Switching from a note per client in a notes app
A note per client is the most common record in one-to-one work, and it is not a bad system. It is a private one. Nothing here asks you to delete it or move it, so this guide is three things: what a notes app does today, what changes, and what stays where it is.
What you do today
One note per client, typed during the session or straight after it. Dates as headings, a few lines each, sometimes a photo of a whiteboard. It is fast, it is free, and it is on your phone between sessions, which is why so many coaches, tutors, trainers, nutritionists and consultants have never replaced it.
Two things it does not do, and both of them are about somebody other than you reading it. The note is yours, so the client's copy is whatever you retyped into an email afterwards, which means the record and the thing the client actually got are two different documents that only you can reconcile. And a year in, the history is a long note you scroll rather than a session list you open, so "what did we agree in March" is a search through your own shorthand.
The write-up itself is still hand work. Twenty minutes each, ten sessions a week, is three hours twenty a week and about a hundred and thirty three hours across forty working weeks. Those are the example numbers this site already uses; put your own in and the shape holds.
The full arithmetic, on your own two numbers.
What changes
The write-up is drafted from the session rather than typed from memory, and it lands on that client's page in order, so the twentieth session opens with the previous nineteen already there. The action items and goals carry from one session to the next instead of being retyped.
The second change is who can read it. Each client gets a private page with their own write-ups and next steps on it, so the record you keep and the copy they hold are the same document. You read every draft, change what is wrong, and press send. There is no automatic send and there never will be.
Today you get a write-up by uploading the session recording, which works on every plan. The meeting recorder that would join a Zoom or Google Meet call for you is not live yet and has never joined a call. If you would rather not record at all, you can paste the notes you already typed and get the same draft.
Recording starts only after everyone in the session has agreed. How recording consent works.
What you keep
Your notes app, for one. Nothing is imported out of it and nothing is deleted from it, and plenty of people keep using it for the rough lines during a session and let Slide handle the write-up afterwards.
- Your shorthand. Keep typing the way you type. What you paste in is raw material, not a form to fill.
- Your history. Old notes stay where they are. Paste one into a client's page if you want it in the new record, or leave it.
- Your own way of getting paid. Slide never processes payments between you and your client, and Slide takes no commission, ever. You keep 100% of what you earn.
- Your tools. Your site, your calendar and your socials keep working. Slide sits alongside them.
- The exit. Export your clients, your notes and your write-ups at any time. How that works.
What it costs: a 7-day Pro trial with no card, then $14.99 a month on Starter, $29.99 on Pro, or $49.99 on Max. Starter includes 20 write-ups a month, Pro 200 and Max 500. The first 30 founding practitioners get Pro at $19 a month for 12 months, then $29.99.
Try it on one session
Bring one recording, or paste the notes you already typed, and read the write-up your client would have opened. It takes about a minute, and it needs no account and no card.
Try it on one sessionRead what it costs
How Slide handles recordings and consent