Attach the grade to the discipline, not to the student, and store every promotion as a dated event with a grade before and a grade after. Do those two things and almost any tool works, including paper. Skip them and no tool saves you, because the question that turns up three years later is never "what belt is he" but "when did he get it, and what did the coach say".
The ten second test
Open whatever you use today. Pick a student who joined two years ago. Answer three questions: what grade, awarded when, and what was written about it on the day. If any of the three takes longer than ten seconds, the record is decoration.
The notebook fails on availability. One copy, one handwriting, and it lives in a bag. When the head coach spends a fortnight away, the record spends a fortnight away, and nobody at the desk can answer for it.
The spreadsheet fails more quietly, which is worse. One row per student, one column called Belt. That column holds one value. The day a four year Muay Thai student starts jiu-jitsu you add a second column, then a date column that three coaches out of five remember to fill, then a Notes column that turns into a graveyard. The file still opens every morning and nothing warns you it stopped being true. The real damage is the overwrite: change the cell from White to Blue and four years of white belt disappear without a trace.
One grade per discipline, not one grade per student
Nok trains gi jiu-jitsu three nights a week and Muay Thai on Saturday morning. She is a blue belt in one. In the other she sits in the middle of a ladder that has no belts at all. No single value describes her, so a record built on one field per person forces you to either overwrite something true or invent a free text field nobody reads.
In MoveMembers a member carries a primary discipline plus as many secondary ones as they train, and each discipline carries its own grade system. Promote Nok in jiu-jitsu and her Muay Thai level does not move, because the promotion is written against the discipline rather than against her. This is the one place where martial arts gym software genuinely differs from a general purpose gym tool, and it is the question to put to any product you are shortlisting: does promoting a student in one art touch their standing in another.
Three ways to grade a discipline
| Grade system | Fits | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Coloured belts | Gi jiu-jitsu, judo, karate, taekwondo | The ladder drawn in order, a Promote button, promotion history and eligibility bars |
| Ordered levels | Boxing, Muay Thai, MMA, wrestling | The current level on the profile, changed by editing the member. No history, no eligibility. |
| No grading | Open mat, conditioning, a women's only session | Nothing on the profile. The discipline still works for the timetable, the filters and the revenue split. |
Choose martial arts as your gym type and seven disciplines are already there, with jiu-jitsu carrying a white to black ladder. Everything past that you write yourself, once per discipline. There is no library of federation ladders to pick from: kyu and dan, geup, stripes on a white belt are entries in a list you type, each with a name and a colour. A school that grades gi and no-gi separately simply runs them as two disciplines.
What to write down on grading day
- The date, recorded the same evening. The Promote button stamps today and there is no field to back-date a grading. A Saturday grading typed in on Wednesday puts everyone's time in rank four days out. Type it while the belts are still on the floor.
- The discipline, even in a school that only grades one art today. The second art always arrives.
- The grade before and the grade after. "Blue" is a state. "White to blue" is an event, and only the event survives a mistake.
- Two lines in the coach's words. "Passing well, still gives up the back when tired." A year later that note is the only thing that reconstructs the day, and it turns the next grading into a conversation instead of a guess.
- The coach's name, inside that note. There is no separate promoted-by field. If two or three coaches run gradings at your school, write the name in the note. Four extra words beat inventing a field.
All of it lands on the member profile next to attendance, payments and notes, which is the point. A grade read beside an attendance record means something. A grade read on its own is a colour.
Knowing who is due before they ask you
Two numbers decide it and neither is an opinion: how long since the last promotion, and how many sessions attended. Everything after that is judgement, and judgement is your job, not the software's.
MoveMembers puts both on the member's grade card as bars, measured against six months in rank and forty attended sessions. Over both, the card reads Eligible. Under either, Not yet. Nothing is blocked: you can promote whoever you like whenever you like.
The software has never seen anyone roll. Treat Eligible as a name to go and watch on Tuesday, not as a decision.
The limits matter for how much weight you put on that flag:
- Time in rank counts from a promotion recorded here, not from a date you type. Setting a student's current belt when you create their profile leaves the bar at zero months and the card reading Not yet. A school that carries its students over gets nothing useful from that flag until the first grading it runs inside the software, which for most people means six months of blank bars.
- The thresholds are fixed at six months and forty sessions. You cannot set them per discipline or per belt, so a school that grades white to blue at two years and brown to black at four gets one line drawn in the wrong place twice.
- The session count is the student's total attendance, not their attendance in that discipline. Someone who trains Muay Thai five nights a week and jiu-jitsu once on a Sunday crosses forty long before they should.
- The bars appear on the primary discipline only. Secondary disciplines still show the ladder, the Promote button and the full history, but no eligibility.
And all of it rests on attendance actually being marked. Forty sessions counted from a register nobody fills is forty imaginary sessions. If marking attendance is currently a clipboard by the door, fix that first: check-in is the input, grading is the output.
The monthly pass that keeps the record honest
Fifteen minutes, once a month, usually the same evening you look at the money.
- Filter the member list by discipline and read the belt column next to Last seen. That finds one group straight away: the students who stopped coming four months ago and whose belt is frozen because they are. They are worth more than the ones who are due, and a belt spreadsheet never surfaces them. It does not find the ones who are due, because the list shows the belt but never how long it has been there. Time in rank lives on each member's Grades tab, one profile at a time, and there is no filter or sort by belt anywhere.
- Export the members CSV if you want a sheet on the desk for grading day. It carries the primary belt and discipline, not the secondary grades, so in a multi-discipline school treat it as a starting list and not as the record.
- Let students see their own grade. The member area shows each student their disciplines and current grade. Anyone reading "white" three months after being promoted tells you within a day. That is free auditing, and it is the only thing that catches a promotion nobody typed in.
What this does not do
- A promotion sends nothing by itself. There is no promoted trigger in the automations, so congratulating a new blue belt is one click from her profile, but it is your click.
- There is no ranking by belt or by attendance. What does exist is a leaderboard for each measure your school records, in the member area, and it is on by default: a school that grades on the mat and wants no table at all switches it off for everyone in the settings, and any student can take themselves off it. Body measurements never appear on it.
- Grade history does not migrate, and neither does the current grade. Members import from a CSV of up to 5,000 rows, but the importer does not read belts, grades or disciplines: a Belt or a Discipline column in your file is ignored, so every imported student lands with no discipline and no grade at all. Setting a hundred of them by hand is an afternoon. Do it by editing each profile, never by pressing Promote a hundred times, or you stamp today's date on the whole school and every eligibility bar is wrong for six months.
Which leaves the useful truth: the record starts the day you start it. A school that enters correct current grades this week and writes clean events from here is in far better shape in a year than one that spends three weeks trying to reconstruct 2019 from a notebook. Belts, disciplines and promotion history are not a paid add-on, and the free plan stops at 20 active members with no deadline attached, so putting the record in order does not require deciding anything else first.