5 Reasons Fitness Centers
are Making the Mindbody
+ ERP Connection
As people around the world become more aware of the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle, many join local fitness centers, sign up for yoga classes, and use facilities like country clubs to help them reach their health goals. In fact, over 73.6 million Americans aged six and older (roughly one out of four people) used a health club in 2019, up 27% from 2010)
With the typical gym having anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 members, managing those memberships and the activities that those individuals participate in (e.g., spinning classes, Pilates sessions, tanning bed visits, virtual boxing classes, and so forth) requires careful orchestration and a robust technology platform that can manage new member onboarding, recurring membership payments, physical inventory management, and other day-to-day operational tasks.
5 Reasons to do Something Now
Here are five reasons why fitness centers and other health-oriented companies are replacing their antiquated, disconnected systems with cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that come with industry-specific functionalities:
1. The less human intervention required to manage core business tasks, the better
Many facilities run on a combination of gym management software systems, spreadsheets, and paper. Lacking direct integration to the club’s backend financial, accounting, and inventory management systems, these systems operate in silos and require a lot of manual intervention. They also negatively impact customer service—something no health club owner can afford to have happen in today’s competitive business environment.
2. Mindbody is an industry platform of choice, but it’s not a cure-all
In many cases, fitness centers, country clubs, and health clubs use an application like Mindbody as a point of sale at their individual locations, a separate CRM for customer relationship management, and a platform like FranConnect to control and manage their various franchise locations. To manage expense reporting, they’ll layer an application like Expensify or Abacus onto that pile, which usually also includes an email marketing system and some other applications.
3. It’s pretty typical for a health club to use anywhere from 5-10 different systems
All of these systems are disconnected and none are in sync with one another. When companies hear that NetSuite Cloud ERP can manage all of their systems and link directly to their Mindbody platforms, the collective relief is palpable. That’s because NetSuite replaces all of the other tools that are on the market and integrates very well with the Mindbody platform. When combined, these two systems provide a single source of truth that companies can rely and build their businesses on.
4. Manual work is just the name of the game
Using Mindbody for training appointments, membership subscriptions, and retail inventory management—plus a basic financial system and various other applications in place—companies must manually transfer data back and forth between these systems. One company that NetSuite Partner Bring IT recently worked with was using QuickBooks and a remote team that had to sync up all of its information manually. It was taking information from a Mindbody report and then manually keying all of the information into QuickBooks to create the financial record link between systems.
5. Inventory management is an important function not easily managed with spreadsheets and disparate systems
With retail products for sale at each of their locations, fitness companies need to know how much inventory is on hand, what is/isn’t selling, and when to restock items that employees sell to both members and non-members. Most also have rental programs for items like heart rate monitors and wearable devices. This cash sale and inventory data is fed directly into NetSuite Cloud ERP, thus ensuring better financial controls at the individual franchise or location level.
By integrating NetSuite Cloud ERP with Mindbody, NetSuite MBO Connector Mindbody Connector eases the pain of daily sync ups between a fitness center’s financial system of record and its operational execution systems. All of the company’s activity can be fed right into NetSuite, whether that data touches the Mindbody platform or not. It all goes into a single, unified system that club owners and franchisees can use to run their businesses more efficiently and profitably.
