What Makes Gym Software "The Best"?
In today’s everchanging fitness industry, it’s easy for gym owners to get caught up in all the hype over software. However, it’s important to remember that lots of features doesn’t necessarily make the best software. What wows you today might not be essential to your gym’ s long-term success.
If you look hard enough you’ll notice these features come with a high price tag. Most often these features wont help you grow your business. Therefore, it’s important to look carefully and choose only the essential features before choosing the best gym software for your facility.
Two Most Important Features Of Any Gym Software
If you’re just starting out in the fitness industry you’ll need all the help you can get. We believe customer support and pricing to be the two most important features when selecting your software. Each of these will be a factor for the life of your business.
The Best Customer Support
One of the most under-rated and over-looked features customer support. When you need a question answered, waiting for days isn’t an option. You need to make sure your software company has a team in place to support you from the start as well as along the way. Some questions to ask are:
- Do they have a customer support team able to assist with getting your business started?
- What about technical questions? If there are issues, how will you get those issues resolved?
- Will you have an account manager that you can call?
- How long have they been in business?
These are all important questions to ask before choosing a gym software. The last thing you want to do is to choose some fly-by-night company with sketchy customer service or no long-term support.
Affordable Pricing
Pricing is one area where gym owners often make mistakes. There are many factors to consider and each one should be weighed carefully. Here are a few things to consider when choosing your gym software:
- Make sure the software fits your monthly budget. Pricing can range anywhere from $57-$500 per month depending on how many members you have.
- Do they offer a flat monthly rate or tiered pricing? Some gym software companies offer tiered pricing based on active members. Pricing can change rapidly as your business grows.
- Look out for hidden fees. Some software companies charge low monthly fees in exchange for high payment processing costs.
We suggest performing a full business analysis and total out your estimated monthly fee and payment processing costs before purchasing any gym software.
Always keep in mind…the software might look good at first glance, but if there’s no customer support, or you trap yourself in a long-term financial commitment, you could be hurting your business.
What Features Do You Really Need In The Best Gym Software?
The best gym management software should have the basic tools needed to make managing your gym easier. What does that mean? The goal of any software should be to make your life easier as a gym owner. Reducing the time spent on administrative tasks so you can focus on growing your fitness business.
The right software for your business should save you both time and money over the life of your business. Therefore, you should consider a simple and easy-to-use management software. Some vendors overpack their software with lots of unnecessary features. While these features may seem like a good idea, they make the software difficult to learn.
The last thing you want to do is invest thousands of dollars in new gym software and then spend endless hours re-training your members and staff. Instead, focus on the core features needed to manage your gym effectively. The following should serve as a guide to finding the best gym software.
Membership Management
The membership management gym software should give you the basic capability to set up your gym’s membership types for free trials, family packages, punch-card, and unlimited classes. This way you can sort your gym members by membership type and properly segment your trials, current members, or past members.
Automatic Billing
The software solution will need to have automatic billing so that you can collect membership fees. The gym solution should give you the functionality to set up one-time or recurring payments to bill your members weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly from your software. Be sure to check that the software solution offers the functionality to run both ACH and Credit Cards transactions from within your software. You will find that ACH will save you the most money in the long run.
Class Scheduling
Another essential feature for your gym is class scheduling. The software should provide the basic functionality to set up custom classes and appointments for your fitness classes or training sessions. With most software vendors, you can integrate your class calendar on your website or mobile app to allow your members to reserve classes online or from their phone.
Gym Check In Kiosk
The gym sign-in process is another important area that you will want to simplify from your software. The gym software should provide a solution for your members to sign-in in person or online with key cards, mobile apps, or sign-in kiosks. If you are a 24-hour gym you will also need to look for a software company that offers a 24/7 door access control system.
Attendance & Financial Reporting
Solid reporting is a must for any gym. As a gym owner, you will also need the functionality to track your members’ daily and monthly attendance from your software. This way you can track the amount of classes each member has attended and who your loyal members are. The solution should also allow you to easily create and export financial reports from your dashboard to track monthly membership sales, products purchased, and member retention.
