Many years ago when we opened the gym, I was all about saving money. I didn’t want to be spending more than we were making each month, and enrollment was in such flux that I didn’t want to spend money on unnecessary things. So, we made our class schedule on Google Calendar and as athletes were enrolled, we’d take their paper enrollment form and stick it in a binder and put their name in the details section of the google calendar event.
That worked for a little while. Then we hit over 150 athletes. We had no system for automatically charging tuition, so each month we would take the binder out and Angie and I would sit across the table from one another. Using our Square app on our phones, we would manually charge tuition for 150 gym families. That’s right. We’d type in every card number. A few months into owning the gym, we started dreading the first of the month. It was becoming an all-day task. Two people at 4-5 hours each.
As far as the rosters, they were fairly accurate, but I wouldn’t say 100% accurate. We had made all parents a Google contact, but had no easy email process. (Google lists work until you want to email just one group of people or one class, and then you’re segmenting your lists.) It also became just one more thing we had to remember to do when someone disenrolled.
It wasn’t long before I did the math. How much was our time worth? For less than $100 per month, we could have a full-class management software solution.
At that point, we were sold. I didn’t realize in the beginning all things class management software could do for me, but once I learned them, I realized my $100/mo. was an investment not an expense. Anything that saves you significant time or money or makes you significant time or money shouldn’t be treated like an expense but rather like an investment.
Here’s what your software should be doing for you:
- Maintaining class rosters and a class schedule with easy-to-find information on each athlete in the class.
- Attendance tracker (if there is a fire or natural disaster, you need a digital way of confirming everyone got out OK).
- Staff clock in system is helpful
- Skills tracker is helpful
- Automatic (or minimal work required) payment processing
- Point of sale system (while there are easier and more efficient options, your class management software will help you get started on this)
- Dashboard with your business’ vitals (this could be the number of athletes in your programs, your level of class vacancies, number of absences and/or athletes’ dates of birth).
- The ability to mass-email and mass-text your clients.
- Parent portal is helpful. I don’t use mine for parents to update much as we have a full-time staffed front desk, but it’s helpful if parents want to see their child’s skill tracking and attendance record (how many available make ups they have)
- A process to filter athletes and look for those within certain age groups, school districts, etc.
If you’re using a software that is passing on the credit card fees to your clients, make sure it’s legal in your state. Personally, I’m not a fan of this and don’t view it as good business practice. Credit card fees are the cost of doing business and should be factored when determining your pricing.
If you’re using software that is requiring major labor, reconsider. Anything will take an investment of time to set up, but nothing should have massive amounts of regular maintenance. Make sure you find a company with great customer service and tutorials so you can get the help you need.
The top ones used by Next Gen are Jackrabbit and iClass. We recommend taking a look at those as they’re incredibly responsive to ideas and metrics that will create better solutions in our industry.
