Are you a gym member, owner or simply an entrepreneur looking to open your first gym? Deciding on which club management software is right for your club can be difficult. We?re here to help make that decision easier for you.

What does ABC Financial?s club management software offer?

Our club management software, DataTrak, is designed as a secure database that is user friendly for club owners and employees. Through DataTrak, you can manage members, prospective members, check in?s, agreements, recurring services, and employees and much more.

Member Management

Member Management allows you to add and delete invoices, cancel and freeze memberships, and view a member?s complete history. If your member information causes you headaches because it doesn?t update automatically, then your favorite part of our member management will be the real time member updates!

Prospective Members

We make it easy to add prospective members and convert them to members. Discovering the source of why a prospect visited your club is important to your marketing campaign and through DataTrak we can monitor and report on these issues.

Member Check In

Member check in is quick and easy! Members can be checked in multiple ways ? barcode key tag, key fob, biometric/pin code or simply by searching a name in our database. Whether you have a staffed gym 24/7 or your members need to check themselves in, we make it easy for everyone.

Electronic Membership Agreements

Save the trees and your gym some money! By using our electronic agreements you can easily email agreements to members, customize payment plans, and digitally capture signatures.

Recurring Services

Does your club offer personal training, child care, group exercise classes, tanning, etc.? Don?t let these recurring services cause you and your employee?s headaches when it comes to managing and billing. Setting expiration dates and even holding unfunded sessions until they?re funded are only a couple of the great features we offer to help manage these services. Our club management software makes it easy for you to create and customize specific plans for recurring services.

Employee Management

We?ve made managing employees just as simple as managing members. From clock in to commissions, employee management is a breeze. Figuring commissions is as easy as creating employee groups by departments. You even have the ability to set different security levels for each employee, a group of employees, or an entire department.

Running your business can seem stressful at times, but with DataTrak and the great employees of ABC on your side it?s simple. Let us take the dirty work off your hands and create a streamlined way of running your business. Give us a call at 1-800-551-9733 or request a demo of the best gym management software around.

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One thing to keep in mind when selecting member management software is data security. When members join your club, you acquire sensitive information. Most gyms require the member?s full name, date of birth, address, and billing information.

Your member?s information should be accurate, complete, relevant, and most important, it should be safe. ABC?s club management software, DataTrak, can help your member?s information be all of these things.

Accurate. DataTrak has the ability to scan a member?s driver?s license upon signing up. This eliminates any human error when taking information such as the member?s name or address. It is very important to have the member?s correct address especially if you are mailing renewal reminders or birthday cards.

Complete. Within DataTrak, we can set what information is required from the member when they are sign up. For example, if all of your new members receive a copy of their membership agreement by email, you would want to require your sales staff to obtain an email address from every new member.

Relevant. DataTrak allows you to track any information from your members, even if the field is not already built into the software. Even though DataTrak already tracks a good deal of information, if there is any other information you would like to report on, we can create those fields for you.

Safe. Keeping your member?s data safe is ABC?s #1 priority. ABC Financial is PCI Level 1 Compliant; your member?s data will always be safe. In this day in age, consumers information should be kept as secure as possible, and with ABC, you will always know your data is safe with us.

You need to be able to trust your club management software, especially with all the important information they are storing for you. Not having to stress about if your data is safe frees up more time to get to the important things: helping your members.

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IHRSA 2015 was a great success and ABC Financial would like to thank everyone who visited our booth.  If you did not get a chance to visit our booth or attend IHRSA, please allow us the opportunity to show you our latest enhancements which include Biometric Fingerprint Check-in and Membership Upgrade. Click here to request a demo of our club management software.

Below is an interview with ABC Financial?s CEO/president Paul Schaller talking about IHRSA 2015.

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With the new MYiCLUBonline enhancements, the Premium version allows members to upgrade their agreement online without assistance from health club staff.  When a member completes an upgrade agreement in MYiCLUBonline, they sign with their mouse or finger on their mobile device.  A copy of the completed agreement is emailed to the member as well as stored in DataTrak and in ABC’s imaging system, where it can be accessed later if needed.  Billing amounts and available club amenities update in the member’s account automatically based on the agreement upgrade.

Biometric fingerprint check-in is fast, safe and cost effective. Compared to the expense of issuing new keytags when they are lost and the potential reduction in fraud, a cardless check-in system based on finger biometrics is often less expensive from its first day of use.  It also allows you to know who is in your club at all times. Cards, fobs and bar codes can be shared; biometrics cannot. This insures only paying and current members are accessing your facility, resulting in a safer environment for your members and preventing fraud.

“We are excited to unveil our latest software upgrades and eager to showcase our enhancements to the attendees at IHRSA,” saidSteve Ayers, Chief Revenue Officer at ABC Financial. “ABC prides itself on being the industry leader in software. Our clients deserve the latest and most cutting edge improvements in software, and that is what ABC Financial provides.  These enhancements further solidify that position,” said Ayers.

David Smith, Chief Executive Officer at Identity One said, “Members appreciate the convenience and ease of use of cardless check-in using biometrics and owners appreciate the added efficiency and cost savings.  It’s a clear win-win for all involved.”

About Identity One Corporation:
Identity One Corporation, a U.S. subsidiary of the Identity One Group, specializes in biometric middleware and off-the-shelf biometric software products. Identity One has over 12 years of finger biometric, iris biometric and face biometric integration and use experience. Identity One is the market leader in biometric middleware for: cloud based solutions, health club check-in, access control, time and attendance, compliance and jail and prison biometric identity management solutions. Identity One is headquartered in Atlanta, GA, and has ancillary sales and engineering facilities in Brisbane, Australia.

Identity One will be showcasing at the MorphoTrak/Identity One booth #707 at IHRSA.
www.identityone.net

About ABC Financial
Launched in 1981, ABC Financial has revolutionized software and payment processing for the health and fitness industry.   Headquartered in the Little Rock, AR. area, ABC Financial serves approximately 4,800 clubs with approximately 4.5 million members throughout the United States, Canada e Puerto Rico. The company’s innovative club management software, DataTrak, is the most complete web-based software in the health and fitness industry.

Visit ABC Financial at booth #1123 at IHRSA.
www.abcfinancial.com.

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By: FitRewards

Rewards programs are popping up all over the place – from your local coffee shop, large-chain grocery stores, department stores, cell phone providers, and health and fitness clubs.  Since the 1980s, when Customer Loyalty programs begin to appear, customers have now been accustomed to seeing rewards in a myriad of ways, from large to small; at every place, they are spending their money, with instant gratification.

Why are Rewards Programs so popular? Studies show that loyal customers spend more, purchase more profitable products and services, and are more likely to refer friends and family to that business. In other words, loyal customers are a company’s most valuable asset. Not only is it important for your brand to be rewarding your loyal members, you need to ensure that you have a unique rewards program that will entice your members to remain active in the program for the length of their membership in your club.

As a club owner and operator, this should get you thinking, “I want to build member loyalty, but I don’t know how;” “I have a rewards program I’m devoting countless hours developing, but I’m seeing no return;” or “I’m just struggling to acquire, engage and keep my members, let alone implementing a rewards program!”  And maybe, you have a rewards program, but it’s not comparable to what the other competitors are doing in the area.

With the start of a new fiscal year looming, you may be considering what is your financial and marketing plans are for 2015 to retain these new clients. The secret sauce is to create loyal members staring sooner rather than later with a memorable program. A loyal member is your link to generating more leads, spending more money, and engaging in more programs at your club.

Choosing a Rewards Program should include the three things: Meaningful, Memorable, and Easy to Achieve. Now is the time to start thinking outside the box and addressing your problems with solutions. The start of a New Year always brings in a new set of members to a club, looking to attain their goals for the New Year, and your existing members refreshing their perspective on their health and wellness goals. Instead of them trickling out the door and completely gone by mid-February, it is time to capitalize on that opportunity. The question is how to do this in the most effective, successful way possible?

Implementing a unique rewards program into your club makes generating referrals, driving retention, and creating an opportunity for additional revenue for your club services.  Most importantly is drives ongoing member loyalty and engagement.

What makes for a Unique Program?

Customize your program name to your club ? By calling your program (YourClubName) Reward Program and customizing it to fit your company culture; you are differentiating yourself from your competition.

Drive the actions you want – Know what your clients behaviors are and how you can inspire and drive them. For example you may want to create core users (members who use the club 100 times or more in a year).  IHRSA research has shown that core users having a longer tenure and spend more in your club. So go ahead, increase retention and member tenure by motivating members to use the club with reward points.

Customize your rewards – Your club can reward for many things, from in-club services like personal training, smoothies, apparel, and memberships; or you can utilize an outside source to fulfill for name brand products on headphones, jewelry, exercise equipment, handbags, and accessories. Research shows that the better the rewards, the more likely members will be to engage.

Make it part of your Marketing Program and Your Culture ? When you embed a loyalty program into all aspects of your culture and marketing you bring the fact that member loyalty is important to your organization. Members now look at your club as more of a brand they love rather than just a place to work out.

FitRewards has developed a customized rewards solution branded for your club. The customization starts with the uniquely branded program name, but in the behaviors your members are engaged with, and rewards offer with in-club services to draw attention back to your profit centers. FitRewards also provides the marketing and technical support needed for your club from Day 1 and for the lifetime of your program to continually platform that engages your members.

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Effective January 2015, we are modifying our RFC (Return for Collection) process to occur once a month instead of twice a month.  The RFC selection process will run on the 16^th of the month and the clients will have until the 26^th of the month to reinstate any account.  On the 26^th, the SCA (Send to Collection) process will run and the accounts will be sent to a collection agency or club at that time.  The RFC and SCA process will all occur within one month so the club will not have to look at two separate portions of multiple months to see the total number of RFC accounts. 

ABC will continue to attempt soft declines until the accounts RFC. In addition, the club has longer to review the accounts and make any necessary changes on the preview report. 

Please see below for a few FAQ?s: 

Will the RFC process run on the 16th if the 16^th falls on the weekend?  This process will run automatically on the 16^th regardless of the day of the week.

Will the SCA process run on the 26^th if the 26^th falls on the weekend?  Because this is the final step prior to sending an account to collections, we want to ensure all requests to remove accounts from RFC status are complete prior to finalizing the list.  The process will run on the 1^st business day after the 26^th if that happens to be a weekend day. 

What is the impact of this change?  One of the major impacts to this change will be the age of accounts when they RFC.  Accounts who just missed the RFC selection by a few days will now have an additional two weeks soft collection activity until the next RFC process runs on the 16^th of the following month.         

Is it possible to customize when or how often the process runs?  The process runs for all clubs at one time therefore the run date cannot be customized.  You can, however, modify the age in which an account is eligible to RFC.

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If you have yet to include this type of software into your gym, you?re missing out on the type of digital intelligence that has the ability to deliver comprehensive results while making your life a heck of a lot easier.

Why go digital?

Why not? Many people often hesitate to go digital for fear of security breaches and for fear of learning something new that appears intimidating or illusive. But have no fear, the DataTrak club management software is highly-secure and is guaranteed to make your life easier in the gym. How so?

Management software will make your life easier as a club owner or manager by centralizing all of your gym?s critical and sensitive data into one highly-secure database. This measure prevents and deters data corruption while the inclusion of comprehensive digital management solutions such as attracting and signing up new prospects to your gym takes just seconds or minutes.

With DataTrak, you?ll never have to worry about potential database failures or system crashes thanks to the included services of timely database maintenance and critical back-ups provided by ABC Financial. These additional services are completely complementary and are included with your new highly-intelligent software.

Take the Sweat out of Management with DataTrak?s Key Features

This is just a taste of what you can expect to experience with club management software:

• Prospective Members: This feature allows you to instantly and easily enter new prospects and guests while assigning a designated salesperson and assigning a priority to each prospect and guest. Monitor conversion rates, track marketing campaigns and get to know prospects before converting them with ease.
• Electronic Membership Agreements: Go paperless and save money with this great feature. Capture membership agreement signatures instantly and securely.
• Member Check-In: Easily check-in members to the club with a simple bar code key tag, pin code, name search, or key fob. This makes the check-in process a breeze.
• Member Management: View club members? complete club history, access invoices, cancel or freeze memberships when necessary, update information and more, all in real-time.
• Kid?s Club: With the Kid?s Club feature you?re able to attach a child to your valued club members with a simple picture of the club member and child for security purposes and verification purposes. This helps to monitor legal childcare limits, verify pick-up?s, and track attendance.
• Inventory Management: Track vendors, unit cost, print UPC labels, create catalog items, re-stock and more with this easy-to-use hassle-free feature.
• Schedule Management: Manage departmental calendars with ease and more.
• Employee Management: Manage all of the gym?s employees instantly and easily with the employee management feature. Set security levels, figure commissions and group employees by gym departments and more.

Disaster Recovery protects your system in the event of any type of disaster and PCI Compliancy ensures that your gym remains compliant at all times. For a full-listing of the DataTrak club management software, visit us here or request a brochure by giving us a call or contacting us online!

Are you ready to make life easier in the gym?

When you?re ready to give your gym?s management system an upgrade with ABC Financial?s DataTrak club management software, give us a call or contact us online. Upgrading to a digital management system will improve productivity, data security, and overall efficiency.

ABC Financial is an industry leader proud to provide digital solutions to clients that will help them to ?better understand their business? by providing them with ?powerful insight? and tools that will enable them to achieve their objectives and goals.

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An online Gallup Business Journal article showed a study conducted with 2,500 entrepreneurs to understand the actions and decisions that lead to venture creation and growth. After years of research and hundreds of interviews, Gallup has identified 10 specific aptitudes which were consistently observed in highly successful entrepreneurs. One talent is that of a relationship-builder who has the high social awareness and an ability to build relationships that are beneficial for the company?s survival and growth

Successful fitness clubs are successful in relationship with members and the community. Personal interaction has and always will be the best way to build relationship. But today?s culture and business market demands interaction via technology such as health club management software and social media platforms.  Club management software that interfaces with mobile app and website software that syncs member data for automatic follow-up and targeting email communications is one way for your club to connect with current and prospective members.

Effective social media links prospective and existing members to your website, mobile site, gym, and, most importantly, ?you? as a ?relationship-builder?. However if you are absent, neglectful, dismissive, dated, careless, or unintentional with your gym?s social media site, your site and those potential relationships will fail.  This, in turn, will hurt your gym. Effective social media is mindful of the real person on the other side of the information highway so it makes sense to glean from digital and personal interaction experts alike.

Seven things to note when utilizing social media

Treat each channel differently – Search for the social media avenue that is best suited to your fitness business (including interface with your website and app), is user-friendly, and is client-preferred.

Be yourself – Relate to your members/clients/followers/PEOPLE. Get to know them on and offline.  What they are thinking about, worrying over or enjoying. Be humorous, crazy, and somber. Be transparent about issues and honest about mistakes.

Keep them on their toes – Keep your site fresh, live and interactive, putting up and taking down at the speed of business. Whatever is new in your gym should be new on your site. Post real-time with followers.

Ask a thoughtful question – Interesting interactions among you and your followers is memorable and creates positive club experience.

Listen – Listen and diplomatically respond to both compliment and complaint posts. Leave room amongst your postings to really listen to responses.

Focus on quality, not quantity – If you or your social media delegate doesn?t always have time to post quality, interactive and relational material, get quality back-up for when you can?t. Your goal is connection not counts.

Compliment them – Show appreciation for your members collectively and individually, with permission, on your site. Staff should be able to tell you about goals reached, elevated member activity, and other notables.

Be relational – Successful entrepreneurs build relationships to build a healthy business.

Works Cited

Badal, Sangeeta. ?10 Talents That Drive Entrepreneurial Success.? Adapted from Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder by Gallup Press, Sept. 2014. Gallup Business Journal. Gallup, Inc., 6 May 2014. Web. 1 Sept. 2014

Temple, Brandi. ?7 Tips for Social Commerce.? Inc. The Playbook. Mansueto Ventures, 23 May 2014. Web Video. 1 Sept. 2014.

Young Entrepreneur Council. ?Making a Lasting Impression in Under 5 Minutes: 14 Ideas.? Inc. Networking. Mansueto Ventures, 27 Aug. 2014. Web. 1 Sept. 2014.

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I don?t write promotional articles often?it just ain?t my style. But this one is way too timely and illustrates the ADVANTAGES OF YOUR CLUB?and YOU MAY NOT EVEN RECOGNIZE THEM! Allow me to veer off for a few sentences.

One thing that is for certain you must know by now, is that our industry has entered ?the digital age.? Apps, technological aides, software enhancements and much more are coming at us rapid-fire.

Consider that 80% of U. S. consumers own at least one ?smart technology? device. By 2016, 85% of consumers will own a smart phone. 62% of all Internet searches are now initiated on a smart phone!

Three out of four consumers ?shop you before they shop with you? ? meaning that they are reviewing your club?s website before they make any kind of decision to possibly go a step further and walk in your door. If you don?t have membership rates, a way to buy from you, and customer-interactivity as part of your site, you don?t even get to the preliminaries! Potential customers won?t come unless THEY THINK THEY ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT YOU TO BE COMFORTABLE.

You have an existing ally that you rarely think about:                          

ABC Financial?s unparalleled customer service teams?and DataTrak! Yes?that which you have taken for granted and actually pay little attention to is a wallet full of bucks sitting in your pocket!I recently had the opportunity to spend hours and hours on ABC?s website?evaluating it from the perspectives of both industry veteran/expert and interested consumer. I learned a lot?and want to share some of YOUR BUILT-IN ADVANTAGES with you.

• DataTrak?s ?dashboard:? under-used and brimming with info that you can use to make stronger business decisions and to better monetize your customer base. (If you don?t know what I just said, you need to call me!)
• Owners? and Members? Login on www.abcfinancial.com. Incredible resources within a few seconds.
• MYiCLUBonline and ClubApps connections. Real-time services, scheduling, and much more at your fingertips.
• Scads of Online Video Demo Helps in A/V format. Just click ?n go to educate yourself and staff.
• News articles that offer cutting-edge info on everything from smart devices to workout buddy importance to healthy lifestyles. Like having your own library on-demand!

And there?s a heckuva lot more! I?ve rated ABC Financial?s website as the most useful and easiest-to-get-around in the entire club management software industry. If you?re not using these assets every day, I think you?re at best being short-sighted and at worst being foolish. Get in touch with your advantages!

(Michael Scott Scudder is Founder/CEO of Fitness Business Council, the independent club business network. He can be contacted at 575-751-1212 or mss@fitnessbusinesscouncil.com.)

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