In some of my previous posts, I talked about websites and accounting software. I get asked this question a lot: “What tools should I use?”. I can’t tell you what you SHOULD use, but I can tell you what I use and why. Again, I’m here to share my experience, not sell you anything. Do you need to do any of this? Nope! The great thing about starting your own practice and setting up your business is that you don’t HAVE to do anything. Do as much or as little as you want.

List of topics:

  • Accounting and Invoicing
  • Scheduling
  • Website, domain, email
  • Video conferencing
  • Business Registration

Accounting and Invoicing

My pick: Wave

It’s free to sign up for Wave and it’s free to do most accounting processes with Wave. Wave allows you to create customized invoices, send it directly to clients, track the invoice, and then track when the invoice has been paid (either manually, bank transfer, or credit card). There is a fee associated with payment using bank transfer and credit card payments through Wave, but that’s standard across all platforms. You don’t need to set this up from day 1, but it’s free, so why not? It’ll keep you organized and your process streamlined from the beginning. Wave makes tax season really easy, and it’s a global platform.

Wave also allows you track your expenses. Whether that’s a zoom invoice or a coffee you bought for a networking meeting. Wave makes it really easy to upload receipts or invoices. Better yet, Wave has an easy to use mobile app so you can take a quick picture of your receipts and it will automatically extract the relevant information. All you have to do is review and approve it. As a small business, it’s important to keep track of incomings and outgoings so when tax season comes around, you have an accurate picture of income and business expenses. Wave has saved me a lot of time by doing most of the heavy-lifting for me.

Before you ask, I have no direct affiliation with Wave. I think it’s a great product- it’s user-friendly, and they’re generally great people! As a company, they have a great culture and they genuinely care about their customers. Did I mention you can do most of what you need to do on Wave for free? Amazing!

Scheduling

My pick: Acuity

If you have more than one client, I would suggest signing up for a scheduling app. Going back and forth on email about availability and changing schedules is not a good use of your time and most of the apps have a free offering. Initially I chose Acuity because their free service did I what I needed it to do. I was able to set up different appointment types (30 minute consultation, 90 minute discovery session, 60 minute coaching session), set my schedule, and integrate (more or less) with my calendar. I say more or less because I don’t use Google for email (I’ll come back to that later) and if you don’t use Google, the integration is a little bit more challenging, but still doable. One thing that the free version doesn’t do is allow you to integrate with zoom. This means that when your client books an appointment, you either have manually send them the zoom link, or pay for an Acuity subscription that does it for you. When I started, I sent out the zoom link manually, but as I started working with more clients, I decided to pay for that service. You also have to have a zoom subscription, so that’s also something to keep in mind.

Overall, I’m happy with Acuity. It embeds nicely on my website and it’s fairly easy to update my availability, block off time, and set regular hours (or not). They even have a really good article about how coaches can use Acuity.

Website, Domain, Email.

I use my website as a business card. I don’t worry too much about SEO or anything like that. It’s a place for me to direct people if they want to see what I’m about as a coach. Picking the different providers took me more time than building my actual website, and I’m not technical. I just picked the tools that were the easiest to use and I picked a website platform that had templates I liked (note: I did not use a website service for this website). I like having an email address that specific for my coaching practice. I find that it looks professional and it allows me to separate work and play.

Registering a domain / email

My pick: Hover

It doesn’t really matter if you use Hover or GoDaddy or any other service out there to register you domain. They’re pretty much all the same. I’m not that technical so I was looking for something that had good help center articles. You’ll need to do a little bit of configuring, so having a good help center and customer support was important. Hover is affordable and generally easy to configure, so I decided to go with them. You can also sign up for email with Hover.

Setting up a website

My pick: Squarespace

I found Squarespace to be the most user-friendly website builder and sufficient for a marketing site. Having a website helps you start to establish your brand. If you don’t know what you want that to be day 1, don’t worry about it. You can always change it! A lot of these platforms make it easy to update your website. The important thing for me was to just get started. To get started, find a template that you like and start filling it in. It’s easy enough to adjust the template layout and styling and it’s super easy to make updates and edit the content once it is live. The out-of-the-box templates are good to get started! You can also set up your domain directly through Squarespace.

Video Conferencing

My pick: Zoom

This section is going to be short. Given the current situation, I’m assuming you’re coaching remotely. This is probably not surprising, but I find Zoom is the best option to meet my clients. I find it more reliable than FaceTime and Skype and their free offering is good to get started. I do have a paid subscription so I can integrate it with my scheduling app and have an uninterrupted 60 minutes.

Business Registration

My pick: Ownr (Canada)

One of the first things I did (again, not at all necessary) is register as a business in Ontario. I’m registered as a sole proprietor, so I’m basically treated as a person, but I was able to register the name of my business, ensure it wasn’t trademarked, and register my domain with more confidence. This can definitely be done through a government website, but the government of Ontario website was challenging to navigate and I found Ownr was a good alternative. It’s affiliated with RBC so I believe you get a good deal on a business bank account if you use Ownr. Regardless of where you are in the world, it’s worth doing a little bit of research around pros / cons of registering a business, what the potential tax implications are, if any, and at what stage it makes sense to register.