to give them the best possible chance at thriving and becoming your biggest fan.

There are presently 37 essays all ready to go, and with more to come.

37 is a lot, so here are some that I suggest as worthy starting points:

• Openly Willing to Fire Clients
• Harness The Power of Your Client’s Desire to Look Good
• Being a Blank Slate Isn’t Good Customer Service, It’s Lazy
• Coaches, you’re in the Caring-as-a-Service Business
• AI is Either Good Enough for Your Client, Or It Isn’t
• We Don’t Need You to Have More Certifications, We Need You to Hold Us as Big

Find it all at https://perspective.coachaccountable.com/

Subscribe to it here.

Whether you use CoachAccountable or not, I’m good either way.  The ideas presented in these essays (of what us coaching clients wish you coaches would know and do) are generally applicable, and should ring true and worth trying.  I just want to help coaches to help their clients get bananas good results like I’ve been fortunate enough to get.  AND I want coaches to thrive by fomenting those results.

Here’s to your success in 2026, and beyond. :)

Yesterday, November 3rd, Practice.do closed its doors for good, abruptly locking out all users from their accounts.

It was about two weeks earlier that folks logged into their Practice.do accounts were greeted with this banner at the top:

Red is nature’s danger color!

So if you were a Practice customer, you are probably looking for an alternative platform for managing your coaching. CoachAccountable might be a fitting new home for you.

And if you did manage to export your data prior to that final shut down, you might have a very elegant transition indeed!

CoachAccountable can take the ZIP file you got from Practice and automatically import its contents in seconds.  This includes:

• Clients
• Families (as Companies)
• Package Templates (as Engagement Templates)
• Package Instances (as Engagements)
• Appointments
• Client Notes
• Client Worksheets
• Client Files
• Library Files
• Worksheet Templates
• Invoices
• Payment Cards (from Stripe, when you’ve connected the same Stripe account)

And you can do this all on your own, no need to email us and wait to hear back, no need to make any sort of pre-paid commitment.  You can grab an account, run the export, and see how your business could look within CoachAccountable with no waiting involved.

You’ll find the friendly prompt to do this when logged in, under your My Account >> Import Data area.

Just choose that ZIP file from practice and you’re on your way.

After clicking the “Upload it!” button, you’ll be presented with a summary of what CA found that is ready for importing, like so:

Choices, choices!

From there, choose which types of items you wish to import and you’ll be on your way.

In seconds.

There are a few limitations (for example, the Practice.do export file simply doesn’t contain key information for e.g. multiple choice questions, meaning those will have to be manually typed back in), but all in all, it’s a GREAT head start on getting your existing setup from Practice.do all ready to go in a new platform.

My heart goes out to everyone who was left in a lurch amid the Practice.do shut down.  Again, if you’re looking for a Practice.do alternative, grab a CoachAccountable account and give that import a whirl, and see how quickly you might once again be all set to continue on.

Update: For the next few days, we’re offering live sessions to acquaint yourself CoachAccountable and explore how it stacks up as a Practice.do alternative.

No pitch. No pressure. Just help getting you re-grounded and back to doing what you love…coaching.

If you’re feeling at all stuck, we’ve got you covered.

Sign up to join an upcoming session here.

It’s a real simple theme with today’s new version of CoachAccountable: the addition of TWO new integrations, MS Teams and Google Meet.

These virtual meeting platforms join the ranks of (long-supported) Zoom, enabling CA to now create virtual meeting rooms for your Appointments within these two in the exact same fashion.

The setup for all of this lives in the new Settings >> Appointment Config >> Virtual Meetings area:

You can go down the line, connecting (or not!) like 1-2-3.

Here you can connect any or all of the now-supported virtual meeting providers: Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet.

Connecting works like connecting the respective calendars: a quick bounce over to either the Microsoft or Google side of things (to be told CA wishes to have permission to create these meetings on your behalf), and you clicking to grant as much.  Takes less than 60 seconds, closer to 5 if you’re already logged in and a quick reader.

(Important caveat: the MS Teams API is ONLY supported for Work and Business accounts with Microsoft.  If you have a Personal account, neither CoachAccountable nor any other app is allowed to create MS Teams meetings for you.)

Once connected, you’ll find suitable options for each of your Appointment Types in the Preferences tab:

You can also set these preferences for a given Appointment Type when editing that type.

When scheduling an Appointment of a type that supports several choices, you (and your clients!) will be given the option to choose the preferred one:

Same deal when clients schedule as part of an Offering, too!

Like with Zoom meetings, the join link for MS Teams meetings and Google Meets display in-app with Appointments, automatically when it’s upcoming and soon to be relevant, or with a click of the calendar icon when looking further ahead:

Sharing Connections

This one goes out to all the CA power users in the house, namely those who maintain multiple accounts for operating in different contexts.  I see you!

There’s… let’s charitably call it a “quirky” thing about connections between one app and another (such as connecting Zoom to a CoachAccountable account): Zoom (and some, but not all others) will go out of its way to prevent multiple connections to the same app.  Namely if you connect to a second account, Zoom will immediately and deliberately sever/invalidate the first connection.  This is well-documented for Zoom, but this is not unique to Zoom nor to CoachAccountable.

To get around any such issue for all three providers, there’s now a way for the owner of a given connection to share that single connection with others (including him- or herself in a separate account).

To do this, click the “Connection sharing…” button for a given connected provider and you’ll see the following:

Click that copy button and you’re on your way!

The share token is the key: with it, another user (or yourself in another account) will be able to add and use that connection too.

And for you as the owner, if the share token ever falls into the wrong hands, you can click the “Change this share token…” link to rotate it to something else.  You will also see a list of any users with whom your connection is presently shared, with controls to rescind that sharing whenever desired.

And that’s all there is to it!  Connect your providers, choose which Appointment Types should have which types of meetings, and schedule as usual.  CA does the rest by setting them up, and making it super easy for both you and your clients to find the join link in notifications, reminders, synced calendar events, and in-app displays.

Usually I’d pack more into a .point release, but with this pair of integrations being far and away the most consistently requested integrations, I’m delighted to honor these requests sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

PhotoShopped cakes with a text layer for the candles 4eva.

The number 13 has a bit of a reputation.  But from a longevity standpoint of this enterprise, I’m feeling pretty lucky.  In these last 365 we here at CA got a whiff that, yes, even coaching platforms die.  Meanwhile, CoachAccountable keeps merrily humming along.

CoachAccountable’s 13th year saw the addition of numerous quality of life enhancements in the December release of Version 5.1.1, and in smaller releases sprinkled throughout (such as last week’s addition of appointment series scheduling for clients).  All told, there were 32 bug fixes and 66 such tweaks and enhancements added.  If you’re curious what you might have missed, go check out the Release Notes!

In October, I launched and subsequently ran a highly effective Bug Bounty Program, inviting the internet at large to take a stab at finding vulnerabilities in CoachAccountable.  $26,500 in bounties awarded later, I feel better than ever about the security of the platform and you should too.

On Sunday March 2nd, CoachAccountable had its only notable downtime this year, and it’s one I’m very proud of.  It was for 6 minutes while I moved CoachAccountable out of its server environment of the last 7 years, and into a shiny new one with far beefier machines.  Fun fact: in the week leading up to the migration, the old server setup had an average execution runtime of 0.1966 seconds across 294,963 requests.  In the week following, the new server setup’s average was 0.1009 seconds, i.e. just a hair over a half that of the old.  That is a nice gain in app responsiveness that you can feel!

In April, I had a blissful 3 weeks of not checking my email a single time while traveling abroad (thanks Jaclyn for so thoroughly taking the reigns!)  It was the longest stretch of not being in email since getting my first address as a freshman in college.  On the heels of that I thought “You know what?  A fella could get used to that.  Maybe it’s time to hire again and grow the team a little so that I may do this more often.”

Now then, anyone familiar with the trappings of management probably recognizes that as a rather naive sentiment.  I hear it, too!

I still figured I’d try.  This time I got smart and posted the roles just to the CoachAccountable community, rather than on general internet job boards.  And what a difference that made.  The result (thus far!) is Noah, who joined the team in early July.  Please do take a beat to get acquainted and say hello!

It’s already going very well.  And so now, bolstered again by having a team behind me, I’m feeling quite free to truly step away for weeks at a time.  And lest you think I’m going soft, I’m also feeling inspired and supported to take on what we might call more ambitious projects, to shift the very definition of coaching itself to include more than the conversations.  This of course is a drum I’ve been beating in our little corner of the internet for quite some time now; more on that another day. :)

And that’s a wrap on year 13!

My many thanks to the CoachAccountable community, without which this party would hardly be a party at all.  Thank you all for coming.  I appreciate and remain honored as ever to be your coaching platform guy.

Happy Birthday, CoachAccountable!