As a gym owner, you constantly have countless balls in the air – literally, it seems. Kids in the air. Parents asking questions. Bills to pay. The struggle to find time to market your gym and keep your student pipeline flowing.

You spend so much time on admin and personnel tasks, you start losing touch with why you opened a gym. Don’t despair, ­there’s help! Owning and operating a gym doesn’t have to grind you down.

Implementing specialized class management software can save you significant time. Using a class management system to manage many tasks that currently keep you running around will free you to focus on high-value, high-reward tasks.

Here are just four of the ways a class management software will help your gym run more smoothly, even as it requires less admin time from you.

Empower parents to self-serve

Parents take a lot of time. They pay the tuition fees, so they deserve your attention. However, many of the questions and needs parents have can be met through an online registration system and parent portal.

Think of the time it takes to sign up new families, collect their information, and get them registered. Then there’s the ongoing process of having their kids enroll in the right classes on the right schedule. For gyms that manage registration and enrollment manually – it takes hours and can cost almost the equivalent of hiring a full-time admin.

Parents love online registration and enrollment. A portal achieves more than eliminate the time you and your staff have to spend updating class schedules, take information at the desk, or from phone calls and emails to update class enrollment lists. It gives parents control over the customer experience they want. They can take care of their kids’ gym schedules on their own time, using their computers or their phones.

Another time-saving customer experience benefit is that the inevitable schedule changes don’t create the same confusion or frustration when updates have to be shared and managed manually. Whenever a class changes, whether the time or the teacher, those changes update the online class list in near real-time, so everyone is looking at a current schedule.

The portal also gives parents full visibility into their accounts, such as what their balance is and what meets their kids are scheduled to compete in. Instead of tracking down you or staff to answer simple questions, parents can see the information themselves. (They can also pay their outstanding balances through the portal, but more on that later.)

Improve communication even as you spend less time fielding questions

Parents ask far more questions than just about class time and their bill. The parent portal not only lets parents see their account information and enroll their kids in classes but serves as a 24/7 message board for your gym. Professional class management software enables you to use a parent portal to push out general and personalized announcements to families.

Communication is critical to maintaining a positive relationship with your students and families. Your class management software should provide a variety of communication tools. The portal is your primary communication tool, as it can push out notices to parents. Plus you’ll also save time communicating with parents or groups of parents through the class management system’s mobile app, email blasts, and text messaging for emergency announcements.

Streamline staff management

Your staff benefits from their own portal, as much as your families and students do. Your specialized class management software should also include a separate staff portal where they can see their schedules and update you about their future scheduling preferences or challenges. As with the parent portal, the staff portal is also an ideal place to push out announcements. Your goal is to use the staff portal in ways that help staff self-manage and minimize the time you need to spend managing them.

In addition to a staff portal, the class management system should make creating classes and scheduling staff time easy. Scheduling classes and teachers is a major time eater for most gym owners who have to do this manually. Save yourself hours each week by using the system that lets you set up classes in minutes and quickly see any potential scheduling conflicts.

Your class management software should also include a staff time tracker to eliminate the need for staff to manually track their hours and your time to enter staff time into a payroll system. First, manually tracked hours are never as accurate as automatically tracked time. Second, you’ll save time and money by importing tracked time from the class management software into your payroll software. The American Payroll Association estimates that manual hour tracking errors account for anywhere from one to eight percent of your total payroll!

Improve your financial management

A full-service class management software will include a full complement of financial management and analysis tools, including:

• Online payments for parents to easily pay outstanding balances.
• Batch processing monthly tuition fees and other regularly scheduled payments.
• Simple point-of-sale tools so you can process payments, including goods, anywhere.
• Integration with QuickBooks® online and desktop version, to eliminate hours you spend on daily accounting tasks (or eliminate the costs of a bookkeeper)
• Financial reporting dashboard gives you an instant overview of your gym’s financial health.
• Robust reporting function lets you dive deeper into your gym’s financial performance and trends.

These types of financial tools will save you time and help you to improve your cash flow!

Let your gym work for you

It’s common for small business owners see their dreams of being their own boss give way to becoming a slave to their business. It doesn’t have to be that way. Bringing in a specialized class management software system can do much of the heavy lifting that occupies your time now. You’ll be left with time and energy to invest in the personally fulfilling and revenue-generating tasks that inspired you to open the gym in the first place.

Listen to what these gym owners have to say about how using a class management software package helped them.

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