How to manage gym members without losing track
Managing gym members well needs less data than most gyms collect and more routine than most gyms keep. Record the few things you will actually use, keep the list current with one weekly pass, and the questions that usually take an afternoon answer themselves.
What is worth recording
Name, phone, plan, joining date, and an emergency contact. Everything else — address, email, occupation, goals — is optional and mostly goes stale. A short record that is accurate beats a long one nobody updates.
Keep the statuses honest
A member who has left should be marked as left, not deleted. Deleting them loses the history and makes every year-on-year comparison wrong; leaving them active makes the member count a fiction and inflates every figure derived from it.
The weekly pass
Once a week, look at three lists: who is due to renew, who owes money, and who has stopped coming. Fifteen minutes, and it is most of what member management is.
Ask who referred them
One question at signup, and after six months you know which members bring people in. Almost no gym records this, and it is usually the cheapest marketing information available.