Budget Projections: Get Desired Results Through Accountability

Carole Oat, the national sales manager at Twin Oaks Software, shares what statistics and information should be tracked to hit your budget projections.

It’s year’s end. How were your 2021 results versus expectations?

Will budget projections be hit? Often this may not be known if someone isn’t monitoring results regularly. As any consultant would say, live and die by the numbers.

Get the desired results through accountability. Expect your CMS to show crucial report information easily. Producing an informative sales analysis and daily deposit reconciliation report should minimally be provided from any good program. For items such as new member sales, renewals, online revenue generated, inventory management and all the individual detailed income, that information should be tracked and reviewed.

View key statistics such as: 

• Number of new memberships sold for the year broken down monthly, annually and short terms along with revenue generated.
• Number of renewals done. 
• Number of cancellations and dues amount lost. Likewise, how many paid-in-full memberships did not renew.
• Outstanding memberships on freeze.  
• Accounts receivable balances due, then write off bad debt.
• Track returns and cancel any memberships that have been delinquent for more than three months.  
• Archive former or expired members.

Having the above numbers provides the ability to see the business attrition rate or retain members. The results help determine the appropriate course of action and goals for 2022. Note the most profitable clubs put 70% or more of their new memberships onto monthly billing to ensure they have a continually growing revenue stream coming in. Monitoring these is a key indicator of success.

Be sure your CMS program can provide reports showing not only the revenue brought in by line item, but also the number of units sold. This will give a real reference of what’s moving and what’s not. Most of this information can be automatically created on a regular basis.

Here are a few other ways to inspect performance:

• Have a maintenance checklist that staff adheres to on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. Conduct periodic walk throughs with the lists in hand. Run usage reports from your CMS by day of week and time of day to ascertain high-usage times.
• Use low-use reports that include phone numbers and email addresses to communicate with members and encourage participation. Next, analyze the personal training numbers. Track sold and redeemed personal training sessions in your software, and even add monthly package renewals automatically to the monthly billing.
• Inspect new member sales. Be sure the team is entering all prospects and guests into the software for follow up. If you have a website, add the ability via your software provider to allow for online joining, personal training package purchasing, class sign-ups, gift certificates and other items.
• Frequently run desk status code reports to see if members with alerts are being addressed. A cancelled, expired or past-due member directly affects the bottom line.