From spreadsheets and chat to one app: what a coach loses and gains

If you run your clients in a spreadsheet, send programs through a chat thread, agree session times by message and check payments in your banking app — you are not alone and you are not doing anything wrong. It works. It works up to about your tenth client.

This is not an article about spreadsheets being bad. It is about what exactly breaks after that, what you genuinely give up by moving, and how to move in an afternoon rather than a month.

Where the spreadsheet and the chat thread break

Versions. You send the program. A week later you change the weights. The client trains from the copy they found higher up the thread. Nobody is lying — nobody knows which file is the latest.

History disappears. A client writes "did 4×8, felt easy". Three months later you want to see how their squat moved. The answer exists somewhere, among six hundred messages, photos and voice notes.

Progress is invisible. The numbers are in the sheet, but seeing a direction means building a chart. In practice nobody does, so progress gets judged from memory.

Scheduling. "Tuesday at 6?" — "No, 7 works" — "Wednesday then?" Three messages per session, times twenty clients.

Payments. Checking transfers by hand, chasing by hand. The least pleasant part of the job, done in the least pleasant way.

Evenings. All of it happens in the same chat app your friends message you in. Work never ends because it has nowhere to end.

What you give up by moving

Honestly — three things, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The freedom of a sheet. A spreadsheet does anything: any column, any formula, any layout. No app will match that. If your method rests on a calculator you built yourself, it probably has no home in a platform.

Your muscle memory. You know your own sheet cold. Your first week in a new system will be slower than the one before it. That is normal and it passes.

An afternoon. Your templates have to be entered once. Not a month, but it will take an afternoon.

If you coach three clients and it all fits in your head, stay with the sheet. Moving pays off at around ten clients, or when you start losing your evenings.

What you gain

There is only ever one program. You change an exercise and the client sees the change. There is no "latest file" because there are no files.

Logging takes half a minute. On the phone, right after the set: reps, weight, RPE. And last time's numbers sit beside today's, so they stop asking you.

An icon with your name on it. The client adds the site to their home screen and gets an icon with your name, logo and colour — not the platform's. Nothing to install from a store. On an iPhone it has to be added from Safari.

Nutrition in the same place. A diary with barcode scanning, dishes built from ingredients, and a food database in Lithuanian and English. You see what a client actually ate rather than what they described.

Scheduling without negotiation. You set your working hours, breaks and places per slot; the client picks a free time themselves. You can close booking a set number of hours before a session.

Payments through Stripe. An invoice to the client, card payment, money into your own Stripe account. No more reading bank statements.

You can see who needs you today. Every client shows when their program ends and how many days are left — green, amber, red — and a note arrives at five in the morning with how many are ending.

How to move in an afternoon

1. Create an account — start free, five clients without a card.
2. Enter your 3–5 most common sessions as templates. Not all of them. The ones you use every week.
3. Move one client. Not all of them. The one who is easiest to work with.
4. Run both for a week — the old sheet stays, the new client logs in the app.
5. If it fits, invite the rest. The invitation goes by e-mail and the client signs in themselves.

History is not imported — there is no importer from a spreadsheet. In practice that means old history stays where it is and new history starts accumulating from the day you move.

Questions coaches ask

Does my client have to install anything? No. They open the site and add it to their home screen. We publish no store app at all — if a listing in the App Store matters to you, that is not our strength.

Can I keep using my spreadsheet? Yes. Some coaches keep planning in a sheet and use the platform for clients, nutrition, scheduling and payments.

What does it cost? Free up to five clients, with no time limit. After that from EUR 17.99 a month; see pricing and the comparison with other platforms.

Will my clients manage? To a client it looks like a phone app: today's session, fields for the numbers, a done button. Most work it out during their first workout.

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Move one client and see. Start free.