The CoachAccountable Blog

In a coaching relationship, some things are appropriate for sharing with clients and some things are meant to be for internal reference only.  As such it’s vital for any online coaching portal to smartly manage who can see what, so as to both respect confidentiality AND accommodate collaboration.

CoachAccountable has long supported privacy settings on a per-item basis, allowing, for example, some Session Notes to be shared with/freely accessible by the client and others to be private, for the coach’s eyes only.  “Private” and “Shared with client” are handy options to have when making an entry in a client record.

Coaches in Team Edition accounts actually have 3 options for the privacy setting:

1. Private, for my eyes only.  Items that are just for the author’s reference, and not meant to be seen even by other coaches on the team.
2. Visible only to team coaches.  Items that are just meant to be internal to the coaching team.
3. Shared with client.  Items that are meant to be seen by the client in addition to members of the coaching team.

For quite some time these settings have been quite sufficient for the CoachAccountable community.  But a few weeks ago, CoachAccountable client Martin Hoyle shared some insightful perspective that I’d never considered before:

…if I share a session note with a client it can be seen by another team coach. Can I suggest you make that more explicit?

As a coach I’m not comfortable with this, as I believe that all conversations between me and my client (especially session notes) are confidential – even with regard to other coaches working with the same client. It doesn’t seem that there is an easy way to preserve this privacy within the system as it stands.

I’d always assumed that coaching teams within a given organization were more or less a fully united front, in that anything suitable for sharing with the client would as well be suitable to be seen by other coaches assigned to work with that client (not necessarily ALL coaches within the organization, of course, just those specifically paired with him or her).

Yet this bit of feedback made clear that that wasn’t always the case.  Thus I agreed that the system needed a 4th privacy setting: Just me and the client, for items that are suitable to share with the client but still to be kept confidential from any other team coaches, EVEN those coaches who are also working with the client and have access to their records.

So thus here we have sprinkled out through the system, wherever item privacy settings are relevant, a 4th option:

My thanks to Morgan for the grammar check: the first draft of this option was the less catchy and grammarically-inferior “Just client and I”.

It is my hope that this little addition will make easier and more clear the task of balancing confidentiality with collaboration.  My thanks to Martin, and as always to the whole community of CA users whose input continues to make the platform better than I ever could with my limited perspective alone!

Until now, you’ve been able to accept coaching client payments via Stripe. Today we’re pleased to announce that your clients can now also pay via Square!

As in the case with Stripe and Authorize.net, clients can pay your invoices directly inside the online coaching platform, rather than going to an external site.

Setup from within the CoachAccountable system is easy. Just navigate to Settings >> System >> Client Invoicing Config.

Here, select Square as your online payment processor.

Look at that big beautiful Square!

If you’re not logged in to Square, you’ll be directed to the Square login page.

This one should look pretty familiar!

If you are logged in, you’ll skip right over that one and see this next. Square will make sure you want CoachAccountable to have some permissions.

Please say yes – don’t make us get down on one knee!

And voila! The connection with CoachAccountable is complete.

CELEBRATE!! You WIN! Go get that money!

Now your money is going right into your Square account.

What Does This Payment Integration Cost?

It’s free on our end! CoachAccountable doesn’t take any cut of your payments. The only fees are what Square charges you.

Conveniently Save Card Information

As in the Stripe and Authorize.net payment process, your clients can have the system store their credit card information for future use. That makes those automatically recurring invoices a snap and takes them off your mind!

But is it secure? Yep – CA is just a pass-through. Just like coach subscription information, we never keep card details (other than what’s needed to identify the card for the client, such as the last 4 digits and expiration), but instead use a unique token. Square adds yet another PCI-compliant way of taking your customers’ payments through our online coaching tool.

Were you hoping for Square integration in order to sign up for your free 30-day trial of CoachAccountable’s coaching tool? Hop on board today!

At 5 and a half years, the old explainer video had a good run, and it did the job of explaining the gist of CoachAccountable well.  But it was a relic of my early days animation chops (not that they’ve come terribly far!), a shoestring budget, and indeed a much less sophisticated CoachAccountable (which HAS since come terribly far :).

So there was MUCH room for improvement.

I think we succeeded!  Thanks the artistic direction of Rob Fieldhouse of Playground Creative and the beautiful animations of Anastasiya Bulavkina I’m proud of this 2 minute and 45 second video that introduces this platform I’ve been building and evolving for so long.

Fun fact: it’s once again yours truly doing the narration.  We did an hour long studio recording with professional voice talent, and though her voice was great and the take essentially perfect, it just didn’t feel quite right.  Between polished professionalism and gritty authenticity I opted emphatically for the latter.  I just think that the enthusiasm spoken by a fellow coach who’s actually excited about the topic at hand resonated much more than someone who, ultimately, was just reading a script.

I think you’ll find it comes through.  Enjoy!

For some time now I’ve thought to myself it might be cool to be invited to speak at a conference, to share about what I’ve learned over the years in my quest to make coaching better by way of technology.

In late April Halli MacNab, incoming president of ACTO, the Association of Coach Training Organizations, reached out with a simple inquiry:

We had a presenter drop out – and are wondering if you are interested in a conversation about presenting at the conference – about the benefits of merging coaching with technology?

“Why yes, that sounds like fun!”  In our first conversation I was happy to report that that very subject was something I felt quite comfortable with and qualified to speak on. » Continue reading “Speaking at the ACTO Conference”

Thanks to Brian Icenhower’s team for inspiring this new development for our online coaching tool!

You already had the ability to share a file with multiple people at once, but now you can share multiple files with multiple people at once, as well as share multiple files with a single person at once.

This can come in handy if, say, as part of onboarding a client you want to share all your files at the same time with her. Another use case might be if you have a Group that needs to be updated with your entire Library, and you want to skip the step of adding them to a Course that delivers all your documents (which would also require adding any new files to the Course).

Here’s how.

-Create a Group and add the appropriate members.

-From the Group Stream, click “+ File.”

-Select “Actually I want to share multiple files from my Library.”

-Use Shift and/or Ctrl keys to select as necessary.

To keep the Group up to date, you’ll just need to do the following:

1. When you add new clients, add them as members of the Group.
2. When you add new Library files, share them with all members of the Group.

And that’s it!

Sound like a good solution for managing your files and your people? Try CoachAccountable for free with a 30-day trial.