Realistically, even the best-planned budget will run into unexpected expenses or emergencies. By including this in your budget or keeping an emergency fund available, you will be able to handle these situations without affecting your overall budget. While the profit margin on these items is usually small, it is still important to keep a record of your product inventories. You should keep track of how many items are sold and update the amounts when you purchase more to restock.

• Create designated workout zones, such as cardio areas, strength training sections, and functional training spaces.
• Get all clients onto an auto-renewing credit card or electronic bank transfer monthly (or weekly).
• When choosing an accounting method, be sure to educate yourself on its implications.
• Implementing an automated inventory management system can streamline operations by enabling real-time tracking of stock levels, generating alerts for low-stock items, and facilitating efficient reordering processes.
• With salaried employees, a predetermined amount is paid periodically regardless of the actual number of hours worked within a defined pay period.
• By keeping track of all the money you owe, it is easier to make sure all your bills and invoices are paid on time.

Once you determine your actual operational budget, you can begin to discover ways to run the gym better with less money. Applied to a gym business, Parkinson’s law suggests spending will always increase to the level of the money supply. That’s essential because if you aren’t there, the business disappears, too—at least until you hire staff to run it.

How Profitable is Owning a Gym?

If your gym or fitness business receives membership dues of your new members upfront, this is a prepaid transaction. It means, you still have an obligation to perform a service for these clients. Monthly memberships are also considered prepaid until the last day of the month. The Profit First gym accounting approach fundamentally changes your businesss. By immediately taking out the profit share from your monthly revenue, you limit the money available to run your business. This alteration to the formula represents a dramatic and powerful mindset shift for a gym owner.

Whether you want to understand what’s your breakeven, your valuation or create a financial model for your gym or fitness club business plan, you’ve come the right way. You need to then understand how your costs are increasing/decreasing, and you should understand how they are changing as a percentage of your revenue. More specifically, you need to track your cost of sales, your SG&A as outright amounts as well as percentage increases/decreases, and you then need to track each of them, individually, as a percentage of revenue. For ex, if your cost of sales was $10,000 and your revenue was $30,000, your cost of sales as a percentage of revenue is 33%.

Articles on growing a fitness business

In short, an S Corp. will save you in taxes, but your cost of compliance will increase. An expense on the other hand, is a business resource that will expire and be consumed by the business within a year or the normal operating cycle of the business, whatever is longer. The expenses used to figure the cost of goods sold,Capital Expenses, Gym Bookkeeping andPersonal Expenses. My name is Shamal, and my partner Rachel and I own Asnani tax and accounting out of Hayward California. At The Fitness CPA, we’re your first call when tackling the tough decisions. Whether you have one question or twenty, we’re always an email or phone call away to help you understand your business more clearly.

“Managing gym membership finances can be a complex task, but with the right tools and knowledge, it can be streamlined for efficiency and accuracy. QuickBooks, a popular accounting software, provides a powerful platform for categorizing gym memberships, ensuring that financial records are organized and accessible. Our hero today is Andrea Hovel, co-owner of healthier bookkeeping and an expert in accounting for fitness businesses. In this episode, she demystifies concepts like cash flow, profit, and loss, and reveals to us what financial metrics we should all be looking at to understand our fitness business’s financial health. If you’ve ever felt like you’re drowning in all the accounting jargon and numbers, you don’t want to miss this interview and if you’re an investor looking to partner with or acquire a fitness business.

Identifying common expenses incurred by gyms

This categorization helps small business owners gain insights into their financial performance, enabling them to monitor their revenue streams and make informed decisions about resource allocation. By accurately tracking membership expenses, businesses can better understand their cost structure and identify opportunities for cost-saving measures. When you hire employees to help in managing your gym operations, you have the responsibility to pay them on time, while also ensuring accuracy of pay calculations and tax computation.