CoachAccountable Review

CoachAccountable is a very detailed, cloud-based software program with plenty of tools to keep you and your clients enthusiastic and engaged. In this CoachAccountable review, you’ll discover the many ways this program can benefit your health coaching business and help your clients reach their goals.

What is CoachAccountable?

The brainchild of prominent web developer, John Larson, CoachAccountable is a web-based program intended to give professional coaches everything they need to do their best work.

Designed to work across all devices, CoachAccountable is packed with powerful, interactive administrative tools for billing, scheduling, bookkeeping and more. By simplifying these tasks, coaches can do more of what they love: coaching. 🙂 Consequently, clients feel more supported, which ultimately leads to better results.

CoachAccountable also includes tools that benefit clients specifically, such as the accountability tracker, which reminds clients to track numbers and follow through to achieve their goals.

The software syncs you and your clients through action, status updates, and deadlines. Moreover, it allows coach and coachee to jointly create an action plan, follow through on it, and review the results.

Who is CoachAccountable For?

Managing a coaching business can be taxing. CoachAccountable streamlines your coaching business by offering many useful administrative tools that save you time.

Besides benefiting coaches, CoachAccountable also helps clients, specifically those who seek wellness but need a plan in place with structure and accountability. It’s great for someone who reaches goals more effectively with human interaction instead of trying to go at it on their own.

In particular, CoachAccountable helps clients develop resilience so that they can resist giving up or giving in (especially when that hot fudge sundae beckons!) The program works well for people highly motivated by a deep desire for wellness and who recognize that a coach won’t do all the work for them. These clients also understand that gains are made gradually, not drastically.

Overall Impressions

I decided to give CoachAccountable a whirl, so I registered for their 30-day free trial. Signing up was simple and blink-of-an-eye fast. I merely provided my email address, clicked on a link in their confirmation email, and was in.

I was also given the option to sign up as a client, as well as a coach, so I could experience the system from the client’s perspective. If you experience firsthand what your clients see, you can better guide them through the system. In doing so, you can be more responsive to your clients’ needs and adjust each program accordingly. Adding yourself as a client is a freebie that doesn’t count toward your subscription plan limit.

Learning Aids

After I landed inside the site, I was offered a free, 29-page ebook called, “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to Coaching.” I didn’t see what was so poignant about an instruction manual. However, it was chock-full of clear, detailed lessons that not only simplified understanding the program but explained the real-life benefits it offers a coaching business.

The manual also illustrates the psychology behind its features. For example, page 6, “Visually Motivate the Pursuit of Goals,” page 9, “Eliminating Forgetful Follow-Through,” page 14, “Being Available on Request” and my personal favorite on page 18, “Real Results are Sexy.”

CoachAccountable also offers even more great learning aids:

• Client manual (“The Boisterous Guide to being Coached with CoachAccountable”) – This is a manual for clients about making the most of being coached through CoachAccountable. Its chapters include, “Emotionally Invested,” “Self-Direction,” “Managing Actions,” Inspiration at Your Fingertips,” and “Tracking Metrics.”

• Benefits map – An infographic map that guides you through how CoachAccountable’s features benefit you and your clients.

• CoachAccountable courses – This is a platform that allows you to offer courses to a large number of clients. It provides structure for you to set up actions, metrics, worksheets, files, and messages.

• CoachAccountable blog – The blog is another excellent source of information about using the site (even how to translate CoachAccountable into other languages!) and how to hone your coaching skills. These are some of the topics they cover:
  
  
  • Prep for and Conduct Your Sessions Like a Pro
  • Get Your Clients to Reliably Do the Work
  • Using Worksheets – The Basics
  • A Better Way Than Email Attachments to Share Files

So far, so good. I was pleased with what I’d experienced so far.

Next stop: the dashboard…

Dashboard

I’ve always been apprehensive about dashboards. They can be a confusing, frustrating, illogical jumble that makes me throw in the towel within minutes of wrangling with them. Was I destined to this same fate with CoachAccountable?

I’m not going to say “yes” or “no” but “kind of.” It did take time for me to familiarize myself with the system and get up to speed. Once I did (with the help of the resources above and CoachAccountable’s awesome blog), it hit me: This is an exceptional product.

After I’d gotten my bearings, I found the site super easy to navigate. Each time I clicked on something, there was a natural progression to the next. I give beaucoup kudos to the site’s designer. Everything was clean-looking and easy to use. I didn’t need to waste time figuring out what the icons were (e.g., a calendar actually looked like a calendar instead of a hockey mask). Typefaces were easy to read – nothing was smaller than Arial 10.

The layout is pleasing and uncomplicated and actually attractive, with tasteful use of white space. I have a bit of a background in design, and CoachAccountable’s design hit all the marks.

Getting Started Menu

CoachAccountable founder John Larson recommends newbies access the Getting Started menu to understand the program’s fundamentals. This menu contained all the basics, such as “Schedule Appointments” and “Set Up Clients,” that I needed to get on my feet. This prevented me from going into glassy-eyed overwhelm trying to immediately digest everything the system does. Once I understood the basics, I was able to smoothly move on to the more in-depth menus.

Four brief instructional videos are also a helpful part of the dashboard. They serve up bite-size nuggets that can also help you understand CoachAccountable:

• Be an Awesome Coach with Actions (seven minutes)
• Be an Awesome Coach with Metrics (15 minutes)
• A Glimpse of a Typical CoachAccountable Session (three minutes)
• Be an Awesome Coach with Appointments (11 minutes)

However…

Along with these resources, I’d like to see some tutorials that delve more deeply into set-up and usage specifics.

One of the great things about CoachAccountable is that they offer continuing education-type webinars every month. They’re free, which tells me the company is genuinely interested in seeing their coaches grow and succeed.

Most of the webinars are a generous hour and a half. I replayed one called “Designing Worksheets,” in which Larson discussed structure, content, and common mistakes. I feel as though I walked away with very useful information I could use right away.

Branding

CoachAccountable’s software is completely brandable, which allows you to add your own colors and logo. Very slick! It took me very little time to understand and create. The option to brand the tool as my own makes it look as if I built the software myself. This feature alone could bring credibility to your health coaching business.

Customer Service

I must also mention that CoachAccountable’s customer service is one of the best I’ve ever experienced. I had to call them a few times (okay, more than a few) and they were super-responsive, positive, and helpful. One of their reps even stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes to help me understand something I had trouble grasping.

Key Features

Briefly, some of CoachAccountable’s key features include:

• Goal setting
• Progress tracking
• Collaboration tools
• Client management
• Document management

There’a also a library of your content, which also includes preloaded templates to tide you over until you feel comfortable creating your own. It’s also helpful if you’d like the convenience of not having to put them together yourself. Templates include:

• Journal prompts
• Pre-session check-in
• Internal evaluation
• Session wrap-up and reflection
• Email message templates – These include Action Reminder, Metric Reminder, Action Late Notice, Appointment Notice, and Client Invoice.
• Pictures of cute kittens – Yes, you read that right. There’s a folder among all the others called “Levity,” that houses the kitten pics – awww – apparently pre-loaded into the system to relieve your tension on particularly stressful days.

Levity also includes a video from Pharrell Williams, dry-as-a-martini humor from Bob Newhart, and a touching short film called “Validation” that was really well-done, and highly recommend. I enjoyed this section. It was a nice surprise.

Client Payment

CoachAccountable gives you the option of having clients sign up for and/or pay for your services from your own website. If you use Stripe or Square, CoachAccountable can process client payment of your invoices on your behalf.

If clients prefer not to pay online, you can send them invoices they’ll be able to view online. They’ll need to pay you by some method outside the CoachAccountable system. You can choose to charge money up front for any or all the following:

• Membership in a group
• Participation in a course
• Appointment scheduling
• An engagement package with bundled hours and a recurring billing schedule

Metrics

CoachAccountable’s metrics give actionable, real-world insights. It’s the most complicated part of the tool, but one of the most important. Put simply, a metric quantifies:

• Who is tracking?
• What are they tracking?
• When are they tracking (how many days, weeks or months)?

Pricing

If you want to give CoachAccountable a test drive, you can sign up for their 30-day free trial. No credit card is required. You can upgrade to any package during your trial. There are no set-up fees if you decide to become a member, and you can cancel at any time without fees or penalties.

CoachAccountable charges by the number of clients you have, which I think is much fairer than a flat fee. There are eight pricing tiers for solo coaches:

• Starter Plan – 2 clients, 200MB of storage, $20 a month ($10 per client)
• Level 1 – 5 clients, 500MB of storage, $40 a month ($8 per client)
• Level 2 – 10 clients, 1GB of storage, $70 a month ($7 per client)
• Level 3 – 20 clients, 2GB of storage, $120 a month ($6 per client)
• Level 3.5 – 35 clients, 3GB of storage, $200 a month ($5.71 per client)
• Level 4 – 50 clients, 5GB of storage, $250 a month ($5 per client)
• Level 4.5 – 75 clients, 7GB of storage, $340 a month ($4.53 per client)
• Level 5 – 100 clients, 10GB of storage, $400 a month ($4 per client)

Interested in checking out other software options? Read our dedicated guide to health coaching software here.

Pros

Cons

Conclusion

CoachAccountable is a coaching software packed with powerful tools and top-notch resource materials. It promotes close collaboration between client and coach and has many features that effectively support accountability, motivation, and goal-setting.

It’s a subscription-based service thoughtfully based on the number of clients rather than a flat fee. After trying the software myself for this CoachAccountable review, I believe it’s a superior program, and highly recommend it.

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Do you have any questions or concerns about CoachAccountable? Leave your comments below!

Sources

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-larson-4140272