Essential features of gym management software

Seven lines decide, and capacity comes first

Management software has classes, members, payments and reports. The parts do not cost the same when they fail. In order of damage:

1. 1.Capacity that cannot be exceeded. A class with too many people costs a coach their evening and the trust of the people in it.
2. 2.The right to book. Who can take a spot is a different question from who has paid.
3. 3.A recurring timetable with a start and an end date. The standard week is written once and generates the following ones.
4. 4.A waitlist that promotes on its own. A cancellation at 22:40 has to become a filled spot before 07:00.
5. 5.One profile per person. Plan, attendance, payments, notes and tags on the same page.
6. 6.Billing with the methods your country uses. That means card and direct debit, plus any local method members expect.
7. 7.Occupancy per hour next to attendance. They are two different sums, and only together do they tell you what to do with the timetable.

Capacity has to be enforced by whatever writes the booking. The screen that shows the button cannot do it alone. In 07:00 classes, two people booking the last spot in the same second is an ordinary Tuesday.

And there is more than one capacity. A functional class of twelve, a reformer Pilates class of six and a yoga class of twenty fit into the same timetable in the same week. The limit belongs to the class type, because the room and its equipment decide it.

The demo test: two phones, the same last spot, at the same time. If both get the spot, the class has thirteen people for twelve rowers.

Who can book and who has paid are two questions

A payment is money changing hands. A plan is what you sell. The right to book means being able to take a spot today, and it is the only one of the three a booking should check.

Merging all three into one field on the profile works while everyone has the same membership. Then comes the athlete with a membership and ten sessions left on a pack. Then comes someone off with an injury, who keeps their history without keeping the right to book.

And there is the one-day visitor, who pays a drop-in and has no plan at all. A ten-session pack valid for sixty days is a right with an end date. Kept separate, these cases stop being manual fixes at the end of the month.

The timetable repeats, and one day it ends

A timetable is not a list of events. It is a shape that repeats, with exceptions and an end. Six classes a day, five days a week, is thirty classes. In a year that is more than one thousand five hundred, for a timetable that changes two or three times.

The end date is the half that slips by in a comparison. A timetable running from September to July has to stop in July on its own. Without an end date, someone deletes the August classes one by one the day before closing for the holidays.

The waitlist has to move on its own

A waitlist that needs someone to promote people is just a list. What makes it a queue is what happens in the early hours, when nobody is watching the gym's phone.

The sum is quick. Four late cancellations a week, with drop-ins at ten euros, is forty euros a week in spots left empty. Over a forty-week season, that is one thousand six hundred euros.

A useful queue promotes as soon as someone cancels, and emails whoever moved up. The notice is what separates a filled spot from a spot filled only on paper.

One profile per person, instead of five places

A member's information ends up living in five places. The spreadsheet, email, the group chat, the front desk notebook and the memory of whoever has been there longest. Each one is right about one part and out of date on another.

A profile only fixes this when everything is on the same page: the plan, attendance, payments, notes and tags. The signed liability waiver lives there too. QR check-in records attendance without anyone writing anything on paper.

The test is the front desk question. Someone arrives and asks how many sessions are left on their pack. The answer has to appear on a screen, one-handed, before the class starts.

Charging with the methods the country uses

Members pay for a gym by card, by direct debit or by a local method their bank offers. A system that only takes cards hands that work back to the front desk, as bank transfers to check by hand.

Rummo charges through all four methods via the payment processor, and the money goes into the gym's account. The finance dashboard shows who has a payment outstanding, with the amount and a button to charge.

One piece is missing, and it is better to know before deciding. Rummo does not issue invoices yet. Invoices still come out of the invoicing software you already use.

Occupancy per hour next to attendance

They are two sums, and they answer different questions. Occupancy per hour tells you how many spots were booked at 07:00, 12:15 and 19:00. Attendance tells you how many of those spots were actually used.

Ten bookings in twelve spots looks like a healthy class. If seven people turned up, the room was just over half full. And three spots were closed to people who wanted in.

Together, the two sums change the timetable. A full hour with good attendance calls for a second class. An hour at half capacity for six weeks calls for another time, or another class type.

What weighs less than it seems

Some rows take up space in a comparison table and change nothing in the week:

• The number of charts. The numbers you look at every week are few: who is still to be charged, which hours fill up and who has not been in for three weeks.
• Branding in the app. What counts is whether people who train can book from their phone in two taps. Rummo's athlete app opens on the phone in the browser, and there is no native app in the stores.
• The number of integrations. Count the ones that would be switched on in the first month.
• Feature counts. Forty rows with a green tick do not tell you which one stops the extra booking in the 19:00 class.

Rummo does not have everything either. Segmented campaigns and certified invoicing do not exist yet, and there is no native app in the stores. The seven above do exist.

You set up the week once and it generates the rest, with capacity per class and a waitlist. Class booking software