Manage memberships, billing & operations with ease

This is the accounting problem specific to the membership model, and almost every centre gets caught by it at least once. January brings a wave of annual sign-ups, the bank balance looks excellent, and the owner reads that as a good year. By September the cash has been spent on equipment and the club is still delivering eight months of service it was paid for in advance.

Once memberships are recognised over their term, two numbers become visible that a bank statement will never show you. One is monthly earned revenue, which is the real trading figure. The other is deferred income, which is the amount of service you still owe. Neither is complicated, and neither exists if renewals are tracked in a spreadsheet.

Retention in fitness is a calendar problem more than a marketing one. The month before expiry is when a member decides, and most clubs contact them the week after, when the decision is already made and the direct debit has stopped.

The same record tells you which memberships were sold at a discount, which came from a corporate agreement and which are on a freeze. Those distinctions matter when you are trying to work out whether a promotion brought in members who stayed or members who left when the offer ended.

Personal training packages have the same prepayment issue as memberships, in a sharper form. Ten sessions sold and three delivered means seven sessions of trainer cost are still ahead of you. Tracking sessions sold against sessions used is what keeps that from being a surprise.

Most clubs run their retail on trust and a notebook, and it works until the shelf is worth a few thousand dollars. Then the questions start: which flavours actually sell, what expired, and whether the margin justifies the cash tied up in it.

The useful part is that the purchase sits against the member, not just against the till. Somebody who buys supplements every month is a different kind of customer from somebody who only pays the membership, and that is worth knowing before their renewal comes up.

Referral schemes in gyms usually collapse for an unglamorous reason: nobody can prove who referred whom three months later. Holding the referral on the member record at sign-up removes the argument.

The cost side is worth watching. A free month given for a referral is a real reduction in earned revenue, and when it is recorded as such you find out whether the scheme brought in members worth more than the months you gave away.

Multi-site fitness businesses tend to be run from the flagship, which means the flagship's habits get treated as the standard. Per-branch reporting on cost of payroll against earned membership revenue usually reorders people's assumptions about which site is doing well.

One thing to be clear about: Wizard is not a class booking app and it does not run your door access or your member mobile app. Those stay whatever you already use. What Wizard handles is the money, the stock, the payroll and the membership record behind them, which is the part that is usually spread across four places.