Hi everyone.
I’m planning to open a small gym and am looking for management software. I don’t want cloud services or a subscription fee. I use Linux in my personal life and would prefer to keep running that at the business. Does anyone have experience with this type of thing?
I plan to self host all my services and data if possible such as camera systems and maybe even the website (I found a great local website company I’ll be talking with soon).
Like what? A customer management system? Accounting?
I don’t yet know the scope of everything I might need, but right now I believe that a customer management system is the focus. A way to input their details and payment information to have an automatic recurring membership.
I don’t think I really need a way for them to view their account as it won’t have any fancy features. I just need to know that they are a member and have a membership renewal. They can sign up and cancel in person or over the phone (I’m not making it disgustingly hard for people to cancel like the large gyms).
On top of that I would imagine it would be nice for the software to keep track of my total number of patrons and thus a total income amount
payment information
You can nope alllllllllll the way out of that. Payment information means credit cards means PCI compliance. That’s something you’ll definitely want to outsource.
I understand the payment will have to connect to the internet and be outsourced but I want all my customer data to stay on my server
Something like odoo (https://www.odoo.com/) might work?
You probably aren’t going to find something that works for your specific needs right out of the box, so your best bet would be finding a platform that gets you 80% of the way there and provides enough of a plugin mechanism that you can develop the remaining 20% of the functionality yourself
There’s a lot to look into there. It covers quite a bit so it could work. I’ll research this for sure. Thank you a lot!
https://www.odoo.com/documentation/17.0/applications/finance/payment_providers.html
Nice, it has a recurring payment model (subscriptions) and it integrates with payment processors like Stripe. This looks exactly like what OP needs.
Disclosure: I did not have any business myself.
Maybe it will be worth considering starting with spreadsheets? They are super super flexible and what have been done for years. You would have time to see what scope and needs you have for more dedicated and automated system down the road. Switching ERP software is very painful and time consuming, while importing spreadsheet to ERP is basic transition.
I’m not opposed to tried and true simple solutions. I think my wife would find it much easier with an automated system however. I really need a way for people to pay for their memberships and keep track of that and I have no background with this stuff. I think having a system that’s already designed for this would make opening the gym less daunting. I appreciate the thought
I have been using Odoo for years to generate invoices for my little IT business. I don’t use any features that cost money. I am working a web store for my wife and have been playing with erpnext. It is written in Python / Javascript and can be installed on your own servers. I has a lot of features that cost in Odoo but are free and looks like it is easer to modify.
I use wger at home and it’s waaaay overkill. Designed for the gym part, probably not the whole package
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/ check them out for a lot of your business, self-hosted needs. Odoo, like others have said, is on there. I once used moodle for new employee onboarding and training.
I am confused as to what this is exactly. Is it some type of operating system that makes installing certain software easy like Docker or something?
It was suggested to peruse a big list of projects that might work for you. They pre package a huge amount of open source projects to run on say AWS in their own linux distro. If you find a project that looks interesting you can go to that projects website and look at docs and stuff. Then run that project how you want.
