Running your gym on the days you are not in the room

Four things happen at a front desk: someone books, someone cancels, someone gets marked present, someone pays. Three of the four can run without you. The fourth cannot. Two of the switches that turn them on ship off, and you have to go and find them: member self-booking and the self check-in kiosk. The third, the class reminder, ships the other way on a new account: email is already ticked, so it starts sending the morning after your first booking. Know which is which before you promise anything to your members.

That is about ten minutes in Settings. What follows is what each switch really covers, what the room does by itself when a class is cancelled, and the jobs that stay yours whatever you turn on.

Let members book and cancel themselves

The switch is Settings › Member portal › Member self-booking, and it is off until you turn it on. That default is deliberate: a gym that took bookings in a notebook yesterday should not wake up with an open timetable it has not looked at. Online booking is not a paid tier here. It sits on every plan, Free included, so what you are switching on is a decision about your gym, not a purchase.

Then set two numbers, because they do most of the work:

• Booking window, how far ahead a member can commit. It ships at 30 days, and 90 is the longest you can choose.
• Cancellation cutoff, 2 hours out of the box, with Anytime at one end of the list and 48 hours at the other. Inside it a member cancels alone and the credit goes back onto their pass on its own. Past it the Cancel button refuses, and whoever wanted out messages you instead. Choose it by how long you need to refill a seat, not by how strict you feel.

Then write your actual rule in Cancellation policy shown to members, in plain words. The cutoff is what the software enforces; that text is what your gym applies, and the member reads it at the moment they cancel. Two sentences are enough.

Days you have closed and sessions you have cancelled stay visible in the member's list, greyed out and labelled. Nobody gets a card that looks bookable and then fails on an error message.

Attendance with nobody at the counter

Two different things get called self check-in, and mixing them up is the most common misconfiguration in this part of the product.

The first is kiosk mode: a tablet by the door, locked full screen, showing today's sessions. Open one and you get the list of people booked, a search box to add a walk-in by name, and a QR code. It is included on every plan, but the mode only appears once you switch on Self check-in kiosk in Settings, which ships off. Leaving the kiosk asks for the staff code when you use PIN login, and falls back to a confirmation when you have not set one, so a gym cannot lock itself inside its own tablet.

The second is a member checking in from their own phone. The QR code on the kiosk opens the member space, and the check-in there needs no tablet at all: a booking for that day, and being inside the check-in window, which is 60 minutes either side of the start by default and stretches to 240 at most. Outside it, the button refuses.

Here is the part to know before you rely on either: turning the kiosk switch off does not stop members checking in from their own space. They are two separate paths and only the first one reads that setting.

One hard limit decides whether any of this fits your gym. A check-in always attaches to a session. Marking someone present with nothing on the timetable is not possible: the software creates a booking on the session you picked. An open floor with no classes has nothing to check into. Check-in here is attendance at a class, not a turnstile count.

What the room does on its own

• A seat frees up. The automatic waitlist is on by default. First in line is booked and told, whether the cancellation came from the member's own space or from someone at the desk. Nobody presses anything. It also moves the instant the seat opens, with no window to accept, so a cancellation at 19:50 for a 20:00 class promotes someone who will not read the message in time.
• You cancel one session. Everyone booked is emailed and messaged on LINE, as long as Cancellation notification is on, which is how it ships. Archived members are skipped.
• You close a whole day. The Holidays button on the schedule takes a start date, an end date and a reason, and every active member gets a message. Five days in a row for the same reason send one message covering the range rather than five, even though the list itself keeps one line per day.
• The morning of the class. One reminder goes to everyone booked that day, once. On an account opened today, email is already on: it will send whether or not you went looking for it. LINE stays off until you tick it in Settings › Messaging › Built-in messages, and an older account may have both off, so check yours rather than assume. There is a single send, in the morning: you cannot ask for one two hours before a 19:00 class, and someone who books at 15:00 for that evening gets none.

The reminder, and every scheduled rule, depends on a daily job running on the server. It is the one link in this chain that is not a switch in the app, and it is worth confirming it runs before you promise anyone a reminder.

What reaches you, and what does not

Settings › Notifications carries thirteen staff alerts, each with its own on/off and its own recipient: you, your admins, both, the coach of that class, or any address you type.

Now the limit, because it changes what you can lean on. The four booking alerts fire on bookings taken inside the software: from the schedule, from a member's profile, from the check-in screen. A member booking from their own space does not raise one. So switch them on for the coach while your desk still books people by hand, and once members book themselves, read the schedule rather than your inbox.

Who can do what while you are away

Staff roles are on every plan, not a paid extra. The permission grid gives you seven boxes to tick per role, and two of them are deliberately separate: recording a payment, and seeing the amounts. A coach can take cash at the counter without ever seeing your revenue. Settings, reports and automations are not on that grid: they follow the role itself and stay with you and your admins, whatever else you tick.

Out of the box a coach can send messages, and the front desk role covers members, memberships, payments, amounts and messages. Whatever the role, checking someone in, booking someone in, searching and writing a note stay open to any signed-in staff member. Those are the actions of the hour, and gating them would put you back behind the counter.

One thing to plan for: Free gives one account, yours. A second staff login needs the Pro plan. Editing the one you have works on every plan.

What still needs a person

• Money. Cash and transfers are recorded by a human. The only charge that happens on its own is a recurring card payment the member set up from their own space, which needs Stripe connected and its own setting switched on. That one ships off too.
• Replying. On Free, LINE carries the automatic messages. Replying from the Inbox, sending a manual or group message, and editing templates sit on Pro. Until then, treat the automatic messages as a one-way service rather than a conversation.
• Noticing. There are no push notifications, on either side. The member space is a web app you install to a home screen, not an App Store download, so a reminder is an email or a LINE message, never a badge on a phone.
• Deciding. A session with two people booked at six in the evening is a judgment call. The software will hold it open all night.

Ten minutes, in this order

1. Settings › Member portal: switch on Member self-booking.
2. Same screen: Self check-in kiosk on, if a tablet lives by the door.
3. Settings › Classes: set the booking window, then the cancellation cutoff to the number of hours you need to refill a seat. Leave the automatic waitlist on. Write two sentences in the policy box. Both settings live on the scheduling and booking side of the software.
4. Settings › Messaging: tick email on Class Reminder, and LINE too if your channel is connected.
5. Settings › Notifications: route class full and waitlist join to the coach, while your desk still takes bookings by hand.

Then go away for a day. The test is not whether the software did everything. It is what was waiting for you when you came back, and how much of it was a decision. The decisions are the part you are supposed to keep.