The first of the month is not a day. It is an unpaid shift you work after the last class.
You open the banking tab. You open the spreadsheet. Twenty-two e-transfers have landed and two are under a spouse's name you do not recognise. Somebody paid twice in March and is owed a month. Three cards expired in the same week because the bank reissued them all at once. There is cash in the drawer and no note saying whose it is.
Then there is the part nobody puts in a testimonial, which is deciding who to chase. You know these people. You know which one just lost hours at work. You will either send an awkward text or you will eat it, and both of those cost you something.
Then you go and teach the six o'clock.
Where the evening actually goes
Almost none of it is collecting money. It is reconciliation — lining up two lists that were never joined. Who trained, and who paid. The sign-in sheet knows one. The bank knows the other. You are the join, every month, by hand.
That is why it takes three hours, why it is never quite finished, and why a gym with sixty members can honestly not tell you how many of them are paying full price today.
What "billing runs itself" actually means
Not magic. Four ordinary things, set up once.
The plans exist as plans. Monthly and yearly, your prices, your names for them, edited and retired when they change. A plan becomes a thing on the system instead of a number you remember agreeing to with that guy in 2023.
Members enter their own card. Nobody's card lives in your phone or on a sticky note in the office. Charges run on each member's own cycle into your own payout account — hosted setup, with the payout status visible to you.
Comps are a plan, not an exception. The two students who mop the mats get a zero-dollar plan assigned. They stay on the roster, they count in your numbers, and you stop having to remember they are different.
Members fix their own cards. Expired card, new bank, new address — that is their billing page, not your Tuesday evening. They can pull their own invoices too, which ends the receipt-request email in one move.
If you are coming off another system, the roster and the dues amounts come across from a CSV export: columns auto-mapped, a preview that changes nothing until an owner commits it. Card details cannot come across — no system hands card numbers to another system — so members re-enter them. Plan for that week and tell people it is coming.
What the first looks like afterwards
It is a screen, and it takes about four minutes.
Four counts across the top: monthly recurring, active, awaiting card, no plan. Under that, a name-by-name list where every row wears a badge — active, comped, trial, awaiting card, past due, canceled. Finding out is no longer the work. The work is the two or three people the list is pointing at, and that is a job you can do properly because it is small.
The reconciliation is finished too, because both lists finally come off the same roster. The attendance report gives you check-ins per day over whatever window you pick, the daily average, and your busiest day. The revenue report gives you active member plans normalised to a monthly figure and broken out by plan. The membership report gives you active versus inactive, who joined this month, and your belt spread. Who trained and who paid, in one place, without you being the join.
What it costs, and what it does not
The subscription is ninety-nine dollars a month, and it does not move when your roster does. That is the whole platform in any industry, with one staff role and up to ten staff accounts. Pro adds two hundred and lifts exactly two things — staff roles and staff seats. It holds no features back; there is no better version of the product behind a higher number. Text messages are pre-paid credits charged per message, because sending them costs real money and pretending otherwise just moves the cost somewhere you cannot see it.
Software priced by member count charges you more for the thing you are working sixty hours a week to build. That structure is what we are arguing with, not any particular company.
You can start without talking to anybody. No card to begin, seven days free, and no call with a salesperson before you are allowed to look at it.
It is built in Edmonton, Alberta — Canadian-owned, with no investors to answer to. The people building it answer their own email.