Every bill in Smart Coach now has its own screen

A bill is not a single moment. You send it, and then you wait. The client might pay part of it by transfer, then the rest in cash at the next session. Or the payment slips past the due date and you have to chase it. The bill lasts weeks, and every step of it is a question a coach may have to answer later, often while the client is in the room.

Smart Coach 4.1 is built around that. The release notes open with it: every bill has its own screen. From that screen you send the bill, record a payment by cash, card or transfer, and follow the bill's whole story on a timeline.

This post covers what changed and why I think it matters if you run a coaching practice from your phone.

Where a bill comes from

The bill screen makes more sense once you know how a bill is made in Smart Coach. That part is the same as before.

Each client page shows what is unbilled, what is billed and what is due. You tick the unbilled sessions, watch the running total, and tap Create Bill. Invoices are numbered automatically. They take discounts and tax or VAT (and are then titled Tax Invoice), and once they pass their due date they are marked overdue. Invoices, receipts and advance-payment receipts come out as PDFs with your logo.

So making a bill was already handled. The hard part is everything that happens to it afterwards.

One screen per bill

In 4.1, a bill is a place you can open. Three things live there.

Sending. You send the bill from its own screen, so you are always sending the bill you are looking at.

Recording a payment. You record a payment against the bill and say how it arrived: cash, card or transfer. Smart Coach already handled partial payments, and coaches do get paid in pieces. A bill that collects two or three payments is normal, and each one needs to be recorded where it belongs.

The timeline. This is the change I care about most. A bill's history used to be something you rebuilt in your head from a sent PDF, a receipt and a payment status. Now it is a list you read from top to bottom, with the whole story of the bill in one place.

The point is mostly for the awkward conversations. When a client says they already paid, you open their bill and check. You don't need to hunt through receipts or try to remember which session they paid at.

The trade-off

Giving every bill its own screen means one more screen in the app. Smart Coach is not short of screens. It has clients, sessions, workshops, expenses, reports, widgets and an assistant. Every screen I add is another place for someone to get lost.

I went ahead because the bill already existed as a thing in coaches' heads, and the app was making them piece it together. A screen that matches something people already think about adds less weight than one that brings in a new idea. Still, the cost is real, and if it turns out to make the app harder to find your way around, that is on me to fix.

Reports in 3D, compared with last year

The second headline in 4.1 is reports. They are now drawn in 3D and compared with last year.

I know "3D charts" can sound like decoration. What keeps it from being decoration is the comparison and the next part: you can open any month and see the bills behind it.

That matters because a single number on a report raises questions it can't answer. Why was March low? Did a client stop coming, or did they come and not pay yet? A total on its own won't tell you. The bills behind that total will. The reports hub already let you tap a chart to see the data underneath. In 4.1, the report and the bill screen connect: you can go from a month's total to the bills that make it up.

It also works the other way. The same bills you send and record payments on are what the reports add up, so you are not looking at two different versions of your money.

The rest of the release

The 4.1 notes continue past these two items, with a third line about unpaid bills. I'm not going to describe that part here beyond saying it exists. The release notes in the App Store have the full list.

The two versions before it are worth a mention too, because they were about trust more than features.

4.0.1 was a fixes release. The free plan now works as promised: two clients, with unlimited sessions for both. Amounts typed with a decimal comma, like 12,50, are now saved correctly in every form. Bugs like that one are a quiet problem in a billing app. If you type the decimal the way your country writes it and the app saves the wrong number, you won't notice until a client does.

4.0.2 made Smart Coach ready for iPhone Duo. It fills both the cover and the large inner display, and keeps your place when you open or close the phone.

What this means if you use Smart Coach

If you bill clients through Smart Coach, very little changes in how you work day to day. You still tick sessions and tap Create Bill. The difference comes later. When a payment arrives, you record it on that bill along with how it was paid. When a question comes up about a bill, you open it and read its timeline.

If you look at reports at the end of a month or a year, you now see this year against last year, and any month that looks wrong can be opened to show the bills behind it.

If you are deciding whether Smart Coach suits your practice, the short version is this. It is a practice manager for coaches and independent practitioners on iPhone, iPad and Mac. There is no account and no client logins, and your records sync through your own iCloud. With this release, the billing side keeps track of a bill from the moment you make it to the day it is paid in full.