Shine Dance Center offers beginner-friendly dance and fitness classes for adults in Midtown, Reno. As the founder and co-owner of both Shine Dance Center and Ren Consulting, Stephanie Hinen created multiple phases of solutions to handle payment tracking, customer management, and financial reporting that scaled along with the business.
Background
With the launch of Shine Dance Center, a basic solution was created in Microsoft Excel integrated with a customized Microsoft Access database to track customer data, payment history, visit history, and to report on financials. As the business grew, a more customizable solution that integrated additional features such as client retention functions and payment processing became the natural next step.
Objective
The new solution would ideally remove the inefficiencies of multiple systems: Square for Payment Processing, Microsoft Access for creating relationships between various customer data such as visit history and payment history, Microsoft Excel for financials, and a paper filing system for liability waivers and email marketing signups. The solution would also be cloud based to allow for access management that would scale with future business growth and added staff.
Solution
Multiple management software solutions were researched, tested, and demoed. After testing, MINDBODY was selected due to its proven reliability and 9,000+ existing fitness customer base in the Reno-Sparks area. Next, the data was cleaned up to prepare for transition to the new system. Instructor information, customer information, visit history, payment history, and class details and schedule were all uploaded and tested in the new system. Bulk upload greatly reduced manual work by removing the need to type in existing information. To ensure a seamless transition, dual systems were used for the first month. When all bugs were remedied and staff trained, MINDBODY became the sole access point for what had once needed four different systems of information.
With the use of an integrated studio management software, management time spent on customer, staff, and payment tracking was reduced by approximately 80%, and countless hours of end-of-year reporting were completely automated.
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