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Reopening Your Gym After Lockdown - Coming off a Mass Hold

Dru Hill
Dru Hill
Published on Fri, May 15, 2020
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Gyms around the world have already begun the process of reopening their doors after the lockdown period imposed to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. After having weeks or months away from their regular workout regime, many gym-goers are itching to get back into the gym. However, before you take your memberships off hold and open your doors again, there are some best practices to follow with your gym management system to ensure the process is as seamless and painless as possible.

Here’s a checklist of important GymMaster tasks to complete when reopening your club.

Firstly, ensuring your business has taken measures to address rules and regulations imposed by your government to slow the spread of the virus is important–not only for your brand image, but importantly the health of your members. These could be things such as social distancing by limiting how many people can work out at once, or having a register of those who have entered your facility and when. GymMaster can be used for contact tracing purposes, helping track what members have potentially been in contact with one another to help protect your members in the scenario that one might be confirmed as positive for the virus.

Aside from taking measures to reduce the transmission of the virus, reopening your club entails reverting settings in your gym management software that may have been changed when lock-down started.

Bookings

Make sure all bookings are re-added to your system. This means ensuring time is marked as available for services or personal trainer bookings, as well as adding classes back to the club timetable. If you used your gym access control system to set access restrictions, limiting the number of members allowed in your facility at any given time, you may choose to remove these settings if regulations allow you to do so.

Member Portal

Activate gym member portal settings which were turned off–this really depends on your individual club and how you had the system set up previously, however, these are the likely settings which you might like to check.

Allow members to login to member portal:
Open GymMaster and click - Settings > Member Portal > General “Disable Member Login”

Enable bookings of services and PT sessions:
Open GymMaster and click -  Settings > Member Portal > Bookings “Enable booking of PT sessions”

Turn on class bookings: 
Open GymMaster and click - Settings > Member Portal > Class Bookings “Enable Class Booking”

Allow members to buy new memberships:
Open GymMaster and click - Settings > Member Portal > Membership “Enable Buying of New Membership”

Allow new members to sign up to your club:
Open GymMaster and click - Settings Member Portal > Signup “Signup Enabled”

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Please note that “Enable buying of new membership” and the following “Signup Enabled” settings are closely related. Enabling buying new memberships will only allow current members to sign up for your club. Enabling the “Signup” setting without enabling members to buy new memberships will not allow new members to complete their sign up.

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Process Cancellations

Unfortunately, during this time there has been an uptick of cancellations for fitness clubs. As such, it is important you make sure all memberships are up to date. Be sure to follow up on emails from clients asking to process cancellations and change dates where necessary to ensure members don’t incur additional membership fees where possible. 

Billing

Your club will need to re-enable billing, but be sure to make the critical checks to ensure they will be billed correctly. 

Billing Checks Before Re-enabling

If your members have had unused time on their membership due to the lockdown, your club can credit them for this easily in GymMaster, for a full guide on this click here.

Check what bills are coming up and make sure they are correct, to do this open GymMaster and click: Report & Till > Billing > At the top of the page “View Schedule”

Check and clear out pro-rated amounts or debt which needs to be wiped off to ensure members are charged correctly, open GymMaster and click: Report & Till > Debt Colleciton > View filters > All Debtors. This will show all debtors and everyone who has been marked as owing money to your club regardless of reason or failed billing. 

Re-enabling Billing

Make sure your billing configuration is correct, first by checking the Billing Details section on the Settings > Club Details page is correct, then by checking the billing settings under Settings > Member Portal > Billing. 

After this, you may proceed to click Settings > Club Details and turn off Manual Billing so your automated billing can resume. 

As always, if you ever need assistance during this time be sure to reach out to our support teamwith any queries or concerns. We are more than happy to help and try make this stressful time easier for you and your business.