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
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And need a paymemt gateway with a bank which can count as cloud.
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
It’s honorable to want to keep all customer data within your control, but seriously unless you already have experience dealing with PCI compliance, that’s one part you should definitely offload to a payment processor. This might even be a clause in your insurance (Depending on what it covers)
I don’t have any particular software in mind to recommend, but I’d bet they probably have some sort of integration with processors like Stripe or something
This and medical info I will not self host personally. Try to do due diligence but I let someone else take the blame for a breach.
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
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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!
I’ve used odoo before, it is a large piece of software and can be modified to do lots of things. Most likely you will be able to get it to do what you want. You’ll probably need the e-commerce module, there is probably some sort of mode for subscriptions. You can also add the CRM on top for marketing, etc. there is also the booking module (iirc) which is maybe useful for sessions with trainers etc. maintenance might also be useful.
I did see the subscriptions module. Once you add enough modules it becomes a paid service. I have yet to find info on if Odoo is subscription based or a one time payment. I don’t mind paying for a software but do not want a subscription service.
it is subscription, you pay per user per month. It is quite cheap imo, but I understand if you don’t want to pay any subscription. But in that case you can just try to self host it instead.
Okay I see. I’ll have to check how much it is. So this can be self hosted for free with the tradeoff of having to figure out how to do that? If that’s the case then I could even start off with the ease of the subscription and over time get my self hosting setup figured out.
Yes it can be selfhosted in theory, I haven’t personally tried it though. That sounds like a good plan.
You can easily host the community edition in Docker or otherwise. Odoo has a steep learning curve but it’s very versatile. It can definitely do what you describe.
That’s good to know. I’ll look into the Docker image. Thank you
No worries. It has a stripe integration, too, so it’s easy to handle payments without having to hold customers’ credit card info.
You might like ERPNext, Akaunting, or odoo as mentioned by another user
Wow, Akaunting looks really great. It seems simple and upgradable if my needs change over time. I have the ability to self host and even make a one time payment instead of subscribing to their services if I want. Thank you!