The three office questions: what a practice settles before it centralises its reports

Ember Console, a session-report builder for coaches, is in closed beta, and its landing page says data can be managed individually or centralized for offices. What centralizing means there is not stated, so the office decides it. Three questions come first, and all three are about the clients already on the books.

1. Whose client is the record, the coach’s or the practice’s?
2. What did the client agree to when they said yes?
3. Who keeps the reports when a coach leaves?

I call them the three office questions, and no feature list answers one of them.

Whose client is the record, the coach’s or the practice’s?

In the accounts I can read, the record is personal. An r/lifecoaching thread asking how coaches track notes for each client drew 66 comments, and the top answers were a paper notebook, a Google Drive folder per client, and a single living document per client. None of them described a shared system.

Centralising turns that personal file into a practice file. A client who hired a person, not a firm, may read the change differently. One poster, in a thread about what broke when a second coach joined, put it as a question: “If its a dedicated coach per client, the notes are probably not quite supposed to be shared?”

That is the office’s answer to write down, in the coaching agreement, before a file moves anywhere. Working out which documents a platform actually holds is the easier half of the job.

What did the client agree to when they said yes?

Whatever words they signed, and those words are older than the plan to centralise.

If the agreement named one coach, a shared report changes it, and the person who agreed is the person who has to agree again. That is the real size of the job: a practice with three coaches is looking at one conversation per live client, not a settings change.

Two federations publish around this question. The International Coaching Federation asks whether a coach can break confidentiality, and the Certified Coaches Federation has a piece on the ethics of record keeping in business coaching. I link both because the question is live there, not because this piece leans on what either page says.

Ask your client, and check your jurisdiction. The third question runs on that same sentence in the agreement, and if the sentence is missing, moving the records later arrives with its own bill.

What is not stated yet?

The landing page says: “Manage data individually or centralized for offices. Create your next proposal, research project, or ultimate coaching report by analyzing all previous reports.”

That is all of it. The fact sheet behind this piece asks two questions and answers both with “(not stated yet)”:

• What does “centralized for offices” mean: shared templates, shared reports, roles?
• What is a proposal or “ultimate coaching report” built from previous reports, concretely?

So I have no sharing model to describe, no roles and no permissions. The Individual plan lists team seats, and the page stops there. I would rather print the gap than fill it.

Questions people ask next?

Who owns coaching session notes?

Nothing I can read settles that for a practice. Ownership follows the agreement the client signed, which is why a line about records belongs in that agreement before an office centralises anything. I am not a lawyer: ask your client and check your jurisdiction.

What happens to session reports when a coach leaves a practice?

Whatever the agreement says. If it says nothing, the practice and the departing coach negotiate it with the client listening, which is the worst moment to start. Settle it in writing while nobody is leaving.