How to Automate Punchpass

The person teaching the class also owns the studio

Punchpass is studio management software for small fitness and wellness businesses: yoga, pilates, dance, barre, aerial and pole studios, and a fair number of art and craft studios too. It runs the schedule, the bookings, the passes, the memberships and the payments, and it is priced so that adding another part-time instructor costs nothing extra.

That last detail says most of what you need to know about who uses it. The typical Punchpass studio is one room with a timetable on the wall, eight or ten classes a week, a couple of instructors who each teach two, and an owner who teaches the rest.

The unit of business is the pass. Somebody buys ten classes and uses four. Somebody else is on a monthly membership and comes twice a week. A pass has a balance and usually an expiry date, so the studio is always carrying a stack of classes that are paid for and not yet taken. That stack is the customer relationship and the cash flow at once.

One person teaches, sells, cleans and reconciles

There is no front desk. There is an owner between the nine thirty and the six o'clock, doing everything a front desk would do if the studio could afford one.

Working out what each instructor is owed, from who taught what and how many people came. Checking which memberships failed to charge and following them up without making it awkward. Deciding by Tuesday whether Thursday's workshop has enough sign-ups to be worth running. Posting the week's timetable to Instagram and answering the same three questions underneath it. Matching the payouts that arrived in the bank to the classes that earned them. Noticing that a regular has not been in since May.

None of it is difficult and all of it is small, which is precisely why it slides to nine at night, then to Sunday, then to whenever the accountant asks for the year.

Punchpass

Instructor pay ready to check Who taught, how many came and at what rate, assembled before payday instead of rebuilt in a spreadsheet each time.

Takings matched to classes Processor payouts lined up against the sessions that earned them, so the quiet slot on the timetable is obvious.

Regulars who quietly stopped Students with an unused balance or no visit since spring, listed with a note drafted for the owner to send.

Standing reservations and expiry emails already fire on their own

Punchpass automates more of this than most owners have got round to setting up.

Standing reservations auto-book regulars into their weekly class, so the early crowd does not have to book again every Monday. Waitlists can alert everyone waiting or auto-fill the first person the moment a space opens. Email automations run off events rather than dates: after somebody buys, when a pass is close to expiring, when a client reaches an attendance milestone, and the message itself gets written once and reused. Business rules handle the awkward money conversations, requiring payment in advance and charging for late cancellations and no-shows. Memberships can be paused, extended or modified in one place, and when a monthly payment is declined Punchpass emails the administrator. Reporting shows which classes are most profitable and what each instructor is owed.

All of that is triggered by something Punchpass can see: a booking, a purchase, a pass balance, a class on the schedule.

The bank is not one of those things. Neither is the review posted last night, the question sitting in a social inbox, or the studio that opened two streets away with a five-class intro offer.

A studio can know what a Tuesday morning really makes

The numbers a small studio actually decides on are spread across four or five logins, and none of them speak to each other.

Payouts from the payment processor matched against the classes that generated them, so the owner can see what the Tuesday nine thirty earns after fees, next to what the room costs for that hour. Instructor pay assembled from who taught, how many attended and each rate, ready to check and pay rather than rebuilt every fortnight.

Reviews and mentions collected each morning from the places students post them, with the class and the teacher they refer to. The questions piling up in a social inbox, pulled into one list with an answer drafted beside each.

Other studios' timetables and intro offers, read off their own public pages before the new term gets priced. The town's event calendar and the school holidays, which decide whether next Wednesday's ten o'clock has four people in it or eleven.

Anything going to a student is drafted, not sent. A studio this size runs on the fact that the person messaging you is the person who taught you, and an automated note about an expired pass undoes that in one line.

The gap between classes can go back to the studio

Whoever sets the bank, the processor, the review pages and the social inbox side by side spends an hour doing it. In a one-room studio that somebody has just taught two classes and is about to teach a third.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Punchpass, the payment processor, the bank and the review pages, reads them, and brings back the comparison with the differences named.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything addressed to a student is prepared and waits for you to send.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.