Reposted from www.abcfinancial.com

There is no longer the time nor the place for tedious, manual tasks involved in managing your gym; automation is taking its place. Time is too valuable to waste, and with the industry growing at 3% annually, integrating efficiency into your gym operations to keep up with competition is imperative to your success. Even the simplest tasks can be automated to save you time and add a layer of professionalism to your gym. With the advancement of gym management technology, it is now an expectation that processes be completed as quickly and easily as possible.

These five tasks can be laborious if done manually, but if you start to automate them, you’ll see these tasks can be a piece of cake!

Member Check-In

We’ll start with the basics. Checking in members should be one of the simplest tasks of gym management, but lines to the front desk and fitness class rooms can build up quickly. You need to have a fast method of getting people in before that line starts to form, and automated processes can help. One automation tool most gyms employ today is key fobs for check-in. Remember how annoying it was to look up every member or review paper logs? Using key tags, key fobs, fingerprint scans, and pin codes allow your members to simply scan or enter their code and go. It not only keeps your members happy by eliminating the check-in line, but also opens up profit potential for your business. If you no longer need multiple people manning the check-in process, you can have employees take on a larger business role, become a personal trainer, or fill another position that will help to grow your gym.

Payment Processing

Delinquent payments are a nightmare for gym owners and managers. Organizing payments, getting member dues collected on time, and reminding members of late payments are all tedious tasks. But these tasks are also critical to maintaining a consistent, up-to-date revenue stream. With a payment processing system, you can have automated billing, allowing you to focus your time and energy on improving your member experience and club profits. Send automated alerts to remind members when payments are due to reduce delinquent payments. It is also beneficial to have a payment processing system that gives your members the option to customize their payments to set up payments on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Fully automating this process allows you to enjoy a seamless billing cycle.

Reporting for Gym Management

Running daily, weekly, or monthly reports is more useful than you might think because they provide you with the data you need to support important business decisions. Putting together reports manually is time-consuming and is prone to human error, and unless you have someone who is a whiz at putting together charts and graphs, it is hard to really visualize and understand how your gym is performing. Automation speeds up this process and ensures it is accurate so you can be better informed to make the right business decisions. If you are using gym management software, there are several financial reports you should especially be familiar with, but it is also useful to run reports against the goals you have set to see the progress you are making. This progress can be represented visually on dashboards to give you a clear understanding of your gym’s performance.

Scheduling Meetings

If you know you have a meeting that happens every day or every week, do not waste time on scheduling it out each individual time. Even though it might only take a minute or two to schedule a meeting, every minute counts. Your time is spread thin as a gym manager, so setting up recurring meetings saves you the time and the hassle of having to do administrative tasks that can easily be automated.

File Management

Keeping up with customer changes is another tedious administrative task. With different levels of memberships available, customers may switch back and forth until they find a membership plan they are comfortable with. Or they might schedule a variety of classes until they find one they really like. Tracking all of these changes is a huge task involved in managing your gym. However, they can be automated as well. Gym management software automatically tracks these changes for you, so you do not have to worry about whether the membership status you have listed for a particular member is correct. Any changes that are made and any classes that are scheduled are all automatically tracked by your software system.

Gym management is filled with highly detail oriented tasks, which makes owning or managing a gym stressful, there’s no doubt about that. But do not do more work than you need to. Automate your tasks with gym management software so you can spend less time on tedious administrative tasks and more time on focusing on providing a positive and exciting experience for your members!

Learn more about all the ways gym management software can bring flexibility, stability, and security to your gym. https://bit.ly/2AHPYwV

Jim Thomas is the founder and president of Fitness Management USA Inc., a management consulting, turnaround and brokerage firm specializing in the gym and sports industry. With more than 25 years of experience owning, operating and managing clubs of all sizes, Thomas lectures and delivers seminars, webinars and workshops across the globe on the practical skills required to successfully to overcome obscurity, improve sales, build teamwork and market fitness programs and products. In addition, his company will buy gym equipment from gyms liquidating or closing. Visit his Web site at: www.fmconsulting.net or www.jimthomasondemand.com.

By fitmanagement

Health Club Consultant