Why Spreadsheets Stop Working For Online Coaches
Google Sheets is where most online coaches start. It makes sense. It’s free, you already know how to use it, and your clients have seen a spreadsheet before. No learning curve. No monthly fee. Just a link.
For your first few clients, it works fine.
Then it doesn’t.
The spreadsheet era
Here’s what a typical setup looks like: one Google Sheet per client. Maybe you get fancy and use a template. Tabs for programming, one for check-ins, maybe one for notes. You share it with your client, they fill in their numbers, you check it when you remember to.
This is fine when you have three clients. You know their names, you remember which sheet is whose, and you can eyeball whether they logged anything this week.
Where it breaks
Somewhere between 10 and 20 clients, things get weird.
Your phone becomes useless. Spreadsheets were designed for desktop screens. Your client is at the gym, trying to log their sets, squinting at tiny cells, accidentally tapping the wrong row, scrolling past three weeks of history to find today’s workout. They give up and text you instead.
You have no idea who’s actually training. There’s no notification when someone logs a workout. You have to open each sheet, one by one, and check. You tell yourself you’ll do this every Sunday. You don’t.
Clients break things. They delete a row. They paste over a formula. They edit the wrong week. You don’t notice until three weeks later when the data looks wrong and you can’t figure out why.
Reminders are on you. There’s no “hey, you haven’t logged anything in 5 days” built into a spreadsheet. So you become the reminder. You send the text. You feel like a nag. They feel nagged.
Your Drive is chaos. Forty sheets. Half of them named “Client Program - Copy (2)”. You spend ten minutes finding the right one before a check-in call.
None of this is catastrophic. It’s just friction. Friction you absorb so your clients don’t have to. But you’re the bottleneck now. And you’re spending hours on admin that doesn’t make anyone stronger.
What coaches actually do
Most coaches hit this wall and do one of two things:
They pay for software. Trainerize, TrueCoach, Everfit, whatever. These solve the problems above, but now your client needs to download an app, create an account, remember a password, and learn a new interface. Some clients do this happily. Some never open the app once.
Or they stay on spreadsheets and just grind harder. More manual check-ins. More texts. More time spent as an admin instead of a coach.
Neither option is wrong. But both have costs.
The actual question
The question isn’t “are spreadsheets bad?” They’re not. They got you here.
The question is: what’s the friction costing you?
If you’re spending two hours a week on admin that software would eliminate, that’s two hours you could spend coaching, programming, or getting new clients. Or just not working.
If your clients aren’t logging because the spreadsheet is annoying on mobile, that’s data you’re not getting. Trends you’re not seeing. Conversations you’re not having.
If you’re manually chasing people who haven’t trained in a week, that’s energy you’re spending on retention that a simple notification could handle.
Spreadsheets work until they don’t. Most coaches figure out exactly where that line is by crossing it.
Trainlike Coach is a lightweight coaching tool built for trainers who want client tracking without client friction. No apps. No logins. Just a link.