Vcita Review: 20 Disadvantages and Advantages

Running a business can involve piles of paperwork, along with scheduling back-and-forths, billing, and other tedious administration. Once you start gaining traction, it often seems to multiply, keeping you tied up with daily management. That means less time spent on strategic business growth, and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut.

It’s why the right business management system can often be a lifesaver for small to medium companies, or solo practitioners such as online coaches, psychologists, and more. Vcita is one customer relationship management (CRM) solution that offers to help you stay on top, with a host of scheduling, marketing, and billing features for the digital organization.

Features of Vcita

Vcita offers a whole host of client relationship management (CRM) features for small- to medium-sized businesses.

While the software is compared on many review sites with scheduling solutions such as TimeTap, Acuity, and more, it allows for a range of marketing functions to build and increase client engagement.

20 Advantages and Disadvantages

As a coaching or business management solution, Vcita offers a good way for appointment-based practices to improve their efficiency. But will it meet your needs as a fitness coach, executive coach, life coach, or teletherapist?

In the table below, we’ve listed the key pros and cons of the software, both as a more general coaching management system, and from a mental healthcare angle.

Target Audience and Pricing

As with many scheduling and CRM software solutions, Vcita’s features are suited to a broad audience. This means that unlike many of the other medical and mental healthcare solutions we’ve reviewed, it’s not specific to any particular specialty.

Practitioners delivering online services or packages, such as nutritionists, speech or physical therapists, mental health coaches, fitness professionals, e-counselors, and more, could all potentially benefit from the calendar management and basic marketing functions it offers.

As such, Vcita is a potential solution for any business looking to digitalize its:

• Client management
• Online scheduling and calendar management
• SMS and email marketing
• Invoices and billing, and
• Payment processing.

Vcita Pricing

Vcita offers Essentials, Business, and Platinum packages under a functionality-based subscription model.

The key differences between each account type are the amount of included SMS credit, maximum number of marketing campaign recipients, availability of Vcita support (phone, email, etc.), and the nature of your Vcita set-up and installation sessions.

Solo practitioner packages include:

Vcita vs Its Competitors (Chart)

We compared Vcita with other business management solutions that specialize in client management and appointment scheduling.

Here’s how it compares with Acuity Scheduling and Quenza with regard to price, integrations, core features, and the availability of customer support:

	Vcita	Acuity Scheduling	Quenza
Interfaces	Web Android iPhone	Web Android iPhone	Web Android iPhone
Customer Service	Phone Tutorials Articles Online customer service	Phone Tutorials Articles Online customer service	Tutorials Community Forum Articles Mobile app Online customer service
Pricing	€19+/month	$15/month	$49/month
Integrations	Google Calendar Stripe PayPal WordPress Facebook Zapier QuickBooks	Google Calendar Outlook Stripe PayPal MailChimp WordPress Facebook QuickBooks Xero Zapier

Case Study Example

Setting up with Vcita is quick and painless – to kick off, clients can be manually entered or imported using Square, Google Contacts, or a spreadsheet.

Users can then set up a schedule, as well as invoicing and payment processing details, before customizing their account to integrate with WordPress or an existing website. A clean, modern UX makes it easy to work with, and all the different control panel settings are available in a single drop-down dashboard menu:

• Inbox: For clients’ appointment requests and relevant communications
• Calendar
• Clients: Which shows your synced contacts, manually entered clients, and potential new customers who apply through the portal
• Payments: Vcita integrates with Stripe and Square to accept one-click online payments
• Documents: such as course material, worksheets, intake forms, and
• Marketing

Calendar Management

Vcita integrates with Google Calendar, and users can opt for a booking widget on their website.

Clients can easily make appointment requests through your Client Portal, and users can opt to receive email notifications as well as in-app messages.

Different practitioner or team member calendars can be viewed simultaneously, to avoid scheduling conflicts and other administrative errors.

Client Portal

Vcita allows for plenty of white-label customization when it comes to the client portal itself – it’s possible to choose from a library of themes or upload your own corporate images.

Through this public page, new and returning customers can request appointments with specific team members.

Marketing

Coaches and other users can also use Vcita to create automated marketing campaigns to boost awareness, engagement, or improve retention.

These can be customized to meet your marketing goals with options such as discount coupons for certain events or customer satisfaction surveys to improve the quality of your service. A full overview of your campaign stats allows you to evaluate each campaign’s performance.

A Look at the App

The Vcita app is free to download on Google Play or iTunes for Android and Apple devices.

User-friendly with an easy-to-navigate user interface, it offers almost all the key features of the web-based system:

• New appointment creation
• Payment acceptance
• Invoice issuing
• Messaging
• Campaign design, and
• Client notes for coaching or therapy.

We were able to issue invoices, view our pending payments, read and send messages, and access our calendar with no problems. In the straightforward dashboard, we could quickly find all the basic functions we needed to manage and reschedule appointments.

One negative, we felt, was that the Android app was slow – it froze numerous times while we were attempting to create a campaign.

When we did access the feature, we discovered could conveniently send out texts and emails to clients based on their name or an assigned tag.

5 Customer Reviews

So how do existing users enjoy Vcita?

Some of the most critical reviews related to the client self-scheduling function, which some customers found confusing:

“Clients had a hard time navigating the appointment process.” – Capterra

Others felt Vcita’s billing and invoicing function wasn’t advanced enough – in particular, that they couldn’t send monthly invoices.

“The invoicing/billing system is not as robust as some other programs out there. Specifically, I would like the program to send out regular monthly retainer billing.” – Capterra

More convenient document management was positive, some reviews noted:

“Been using Vcita for over 5 years now, great for business and easier to track customer history when it comes to going back to a certain issue. Highly recommend them.”  – TrustPilot

Another advantage, according to reviewers, was the way Vcita integrated easily with their current digital presence. They also found the platform’s support staff helpful:

“I really like the client portal, the automated responses, and how well it integrates with my WIX website. I also like your customer assistance from sales to technical support.” – g2.com

Perhaps most importantly to the first-time buyer, Vcita’s value for money received mixed reviews. On the whole, many felt it was somewhat overpriced for the features offered:

“It’s a little expensive. The all in one feature are nice but are all very basic. So, does not really replace stand-alone solutions. The scheduling is very basic, similar to the free features in other applications. The marketing/email is very basic, not nearly robust as stand-alone email services. Feel like the sales process promised a lot, without telling us there were A LOT of upgrade requirements.” – g2.com

Conclusion

Essentially, Vcita positions itself as a customer relationship management tool for freelancers, smaller practices, and medium-sized teams. With this in mind, it delivers with a suite of campaign marketing, client communication, and scheduling tools.

Our test drive of these features was positive, overall, and we particularly enjoyed Vcita’s ease of use, brand customizability, and quick client portal setup.

Browsing and booking appointments were relatively simple, we felt, and another pro was how quickly and simply we could create packages, promotions, and more.

On the downside, we could relate to some of the more critical reviewers’ feedback. Despite trialing Vcita with a slightly higher-functionality team package, we felt there could have been more elements to the marketing campaigns – these were limited to redirecting users to the Client Portal.

Final Thoughts

Overall, for the money, we’d consider Vcita a good way for smaller practices and solo practitioners to experiment with coaching management software for the first time.

Its potential to save time through digitally invoicing clients, accepting online payments, and approving appointment requests is readily apparent, and with functionality-based pricing, there’s little risk of paying for more than you use.

With more and more business growth, however, it’s easy to see how Vcita’s functions might be somewhat limiting. A few more business and coaching management capabilities, such as monthly billing and more robust campaigns could go a long way to making Vcita an all-encompassing business management solution.

We hope you enjoyed this article. If your mission is to enhance the lives of those you help through high-caliber blended care services, don’t forget to check out our $1, 30-day Quenza access.

Quenza’s suite of coach and therapist-friendly tools will give you everything you need to start designing and sharing your own professional, personalized solutions online, so you can maximize your clients’ results and impact their lives for the better today.

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