Sports Club Membership Management Software Built for Modern Clubs

Those running a sports club know the value of building healthy member bases. But when every single operation needs manual attention, it becomes difficult to focus on member experience. Most of your time goes into dealing with dues collection, member registry, event ticket management, and invoices, to name a few things.

As a result, clubs see payment delays and failures, confusion around seasonal plans and difficulty in onboarding new sign-ups. This calls for a modern solution that can work with the needs of modern sports clubs. SubscriptionFlow is one such platform.

The primary purpose of this software is to simplify club membership management. Let’s look at the ways in which this software makes your operations easier and your members happier.

What Happens When You Don’t Have a Membership Management Software

Without a dedicated software to help you run your sports club, you have to dedicate extra hours to do things manually. Managing memberships involves repetitive tasks that pile up for you every month. For example, monthly payment collections that need to be done timely, dispatching invoices to many members at the same time and managing events and member engagement.

In the absence of good software, this is what club members deal with:

Data in spreadsheets

The more your club members, the more the data that needs to be organized, reviewed and updated as time passes. Sports clubs with fewer members might find manual processes convenient, but when member volume increases, spreadsheets start to fail. There’s too much to track and update every month.

This makes scaling difficult as well, as each new member adds more to your manual data management burden.

Missed renewals and failed payments

The ultimate result of managing operations in spreadsheets is this: admins start facing problems in payment collection. Having more sign-ups is supposed to boost revenue. But in the case of manual management, it can actually lead to revenue loss. The reason is simple: there’s no mechanism in place to collect dues automatically and right on time.

Admins need to oversee each and every payment themselves, making dues collection prone to human error. You lose revenue either by forgetting to give payment reminders or due to payment declines or failures.

Seasonal membership chaos

There are certain seasons in which sports club membership peaks. They offer the perfect opportunity to boost sign-ups and revenue. But that also means higher payment volume, more member needs to meet and increased room for financial errors caused by manual management. So right when sports clubs should be the best at their game, their operations begin to break.

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Group and individual plans side by side

Clubs commonly give out group memberships alongside single-user plans. This makes plan and payment management extra complex. Teams need to sort users according to their plan type, and assign them accurate invoices.

Refund disputes

There are good chances of disputes in a recurring payment setup. Clubs need software that can handle refunds automatically, and a secure payment infrastructure that helps them minimize disputes.

All these factors lead to admin overload, taking your focus away from your club’s real goal i.e. member satisfaction.

Why Traditional Tools are Not the Solution

There are many payment collection software in the market, but not all are designed for sports clubs. They are only good at handling basic payments and offer general subscription management solutions. There are very few software solutions that actually cover everything a sports club needs, and SubscriptionFlow is among those. These solutions are built for modern club needs.

Traditional payment software isn’t cut-out for sports clubs because basic payment processing isn’t enough. If you have a payment gateway to process recurring payments, that doesn’t mean you have a membership system. Membership payments are very flexible. While traditional software may allow you to charge on a recurring basis, they don’t allow the set up of various flexible plans.

They also don’t manage upgrades, trials, proration, failed payment recovery or member access control. These features are must-have for sports clubs because they need different pricing for individuals and families, membership pause options and add-on purchase options like coaching sessions.

Similarly, having only a CRM or an accounting platform isn’t sufficient for membership management as well. They are not recurring billing solutions. They also lack many features essential for membership lifecycle management.

How to Choose a Good Membership Management Platform

With so many management software options available in the market, how can sports clubs choose the right one? They can make the right choice by evaluating each software against this feature-list. These features are necessary to have for modern sports clubs:

Recurring billing for tiered plans

Sports club membership management software should make it simpler to set up tiered plans. Tiered plans are important because they offer different service packages and cater to different budgets. Limiting yourself to offering one plan limits member acquisition as well.

After your plans are set up, the next step is recurring billing. Opt for a software that makes dues collection automatic so you don’t have to repeat manual payment tasks every month. The software collects payments in real-time, saving you a lot of manual work.

Add-on purchase options

There are some membership services that aren’t included in all plans, or in any plan at all. They are sold as stand-alone services. Examples can be gym coaching hours, and unlimited energy drink refills. Your customers should be able to buy such add-ons conveniently alongside their ongoing membership. Making add-on purchases simpler is also a good way to boost revenue.

Pause and resume buttons

Realistically, members don’t need a sports club membership all the time. But they shouldn’t have to drop a membership only because they can’t take pauses in between. This calls for membership pause and resume buttons that can make the members’ lives easier.

Whenever they don’t need membership, members can simply pause, say for a month or two. Then, when they can dedicate their time to sports again, they can easily resume membership and start benefitting from your services immediately. All of this requires a software that can manage pauses in billing, and keep a record of every subscription change.

Group plans (family and corporate)

Family and corporate membership plans bring in additional revenue streams. Corporate sports club plans are especially popular as organizations often include such memberships in employee benefits. In order to acquire large member groups, clubs need software that can take care of billing on an enterprise level.

Smart dunning

Your payment infrastructure is incomplete without a dunning mechanism in place. Without dunning workflows, it becomes easier to lose payments to payment failures due to card declines or members’ personal issues. Dunning management software retries failed payments and tries to recover them as fast as possible.

How SubscriptionFlow Simplifies Sports Club Operations for You

If you’re looking for the right sports club management software, you’re in the right place. SubscriptionFlow gives clubs a complete feature-suite designed to handle modern problems. With this platform, you also don’t have to choose between different capabilities like payment processing, member management and accounting. You get everything in a single software.

SubscriptionFlow gives sports clubs multiple perks, some of which are:

Easy management of monthly, quarterly, annual & seasonal plans

Offer different plan durations, fixed or custom. Easily create seasonal plans to take advantage of trends. Manage all plans with the same ease, and maintain accurate revenue records for each.

SubscriptionFlow lets you assess the performance of each plan individually so you can identify what customers prefer the most. You can also update plan pricing according to economic shifts or business strategy to stay profitable.

No awkward “your payment failed” calls to members

Get smart dunning to manage all payment failures. With SubscriptionFlow, you don’t have to reach out to members via messages and calls manually to inform them of payment failure. Notify members via automatic emails and in-app messages that are sent in real-time. Timely notifications help customers resolve payment issues faster.

Individual, family & corporate packages

Offer all kinds of group membership packages without disrupting or complicating individual plan workflows. The software handles each plan with equal ease and automation. Clubs can also develop custom pricing and payment templates for corporate plans for more flexible billing. SubscriptionFlow follows your rules.

Revenue forecasting & analytics

Clubs are provided with close-to-reality estimates of upcoming revenue. Apart from this, they are given a smart analytics dashboard that allows them to get intelligent insights about their performance. This helps them identify shortcomings proactively and improve faster.

Club access & event management tools

SubscriptionFlow isn’t only about payments. It also makes managing events simpler. For fundraising or other sports club events, create appealing signup forms, make it easy for members to get started, and manage members’ access to services effortlessly. Make membership lifecycles smooth from start to finish.

If your goal is to build a strong sports club membership, look no further. SubscriptionFlow is your growth partner. Book a demo to learn how we simplify billing and member management for you.