A few questions...
1. So at my gym, members can rent lockers ($15 for 3 months) and I'm still trying to find a good way to keep track of it in RGP. So far, what I have been doing is creating a terminate status for the date that it expires and putting a note on the account that has the expiration date on it. The annoying part about doing it that way is that there is a warning when they check in because of the alerted note that tells me their locker expires in 3 months. Is their an easier way to do this other than using the add-on services for EFT? maybe additional policies if they are date stamped?
Also, are EFT memberships taxed in RGP? or does it just charge the total monthly dues? Same if I used the add-on feature, can I add tax to that?
2. I'm also trying to figure out a way for two shifts to have different drawers but on the same computer. Any ideas for how to set that up?
3. Is there any reason for not being able to void old invoices? Not really a problem, but it has come up a couple times when settling different issues.
4. Is there any reason for not being able to split between two different credit cards? What of someone wanted to pay half with their visa gift card and the rest with a MasterCard? Partial payments would also solve this...
And again my biggest problem is not being able to take deposits. I could potentially give the customer fake billing info and just issue a credit right? And if I do issue a credit and take payment in the form of a credit card, my z-out would be off (credit card terminal would say the particular cc would be higher than RGP would because RGP doesn't track it until the day the credit is used). I can't invoice a refund either because that would also mess up the summary.
ANY ideas or answers?!
-Josh
Comments
1. I think the cleanest method would be to use the Add-On services of EFT memberships. Why not just charge $5/month and have it be indefinite? Seems like it is simpler for everyone - your staff and your customers? I suppose policies would work, but you'd need to do the three month math unfortunately. If you aren't using EFT, another option is to create a "customer" for each of your lockers. i.e. "Locker #1", "Locker #2", etc. And then just assign 3 month prepaid memberships to these "Locker Customers". Perhaps use notes to indicate which customer is currently active.
2. Do you mean two tills? i.e. Shift #2 will swap out the till when shift #1 ends? Shift #1 takes out their till and records the time. They count the drawer down, etc. And once all is figured out they can go to the terminal and z-out up to their recorded time. Having another terminal makes this easier only because they don't have to interrupt the front desk. You can z-out any register from any terminal.
3. Primary reason not to be able to void invoices is because credit card payments may have already settled.... and then the accounting wouldn't match up. Instead of voiding these old invoices, just create a reverse transaction at POS. Then the accounting stays clean. If I allowed voiding of old transactions, I guarantee you it would screw up your accounting worse than the problem you are trying to fix!
4. Split payments. Ug. They are nothing but trouble! :) The limitation you experience is due to the integrated credit card processing flow which has the undesirable side effect of also limiting this for those gyms using an external terminal.
5. Deposits: Just create a "Deposit for XYZ" product and sell it. That's what we do for groups, etc. So when they pay the deposit, we sell "Deposit for XYZ" for $50. And then on the day of the event/party we sell them XYZ for the the amount less the deposit. You could even "return the Deposit for XYZ" in the final transaction for cleaner accounting if you want. So you'd sell "Birthday Party for $200", and have "Deposit for Birthday Party for -$50" or something. Then the final is $150.
Not perfect answers, but hopefully this gives you some workarounds to accomplish what you want.
ps. Out of 55 gyms, you are the first to rent lockers and want partial payments :)
pps. You may wonder why RGP doesn't have the concept of a partial payments/running balance/deposit... and here is why - 99% of gyms either collect all their prepaid membership payments up front OR have the member on EFT. Your gym seems to be the only one that offers a partial payment on a prepaid membership with a balance due later. And if I offered the running balance suite of features, I guarantee you gyms would start demanding all the various features offered in a full on accounting package like Quickbooks. And most those features would be necessary to make it work. Bottom line - it is a very complex and extensive feature that would benefit very few gyms. Sure some gyms bill corporations now, etc... but they use Quickbooks for those rare occasions which I think make sense.
Ask yourself this? Is your method of prepaid membership sales better than having the member on EFT without a contract? For instance, you could do the following:
* Sell an $XX product for the first X months of memberships.
* Set the next bill date for +X months
* And then bill $XX/month after that indefinitely.
And with the credit card on file, you are way more likely to get that future payment. No credit card on then? Sign up for ACH and have them use the check #s.
1. That is what we are planning for EFT, however we aren't set up for that yet. For the prepaid members with lockers, I don't see how creating another "customer" called locker #1, #2, #3, etc. would let me know when the actual members locker has expired. I almost need a new status (what our old system did) for locker rentals. Is that a feasible option? Either that or in the check in screen could you also show the comments section of the status? As in "terminate - locker expired"? Both of those options would solve my problem. An add/edit status option would be handy for gyms that wanted additional policies that were dated (lockers, monthly classes, team fees, etc.). EFT would solve most of these issues but for the prepaid members it would be a big help.
2. Yes I mean two tills, sorry about the wording... So then would both tills be "lobby"? If they weren't then it would track each persons starting ballance which would be nice.
3. Gotcha. Agreed that reverse invoice or returning would work better. Thanks.
4. Understood.
5. That's more or less what we are doing for deposits. But what about tax excempt groups? Where we don't want to apply the deposit until the date of the event? For tax reasons, we need to be able to apply that deposit on the day of the event.
Going back to staff access:
What if we don't want our desk staff to be able to change prices or discounts or membership start/end dates and other info. Maybe a checkbox for each staff type so gyms could customize those staff types? Would that be too difficult to do? I think most gyms would benefit from that. It's something that makes RGP customizeable for other gyms but you would only have to set it up once.
Thanks,
-Josh
This may seem like an odd statement, but I do not want RGP to have all the feature of Aphelion. #1 - I don't have an army of software engineers and testers to test everything. It's just me. #2 - I don't want to charge $5000 for the software. #3 - I want RGP to be simple and to help people keep their business simple. #4 - Rather than try to do everything in the software, I want to focus on doing the most important things well.
1. Probably for your needs the easiest thing would be to use Policies. So create a policy called "Locker Rntl (3m)" and when they pay - mark it as TODAY. The gotcha is that they won't automatically expire . Once every few days, go to Data Entry -> Manage -> Maintenance -> Execute SQL and paste in this code. This will expire the 3 month old policies. Change POLICY1_DATE to POLICY2_DATE (etc.) depending on which policy slot you use . You need to change it twice.
update customers set POLICY1_DATE='0000-00-00' where DATE_SUB(DATE(NOW()),interval 3 month)>=POLICY1_DATE;
Status' are tied intricately into membership, and adding a new "parallel" status feature would be a very large addition for a feature that doesn't appear to be in demand from other gyms. Things like team dues etc, seem to be handled primarily on EFT memberships with other gyms.
2. Yes, they would be z-ing the same register. One z-out would be from 10am-5pm and the other from 5pm-midnight, for example. Don't your tills always start with the same amount of money? In which case the Starting Cash will always be the same as the last Leave Cash - which should work.
5. I'm not sure what you mean by "not apply the payment?". Are you collecting money? If so the payment should be recorded on that day?
Staff access. It is an extremely large effort to allow customizable security access to the hundreds of "features/access" points to RGP. This is made even more challenging because RGP is a work in progress - I'm continually moving around features and adding more. Beyond just adding a feature, remember that every feature needs to be tested EVERY time a release happens. So suddenly adding 100+ conditions throughout the software just added 100+ more test conditions for every release (which happens as often as 2x a month).
And most importantly, abuse does NOT seem to be a problem with RGP. I've NEVER (not even once) found any abuse from my staff members, and I haven't heard of any other gym having a problem. Unlike Aphelion, everything is tracked in RGP and as long as your staff know this they don't screw around.
Have you actually found abuse since you started using it? That PIN entry by staff member is really a game changer IMO.
For what it is worth, I probably will add auto-expiring policies at some point as a few gyms have asked for that feature. Just not sure when yet.
That would be a good and very useful feature for keeping track of a number of different things.
There is also a feature I've been kicking around called "Triggers".
With triggers you could assign things to happen to members on a future date. Some ideas for things you could trigger:
* Clearing a policy
* Adding an alerted note (this could be good for lockers)
* Changing a customer's subtype
* Changing EFT dues (for special promotions where a member's dues escalates eventually)
* Creating an invoice. This could be used for your memberships you sell 50% to start, and then 50% later. You'd add a trigger to create the invoice for the second half automatically on a customer in XX months.
* Adding/removing an add-on item to a member's dues
It'll probably be 1-2 months before I can add it, but it should be a good feature.
Lots of flexibility with this feature and I suspect that are more "triggers" I could add. Any ideas?
At the moment I can't think of any other triggers. The ones you suggested sound perfect though.
One thing that might also be nice would be maybe an alerted note in check in if someone has a negative ballance. I can put an alerted note on the account, but that feature could be nice.
-Josh
How about also adding policies and not only clearing them.
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