At any given moment, there are a dozen tasks that need to be completed to keep your club running smoothly.

While one staff member works the check-in desk, another may be walking the gym floor, or restocking towels in a locker room. At the same time, another staff member may be juggling scheduling, checking invoices, and creating a social media campaign.

With so many parts of the business to manage, it can feel like there are never enough hours in the day to stay on top of everything, much less strategize and plan for future growth.

In the competitive world of the health and fitness industry, clubs that fail to adapt and evolve in the rapidly changing market are at a great disadvantage. That makes creating the time and space to focus on big-picture growth absolutely essential.

One of the easiest ways to do so is to cut time spent on tedious everyday tasks by automating them with your fitness club management software. By streamlining and simplifying processes like payroll, reporting, and check-in, you can focus your attention on projects that’ll take your club to the next level.

Here are five admin and management processes you can automate to take back your time.

1. Check-In

The check-in process is often a member’s first impression of your club. For members looking to squeeze a quick workout into a busy schedule, being greeted by a long line at the check-in desk is extremely off-putting.

Rather than relying on a front desk team member to manually search for and check in members — or worse, invoke a paper sign-in process — use your fitness club management software to put the control in your members’ hands.

Give your members direct access to your club by providing integrated key cards and fobs that allow them to simply swipe or scan to sign-in. With a connected, cloud-based facility access system to automate the check-in process, staff members can focus on bringing in new members and improving the experience for current members.

2. Member Management & Communication

Communication plays a large role in successfully attracting and retaining members. As membership numbers grow, so does the job of making sure members are engaged and clued in to everything that’s happening at your club.

Keep track of all your members and make sure they’re engaged at every stage of their journey with an automated CRM. The right CRM will help you manage your member relationships, data, and engagement while making the process easier for your staff.

Keep members engaged with automated emails, texts, and push notifications customized to their interests. Automatically send reminders about payment due dates, appointments, and new programs, and automate lead follow-up communication to ensure no one goes unanswered. When it comes to adding new members, a strong communication platform makes it easy to follow up with prospects, increasing your chances of converting.

3. Staff Payroll

Employees are the fuel that keep fitness clubs running, so getting them paid on time, every time is paramount.

Automate the payroll process with fitness club software that generates payroll based on custom rates or a time-tracking feature. Rather than relying on a staff member to input individual codes for paystubs, automated payroll software makes the process run without a hitch at cadence you customize.

4. Member Payments & Billing

Staying on top of member payment processing and billing is key to maintaining a steady and predictable revenue stream. However, chasing declined payments and making sure all members pay their dues on time can be a huge headache. Having to manually update outdated credit card information, rerun declined cards, and call members to absolve payment discrepancies can take up hours upon hours each week.

Even with a team member or two dedicated solely to the purpose of managing payments and billing, fitness clubs still lose a substantial amount of money—not to mention time—to declined credit cards. A dedicated payments and billing solution automates the process with monthly member statements, pay reminders sent through multiple communication channels, an easy online payment portal, proactive card account updater, and SmartDate resubmission services.

5. Reporting

As fitness clubs grow, using data to drive business decisions becomes increasingly important. From big-picture data points like month-to-month revenue to more specific numbers around marketing campaign performance, everything comes together to tell the story of your club and guide you toward future success.

With so much data at your disposal, mining through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of raw data can take too much time and still not produce the in-depth insight you need to make tough business decisions.

Use your fitness club management software to put all the right numbers to your fingertips, and format it all in a way that’s easy to understand. With reporting customized through self-set parameters and filters, you can get a detailed look into each portion of your club. Sophisticated analytics can show how a fitness club is trending over time and even provide side-by-side comparison with industry averages and peers.

Go one step further by using an interconnected club management solution to collect and analyze performance data from across your club in one place. By integrating all of your club's processes, you can generate up-to-date financial reports that provide a clear snapshot of your club's financial health. Your software should make it easy to glean those insights at a glance so you can make quicker, smarter decisions.

Ready to See What Automation Can Do For You?

Choosing the best fitness club management software is an overwhelming process. The Software Buyer’s Guide was built to walk you through it and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

‍Download the free guide to learn:

• How to get team buy-in when switching software
• Which features to look for when comparing providers
• Common complaints you can solve with the right software