The CoachAccountable Blog

This week has been a deep dive into client engagement in coaching programs, from why it matters and is worth managing to how to cause more of it.  To round out the series I’m happy to unveil CoachAccountable’s brand new Client Engagement Reports.

The impetus to create these reports began 12 days ago during an inspired conversation with Michael Leahy, wherein he expressed the desire to see how his clients were engaging but in a manner more efficient than clicking through to each one and manually reviewing.  The vision was further brought into focus last week when Nicky Roberts shared how keeping up with clients who are falling off in their engagement has made a substantial difference in her client retention.

So now I get it.  Between action plans, marking things done, accessing shared files and more, CoachAccountable already maintains a seriously detailed record of how much clients are engaged in their coaching process.  Knowing that a client is falling behind is actionable information: a chance for coach to check in and offer whatever support might be appropriate.

All that’s needed to make an actionable gauge of client activity is to pull it all together and present it to coach in a way that’s super simple to understand.  Thus the new Client Engagement Reports:

Move your mouse over any band of activity to see the breakdown of what it entails.

A client’s engagement is summarized on a per-week basis, and is comprised of whichever bits you think are an important indication of their participation: action completions, metric reporting, journal entries, and so on.  Even the number of times they logged in during a week can factor in to their level of engagement.

The setup is simple: pick the date range you’re interested in (the most recent month is a handy default) and which items you want to view engagement on.

Just pick a date range and which things you care about for gauging their involvement.

These reports make keeping tabs on who’s keeping up and who isn’t a snap, which is especially important when you’re coaching a lot of people in which case folks might easily go unnoticed when lagging behind.  Given how powerful it is to manage client engagement for the sake of results and a continued relationship, I suspect that this will be a useful addition for many coaches.

As illustrated earlier, client engagement with your coaching is vital to their getting results, and is a major deciding factor in whether or not they stick around.

Here are some practices for causing greater and more regular engagement with your coaching that you can enact with the benefit of CoachAccountable.  And if you’re worried about how much work this is going to be to get your clients up to speed with these practices, included with each one is an estimate of how much time it takes per client to set in motion.

1. Get them in the habit of creating their own actions.  Do it for them perhaps the first time, a basic setup.  Include one action to “Mark this action complete”, and one action to “Create your own action”.  These two may seem trite, but are actually quite useful.  The pair gives them the excuse to play around with Actions, see how they work and get the satisfaction of building up a collection of completed actions.  Bear in mind: the typical client when just getting started will often feel like a guest in someone else’s house, and accordingly will want to tread lightly and not mess anything up.  So it makes a big difference to give them permission to feel right at home and experience this as a resource for them to fully use as well.

Encourage them to set reminders and make comments when they create their own actions.  Let them know that actions can be easily marked complete by replying to reminder emails and texts.  Reminder replies can include comments too, making the dialog super easy to keep going.  Explain how comments keep the communication channels open for more support, and serve as tangible records of both progress made and obstacles overcome.

Time to set in motion with a client: 3 minutes the first week to setup relevant actions + a 2-minute conversation to illustrate the how and why of doing it themselves.

2. Schedule appointments that have pre-session worksheet assignments tied to them.  Appointments are easily setup with reminders for both you and your clients, and can be configured to always have a worksheet assigned beforehand.  Reminders for your clients remind them of the fact that they’re being coached on things that are important to them, and thus gets them thinking about those things.  Filling out a pre-session worksheet gives them an opportunity to take stock of what they would like more support on, and sets you both up for a focused and less meandering coaching session.

CoachAccountable manages the assignment of the worksheet at the right time prior to appointment, and puts your clients one click away from being able to fill it out.

Time to set in motion with a client: 1 minute per appointment, or 2 minutes to setup a regular sequence of up to 12 appointments.  Zero time is required if you allow your clients to schedule themselves with you.

3. Get them in the habit of reporting on Metrics.  You may not have concrete numbers that you are working on, but even subjective elements like how they feel about their progress (on, for example, a 1-to-10 scale) are a useful thing to track.  Regularly reporting Metrics builds a story of progress and what’s working over time, which helps them focus more on causing results in the desired direction AND gives you hints on what to focus on in your sessions.

Remind your clients that Metrics are quick and easy to track, just by replying to regular email or text reminders.  If you’re not sure what to track, see the Four Types of Metrics for ideas.  For a full primer on Metrics and how they work, check out Why Metrics are Awesome.

Time to set in motion with a client: 2 minutes to create the first relevant metric + a 3-minute conversation to explain the concepts and importance of regular reporting.

It’s typically hard to cause high engagement without being high touch, and being high touch is often impractical for the time it requires (and even then it may be off-putting to clients!).  With these practices however you can cause your clients to more regularly engage with your coaching, both with a very small outlay of time for you and in a way that is satisfyingly interactive for them.

I once presumed that, within coaching, client engagement could be taken for granted.  After all folks are paying good money for the experience, and it’s a way for them to grow and prosper in ways that are important to them.  So of course they’re going to keep up with the materials, heed coach’s advice, complete all assignments and follow through on action plans, right?

If you’ve been coaching a while you’ve probably had a handful of such A-students of the process: those who put in their work as though the quality of their life depended on it, and were accordingly rewarded for their diligence with the results they sought.

But not everyone who is coached has all of the will, the wherewithal, and the confidence in the process to follow your guidance with such high fidelity.  This is just as true for individuals who undertake being coached of their own volition as it is for individuals participating in some form of company-mandated training program.

We could say that the success of coaching is the product of how good the direction is (expertise, content, fit with the client) and how engaged the client is with that direction.  This probably makes intuitive sense: you can have the greatest coaching methodology in the world, and if the engagement is nil or negligible it won’t make a difference.

One way to look at client engagement is that it simply lies within clients themselves: some are sufficiently motivated and in a good place to take advantage of the process, and others just aren’t.

But building CoachAccountable and helping hundreds of coaches over the last two years has given me evidence that there’s more to the story.  The degree to which a client engages with a given coaching program is actually quite malleable, and is intimately tied to how the program is structured and the ways by which a client can participate.

Client engagement, then, becomes another dimension along which coach can improve his or her coaching offering.  When clients are engaged, they are doing the work, getting the results, and in turn more apt to be satisfied with the process (and perhaps most telling of all: more likely to stick around for more).

Yes, there are the gimme clients who are rip-roaring-ready-to-go without much effort on our parts.  But the others are by no means a lost cause.  If you lose clients after a week or a month because their enthusiasm to keep up simply peters out in a predictable fashion, it isn’t necessarily that they were a misfit or that your coaching is no good.  It may be just a failure to keep clients sufficiently engaged in a process meant to ultimately benefit them.

So if client engagement is something that can be caused, how to cause it?  There are three main rules for doing this that I’ve sorted out, rules which have had a large part in the design (and success) of CoachAccountable.  They are:

1. Keep the results tangible.  “Am I getting anything out of this?”  If your clients are ever left to wonder this on their own, your prospects of keeping them engaged have already taken a big hit.  To avoid this you’ve got to be doing things like measuring results, keeping a scoreboard, or making a game which enables them to see where they are and how far they’ve come at every turn.  This sort of tracking prevents the weeks from blurring together, and replaces that sensation with one of being on a path that’s leading somewhere good.

2. Make the process fit in their life.  Coaching is intrinsically tough because it’s the stuff of expanding outside of one’s usual habits, performance levels, and comfort zones.  Anything you can do to remove friction to their participation and get them fitting it in with minimal hassle is a win, especially considering that they’ve got enough to manage as is just acting on your coaching.  Make the experience of being coached go down more smoothly by sending reminders for appointments, making their action plans and progress readily visible, providing session notes that are always accessible, and sharing resources in a way that makes them easy to retrieve and easy to revisit.  In other words: give it to them on a silver platter.

3. Make the experience responsive.  If your client’s only opportunity to experience being coached is during your weekly session, that makes a lot of days during which they are on their own.  This time in-between presents ample opportunity for life to come up and derail plans made in coaching, even when derailment is as simple (and easy to overcome) as forgetting.  Sending little reminders to follow through on action plans goes a long way to maintain forward momentum.  Proactively reaching out with a simple “way to go” for progress made makes clients feel cared for, and moreover imparts in them a real sense that following through matters, by the simple fact that someone else is paying attention and cares.  Any way that your coaching presence can be gently felt between those times when you’re actually present makes your coaching a more immersive experience, rather than just a fleeting once-a-week time that stands largely at odds with the rest of life.

My personal experience combined with that of many other coaches reveals that to abide by these three rules provides a major advantage in causing client effort, and thus client results.

One of the reasons CoachAccountable works so well for coaches is because helps them follow these three rules with minimal effort.  To wit, last week I was favored with kind words from CoachAccountable user Nicky Roberts.  Here is an excerpt, a tidy report from the field which illustrates the pivotal role that rule #3 of causing client engagement has played in elevating the success of her coaching practice:

Before I used CoachAccountable I noticed that around the 6 week mark clients usually hit a slump in their coaching. They lost momentum and the sparkle and shine of coaching had worn off.  Since using CoachAccountable there is no slump.  I think this is partly because I have a better sense of when the slump might be starting because I notice a reduction of their use of CoachAccountable and can head it off immediately, and also because we stay in touch so much more, they enjoy a better overall experience of coaching.

Before using CoachAccountable about 40% of my clients stopped coaching after their first 6 weeks.  Now 0%, yes zero, of my clients end their coaching after their first 6 weeks. In fact, as of this writing I haven’t lost a single coaching client in over a year. I believe that CoachAccountable has been part of helping me achieve that success.

It was back in September when I put out a call from some of my favorite early adopters of CoachAccountable for a testimonial, something tidy to fit in to the then under constructions testimonials section of the CA homepage.  Some I heard back from immediately, others took a little while, still others I never heard back from (it’s cool, goodness knows it’s a serious favor, and not anyone’s job to do my marketing for me).

Twila Gates, Senior Credentialed ADHD coach of the ADHD Success Network lovingly let me know that time was tight but she’d get back to me.

Today she got back to me, and then some.  I’m delighted and humbled by the way-above-the-call-of-duty missive she has written, which I share with you now.  Twila, take it away.

I must say that I was extremely fortunate to have signed up with CoachAccountable very early on (I think John said I was user #8). In any case, I was so excited that I found CoachAccountable when I did. Even though CoachAccountable was in its infancy it provided many of the features that I was looking for in my desire to coach my clients to the very best of my ability.

When I signed on I had already spent $10,000+ to have a site developed with many similar capabilities to CoachAccountable… I can tell you that it was not a fun experience, despite my technical knowledge (from a database standpoint). I was at a point where I had to decide to toss the idea or spend a lot more to get it done right. I was wondering if there was anyone else out there trying to create the same type of interface as what I so very much desired… enter CoachAccountable.

I nearly came unglued with excitement when I found CoachAccountable as it had many of the features I wanted and it worked (unlike my own venture into this arena). So I signed up and started playing with it immediately. Not too far in I also added the feature for clients to login at my website portal. I have NEVER regretted my decision to use Coach Accountable.

I work with people who have Attention Deficit (ADD / ADHD). Part of the focus in our coaching is… well …. developing “focus” and “structure”. I had always assisted my clients in creating goals with metrics (I was using a spreadsheet)… but to have it web accessible and web updateable was one of my dreams fulfilled. Setting automated reminders tied into session times, actions, metrics, notes, etc was unbelievably easy and VERY good for my clientele.

John was great and did some re-structuring of the metrics interface so it is possible to view major/long term goals separate from daily or weekly types of goal tracking. He also created an accordion feature for the graphic so a longer list was easier to view. I couldn’t believe that John was so open to my suggestions and ideas. I think at one point… I was a bit much for him, as I was contacting him every few days with questions and ideas.

John never wavered… I’m not saying he gave me everything I asked for, but if it made sense for coaches in general, he as happy to at least consider. Several fixes and additions were made and he knows about a few more things I would like to see happen. John is so fantastic… he considers everything carefully as his desire is to have a very clean and user friendly interface, which I agree is very important. I anticipate that John is already thinking about various requests right now due to his wonderful responsiveness and desire to continue to add features that make sense.

All in all, I would very highly recommend Coach Accountable to ANY coach. It assists you in creating continuity, awareness, motivation, effective communications and an outstanding experience for clients. Coach Accountable gets an A+++++ and John gets an A++++++++++++.

Twila

Metrics remain one of my favorite pieces of the entire CoachAccountable system: they make progress real, reveal hidden insights, and cause clients to be engaged at a very high and regular level.

Over the two years of using and learning how other coaches have used them I’ve come to recognize 4 distinct flavors of Metrics that are commonly employed: Cumulative, Measurement, Rating and Binary.  Each flavor has its own characteristic setup, and each best fits its own separate set of outcomes worth tracking.

I invite you to take a minute to acquaint yourself with these 4.  Do so not only to enjoy a nice tutorial on their setup (and thus on Metrics in general), but more importantly to gain ideas how to more broadly help and serve your own coaching clients.

Cumulative

Cumulative is the type of Metric that typically starts at zero and builds towards some accumulated total amount.  This is really common and handy for tracking long term performance goals in arenas like sales and other such measurable productivity¹.

The target trend line of a Cumulative Metric gives a day-by-day visual approximation of when performance is ahead of schedule and when it is lagging behind.  This is quite nice for honing in on what’s really working as well as identifying when goals are turning out to be off, either too easy or wholly unrealistic.

To create a Cumulative Metric the key is to choose the “cumulative” option for the Data Entry setting.  Then make suitable target values to match the goal.  Most often this will be zero to start, and an end target value of whatever you’re shooting for by the end of the Metric duration.  If for example the goal is $100,000 in sales over a 3 month period, you would set the Metric to last for 3 months and have the target values be zero to start and 100,000 to end.

Here’s what the setup of our example Metric above looks like:

Measurement

A Measurement Metric is perhaps the most intuitive of them all: it is simply the tracking of some real-world value that can be measured on a regular basis.  “Weight” in a fitness program is a good example of a Measurement Metric.

In contrast to a Cumulative Metric it wouldn’t make sense to have to have the numbers of a Measurement Metric be added up as a running tally: the numbers themselves are the real thing to plot and watch unfold over time.  A Measurement Metric typically has target values that start at whatever the real-world value actually is at the onset of the Metric, and ends with the desired goal value.  In the example chart above we see a starting measurement of 252lbs, with a desired end goal of 230lbs after two months.

Measurement Metrics are a very natural way to keep track of real happenings over time and provide a strong visual guide to how well the desired change is (or isn’t) panning out.

Here is the setup of our example Measurement Metric.  Note how Data Entry is set to “regular” and the target values are chosen to match what’s so to start, and the desired goal to end:

Rating

In contrast to Measurement Metrics which are concerned with real-world measurable values, Rating Metrics are made up of scales and subjective numbers that nevertheless give meaning and track-ability to the less tangible.

Things like “managerial effectiveness”, “confidence on sales calls”, “degree of overwhelm”, and “sense of well-being” are all subjective, yet they are still of vital concern when coaching individuals towards their desired outcomes.  By creating a scale and guiding your clients to weigh in regularly with their subjective assessments you gain a rather useful foothold into coaching and influencing these important intangibles.  When tracked over time, and especially when annotated with comments, a Rating Metric invariably tells a real story about how these subjective aspects are going, and gives you as coach a useful area to focus on.

To create a Rating Metric simply decide on what scale you’d like your clients to rate on. 1 through 10 is a very common one that everyone is familiar with.  You might include this range in the name of the Metric (e.g. “Managerial Effectiveness on a Scale of 1 to 10”).

Once you pick your scale you then pick a number that nicely represents a sort of “minimum acceptable” value, as if to say “this value is okay, anything above this is a win, and anything below tells us we should look to improve”.  I recommend you then set both your starting and ending target values to this threshold.

The setup of our Rating Metric looks like this.  I recommend generic “points” to serve as the unit of measure.  The “on a Scale of 1 to 10” doesn’t have to be there in the name, but it’s a nice cue to remind our client how to report his or her values:

(Note that in the above the goal is to “meet or exceed” the target value.  When tracking something negative, e.g. degree of overwhelm, you’ll want to set the goal to “get at or below” the target value).

This goal is not quite in the spirit of things.

A common mistake is to setup a Rating Metric with zero for a starting target, and 10 as the ending one (or whatever value is the top of your scale).  This isn’t ideal because visually what you’re saying, in essence, is that the bar is too low to trip over when you’re getting started, but then gradually gets to only a perfect 10 being okay.

You can play with the target values to be whatever fits your style and actual goals.  Again, I prefer a fixed target throughout but it might be the case that you start with a 4 being okay and the game is to have your client view a 7 as the new standard of okay by the end of the Metric.  Just make sure that your target values make sense as the real (an attainable!) goals throughout the period of time that you’ll be tracking.

Binary

In many cases it’s useful simply to track regular practices in terms of a simple “did you do it, or did you not?”  This is where a Binary Metric comes in handy, where “binary” is just a fancy way of signifying that something is”zero or one”, “on or off”, or “yes or no”.

Here’s a short video showing how to set up a Binary Metric.

Binary Metrics are by far the least obvious use of Metrics, but like the others they enable a commonly useful type of tracking.  Binary Metrics are a good way to ingrain regular habits into your clients like exercising daily, sticking to a nutrition plan, doing prescribed rituals, and so on.

To setup a Binary Metric the most important thing actually is to let your client know that he or she should report numbers as a one or a zero, one for yes and zero for no.   Then I recommend setting target values to 0.5 to start, and 0.5 to end.  I grant that that’s a wacky, nonsensical set of target values for something that’s supposed to be a yes or a no, but bear with me: setting a flat line for the target that’s halfway between zero and one leads to a visually nice graph where the “yeses” are shaded with a favorable green and the “nos” are in an unfavorable red.

(This assumes that yes is good: with a Binary Metric like “Did you smoke today?” in a program trying to discourage smoking, for example, you would flip the goal setting to “get at or below” the target value, and thus flip the coloring scheme.)

A Binary Metric is as simple as that: just a nice scheme to document how much a regular practice is being followed-through upon which shows the history and trends in a very visual way.  Our setup looks like this:

And there you have it: 4 commonly-employed types of Metrics, each with their own characteristic setups and each serving a different collection of things worth tracking during the course of a coaching relationship.

The great flexibility of Metrics is part of what makes them a little intimidating when you first set them up, but this flexibility is also what makes them so versatile for a broad range of outcomes tracking.  By employing a combination of these four types you’ll be able to track pretty much anything your clients are working on, and have them more engaged and satisfied with the process as a result.

Yesterday I got an email from Bryan Gilliom of Level 5 Coaching Group, a fellow who was goodly enough to reply to my “welcome, how’s it going?” email that gets sent to all coaches shortly after they grab an account¹.  In addition to giving a really nice account of what he was looking for, he let me know his wish list so far for the system.  The first on this list was this:

1) To improve my own efficiency I want to be able to send worksheets based on an appointment.  So it seems like I am going to have to remember each session to schedule a “Check in” worksheet and reminder, and I will have to schedule a pre-meeting worksheet.  This seems like repetitive work that would be better done by defining triggers tied to the appointment.

In this I love both his forwardness to ask and clarity of reasoning behind it.  (Incidentally, the second item on his wish list was essentially a request for the forthcoming Team Edition.)

To his first request I replied:

Tying a worksheet to an appointment type is a really good idea, one which I’ve toyed with in the past and am just about sold on as being worth adding.  As you might imagine my to-do list is quite flush with good ideas but I reckon I may add this sometime in the near-ish future.

Then I realized I was just a few days off from a trip to Vegas for MicroConf, and thus it wasn’t a good day for doing any major architectural wrangling for Team Edition.  Instead, a quick project was a perfect way to spend the day.  So I did just that.  And now, as of this morning, coaches can tie worksheet assignments automatically to their appointment types.  Let’s take a look.

When setting up an appointment type it’s as simple as choosing which worksheet template you want assigned to your clients prior to those appointments, and setting rules of timing (when to assign it, and when is it due):

Check the box and you’ve got a few options. By default the system suggests assigning one day before the appointment, and having it be due one hour prior.

That’s pretty much all the setup you need and CA takes care of the rest.  When you as coach schedule an appointment with one of your clients you have the option, if you feel so inclined, to override this assigning behavior:

The worksheet assignment is checked by default, but you can cancel it if the situation so deems appropriate.

When clients schedule themselves for a given appointment type, any associated worksheet assignment is automatically done by CoachAccountable at the right time.  In all cases CA sends clients an email the moment the worksheet is assigned, with a magic link that puts them one click away from working on it.

Cheers to Bryan for his well-timed and well-articulated request, I’m happy to have this one all done reckon it’ll be a win for a large number of coaches besides him.

Happenings Reports.

Or: “CoachAccountable’s system of emailing a summary of what’s new with your clients on a regular basis”.  It is perhaps an odd twist of a phrase, but this tool is one that I suspect will be quite powerful and useful for coaches.

So much customization!

Setup is as simple as indicating who to send to, which clients to report on, and when to send.  There are three types of recipients to serve three very distinct purposes.

Happenings Reports for You, as Coach

By configuring a report to go to yourself as coach, you can get a quick digest of what’s happening with any or all of your clients at regular intervals, without needing to log in and look into individual clients.  This summary enables you to be even more on top of how things are going, and allows you to be more proactive with your support.

If you coach your clients on a regularly scheduled basis, you can configure a series of Happenings Reports, each covering a single client and each to be delivered to your email inbox right before the respective appointments–perfect for getting up to speed just in time if logging in that moment isn’t convenient.

Happenings Reports for Your Clients

By configuring reports for your clients, you can give them a summary of all coaching happenings at regular intervals.  This can serve either as a nice tangible record of progress and accomplishments, or as a tidy reminder to keep up with outstanding actions, complete outstanding assignments, and be mindful to cause and track results for current Metrics.

Happenings Reports for Third Parties

The record of your coaching relationships in CoachAccountable is generally shared only between you and your clients, but in many scenarios it is desirable (or even necessary) to give third parties a window into client progress as it unfolds.  With Happenings Reports, these designated recipients can be automatically kept abreast of progress and coaching results on a regular basis.

This is perfect for when the person hiring you is not your coaching client but someone else, someone to whom you are responsible for producing results with your coaching clients.

Note: if those third parties want more direct access to what clients are doing, you may want to consider using Companies. That way the third party person will have their own login and access to whatever you provide about that client, instead of a passively received Happenings Report.

Include only what is fitting, send when useful

The controls for setting up a Happenings Report offer flexibility to handle numerous and varied scenarios.  Here are some examples:

• Send only Metrics for certain clients to HR on the first of every month.
• Give each of your clients an end-of-week summary of Actions for them to keep up with.
• Send yourself the complete details on a particular client every Tuesday at 10:45, just prior to their weekly session.

Here’s what one looks like in your email inbox:

Client and coach alike can make comments on any item in a Happenings Report via email simply by clicking on the little comment icon() next to it.  Comments sent via email this way are captured in the system as Stream Item Comments, and forwarded on to the other party as usual.

You can configure as many Happenings Reports as you like, each on their own schedule, covering their own set of clients and item types, and sending to their own recipient or recipients.

I’m excited to make these available to coaches and their clients, as a way to make CoachAccountable an even more useful tool for collaboration and accountability in ways that reach beyond when people are logged in.  To set them up in your account go over on the right side of your screen to Settings >> Happenings Reports.

Special thanks to Michael Leahy who was kind enough to give me his real-time first impressions over the phone while using an earlier, less polished version.  My wife and I wondered how long it would be before someone requested the ability to choose which things to include in a given report, and my conversation with Michael gave the answer to that question: 6 minutes.

For his feedback this official release is more polished and user friendly. :)

This is one I’m excited about.

One of the serious wins of Metrics is that they makes progress evident: they turn a set of numbers into a tangible experience of how things are going, with a satisfying visualization of results relative to a target.

One of the other serious wins of Metrics is that they make it dead simple for your clients to track that progress at regular intervals, thus eliminating much of the tendency to forget as well as keeping goals regularly within their awareness between coaching sessions.

Those two major wins have been combined: now when your client replies to a Metric reminder email with their number for the day, they’ll get back an email response which shows them their freshly-updated progress in graph form, like so:

Visual feedback comes right back to your client when they report progress via email.

It’s an effect that I’ve already enjoyed while testing, and one which I think many clients will benefit from.

Why?  Because it’s satisfying to get that feedback right away, and that satisfaction motivates further effort towards next data point.

There was a time, late last April, when I received some feedback about CoachAccountable’s system for client invoicing.

It was critical but fair, and pointed to a lot of the shortcomings one is bound to find in a system that presents itself as purposefully lean and minimal.  It was a reminder of a fact that I well knew but resisted: CoachAccountable client invoicing was a far cry from the level of polish and quality found everywhere else in the system.

To explain why, we need just a little historical perspective.  Client invoicing was truly the bastard step-child of the system, left over from the 1.0 days and never really given the sort of love of a re-write which most of the rest of CA received when I created version 2.  Prior to launch it was never important enough to prioritize among so much else to work on, and I was perhaps too sentimental to axe it completely.  In the FAQ’s I gave a small apology on the matter: in response to the hypothetical question “What about invoices with broken-out line items? Or taxes? Or reports for my accountant?” I wrote the following:

Sorry, the billing setup of CoachAccountable is deliberately lean and mean, and indeed will probably fall short for more complex scenarios.  CoachAccountable is not meant to be a full on invoice and accounting solution, so if these tools fall sort there are other great online options that do it better than CA ever could.  I’m a fan of Freshbooks myself.

Content as I was to not reinvent the invoicing wheel, I still found this particular earnest criticism of the neglected feature really cut home:

I understand the desire for the lean mean look, it’s strange but when people are spending top dollar for coaching, I like my invoice to reflect some care… just a thought.

CA invoices didn’t reflect any care?  “Holy moly he’s right” I lamented to myself.  I resolved that I needed to remove billing if this is what it’s like.  Then I looked into how many coaches were actively using it: about 30% of my then modest collection of customers.

“I should’ve removed it when I had the chance” I grumbled to my wife, always the sympathetic ear to my work musings.  Undeterred, I put out a warning notice to those customers that sometime in the next 6 months I was apt to remove client billing entirely.  For a while it was invisible to all new sign ups, and quietly removed from the product tour page.

Weeks passed and the sting of being called out on evident half-heartedness faded.  I relaxed a little, mulled on usage, and decided it could stay a while longer after all.  I still had plenty to do elsewhere in the system, I decided to let it limp on a while longer.

Fast forward to two weeks ago.  An email from a new user, Brandi Starr, asked the following:

Is there a way to schedule recurring invoices? It appears when I enter an invoice and hit “send to client” it sends it right away no matter when I set the invoice date for. Most of my clients are billed monthly and it’s a hassle to have to remember to go in and generate an invoice each month.

Such a simple and well-formulated set of questions and implicit requests.  My usual M.O. regarding billing was to point to it’s deliberate simplicity and acknowledge that there are better solutions out there, and I more or less replied as such.  Brandi volleyed with a simple observation:

…regarding invoicing even if it isn’t recurring it would be awesome if it wouldn’t send the notice until the invoice date.

That made a LOT of sense, and wasn’t too much to ask for at all.  In that instant I realized that, one, I was never going to take out billing completely, and two, I was officially tired of apologizing for the half-hearted billing system of CoachAccountable.  It was time to do something about it.

What followed was a week long complete remix of billing, including the following new goodies:

• Line-item invoices, instead of a single amount plus one-liner description
• Option to add tax as a percentage
• Post-dated invoices with the option to schedule invoice deliver at the later date
• Create a recurring sequence of invoices with just a few clicks
• Spiffy new display of invoices visible to both coach and client, in-system and via email

Creating an invoice now looks like this:

Click the “I would like to make a series of invoices just like this one” and you see the following:

Here’s what an invoice looks like, including payment history when relevant:

Invoices play nicely with branding settings:

I stand by my earlier view that invoicing is hardly central to supporting and doing great coaching (which remains my main concern for CoachAccountable), but I suspect that having a nice invoicing solution baked right in will be a useful perk for many.  In its shiny, new state I imagine that CA invoicing will be a viable option for many more coaches than before.  Since it will help a now substantial (and ever growing) group of people, I may as well go the last mile and get it to the “Yep, that’ll do for my needs.” state for a wide class of folks.

Accordingly it will be my pleasure to put finishing touches on it to have it really be complete, including exportable reports ripe for shipping off to an accountant and various online payment methods.

I’m keen to hear of what (if anything) else is needed.

There’s a new goodie for CoachAccountable client and group messaging today: the ability to add HTML formatting.

Previously messaging was constrained to just plain text.  This is generally sufficient and right in line with how most email messages are composed.  Starting today however coaches can opt to add rich text formatting to messages sent through the system:

Just one click turns a plain text area into…

…a WYSIWYG area, ripe for making a formatted message.

All told, this new ability applies to messaging a single client, bulk messaging some or all clients, group messages, and group private messages.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but kinda nice.