Read the public reviews of almost any gym membership software and a pattern turns up that has nothing to do with features. Someone joins a gym. A month later a Direct Debit leaves their account with a company name on it they have never heard of. They ring the bank, report it as fraud and cancel the mandate.
The gym finds out weeks after that, when the money stops arriving, and by then the member has usually either joined somewhere else or decided the whole thing was a scam and said so to a few people who were thinking of joining.
Why it happens
Most membership software collects the money itself, in its own name, then passes it on. That suits the software company, and it is usually how the pricing works, because the fee is a cut of whatever they collect. The member never agreed to pay a company they have never heard of, though. They agreed to pay the gym with the logo on the door.
The fix is dull
Collect in your own name. Any modern payment provider will run Bacs Direct Debits under your trading name, so the line on the statement says the gym. Members recognise it, and the ones who do query it ring you instead of their bank, which means you get to keep them. That is the whole fix.
This is a setup decision rather than a monthly cost. It is also the kind of thing nobody raises in a sales meeting, because it makes the product sound worse.
What to ask before you sign anything
Four questions, in writing, and keep the answers. Whose name appears on the member’s bank statement. Who owns the member records, how fast you can export every member, payment and check-in if you leave, and whether that costs anything. What response time they will commit to in the contract rather than in conversation. And the price broken into the monthly fee and the per-collection cut, because a percentage of your Direct Debits is not a fixed cost, it grows as you do.
The part that is true of everyone, us included
Direct Debit mandates belong to whoever collects the money. Move collector later and your members sign new mandates, whichever way you go. So the first choice matters more than the second, and anyone who tells you switching is painless is selling you something.
We build membership systems that collect in the club’s own name, which is a position rather than a feature. If you are choosing between options right now, send the statement question first. One email, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know about how the rest of it will go.