How to Automate Billing at Your Martial Arts School
Teaching great classes is the core of your martial arts business. But a consistent flow of tuition payments is the fuel that allows you to keep running your school and operating successfully.
Throughout the years, we’ve seen countless owners encounter the same problem. When they first open their martial arts academy, they’re convinced that they can handle billing manually. But as time goes on and their student count keeps growing, they fall into a time suck of tracking who has paid them, reconciling financial information, and chasing down late tuition.
The cost of manual billing ends up being far more than just lost time. On top of the many hours spent on admin work each week, school owners find themselves leaking revenue and having to play bad guy during awkward conversations with students and parents about unpaid money.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Here, we’ll outline some signs that your school has outgrown manual billing, the benefits of automating tuition payments, and the steps you need to take to transition from manual to automated billing.
Signs Your School Has Outgrown Manual Billing
How do you know when it’s time to consider switching to automated billing for your martial arts school? If any of these sound familiar, you’re probably due to modernize your system:
- You’re still using paper forms, checks, or even Venmo/Zelle/PayPal to collect dues
- You spend hours each month, if not each week, trying to reconcile incoming tuition payments with how much you SHOULD be earning
- You know you have frequent late or missed payments from multiple students at your school
- You have limited or unclear visibility into which of your students are fully paid and current, who’s overdue, or who’s about to cancel
- Your student count continues to grow, but instead of feeling joy, you feel a bit of dread over another set of payments you have to monitor
The Benefits of Automated Billing for a Martial Arts School
The overarching benefit of automating your martial arts school billing is that you’ll win back hours of time each week. More specifically, there are a number of tasks that will be taken off your plate so that you’re not responsible for chasing down money and juggling disparate tools:
- Recurring membership billing for student tuition
- Failed payment retries instead of manual follow-up
- Auto-generated invoices/receipts
- Integration with attendance or student management systems
Core Features to Look For in a Billing Solution
When evaluating automated billing tools, you’ll want to look for a few key features that are vital for your martial arts school operations:
- Recurring/subscription billing support
- Multiple payment method options (card, ACH, auto-pay)
- Automated late payment reminders and retry logic
- Family/multi-student billing
- Discounting capabilities
- Dashboards and reporting for revenue and outstanding balances
- Support and onboarding
You’ll also want to closely evaluate any payment processing fees. While some processors promote low rates, the advertised fees are actually a starting point on a variable scale where fees change depending on the type of card used, in-person vs. stored card transactions, etc. A flat-rate structure ensures that you are never surprised by the fees that come with processing credit and debit cards.
Steps to Transition from Manual to Automated Billing
- Audit your current billing process and pain points
Conducting this audit will help you determine where you struggle the most and, in turn, help identify what is most important when integrating your new automated billing system. For example, if identifying missing or late payments is where you have the hardest time, then prioritizing that capability will be important. - Choose a software system
After conducting your audit and putting together your automated billing wish list, you’ll be in a prime position to start evaluating systems that can meet those needs. For a martial arts school, the most logical choice is to utilize a martial arts-specific CRM system that combines automated billing and payment capabilities with core features like attendance and rank tracking, student management, lead management, and more. - Determine your fee structure (tuition, discounts, other fees)
If your martial arts school is already established, this part should be pretty straightforward. You likely already have your monthly tuition rates outlined and don’t feel there’s a need to change them. That being said, it can’t hurt to revisit these numbers just to make sure you’re charging an appropriate amount. After all, time is money, and you deserve to be paid what you’re worth! - Prep your students
Making the switch to automated billing doesn’t just impact you and your business operations—it also impacts your students, parents, and their habits. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a headache. A proper martial arts school software system should give you the tools to communicate with students, request the addition of payment methods, or give them access to a member portal where they can self-manage their finances going forward.
Common objections to automated billing
“My members prefer cash/check”
You might believe that this is true, but data says otherwise! Recent studies estimate that around 84% of American consumers prefer to pay with cards, while only 9% primarily use cash or checks.
“Automation feels impersonal”
We can understand why it might feel this way. But consider this: by automating your martial arts school billing, your time is freed up for more dedicated coaching time and one-on-one attention for your students. Automated billing opens you up to have a more personalized experience at your school.
“Setup seems complicated”
We listed ‘Support and onboarding’ as a core feature for a reason. By picking an automated billing system with a high level of support and onboarding assistance, you’ll ensure that getting started is frictionless and as easy as possible. Before you commit to martial arts software, be sure to have a clear understanding of what their onboarding process looks like and what level of support can be expected from the integrated payment processor.
“I don’t want to pay the fees associated with payment processing”
While this is totally understandable, there are two important things to keep in mind:
- Today, many payment processors allow you to set up your student billing so those fees are absorbed into your students’ payments, offsetting any financial impact on you.
- Any processing fees you pay in the future could very well be offset (and then some!) by the amount of unknown/undiscovered lost revenue you end up discovering via automated billing setup.
How Kicksite can help automate billing at your martial arts school
Kicksite software is built to provide you with the vital tools you need to run your business, including seamless automated billing integration. By teaming up with a select group of processing partners, we’re able to offer martial arts school owners competitive processing rates along with key billing features to streamline payments, including:
- An invoice-based Finances system so there’s a record of every payment made to (or missing from) your school
- Automated recurring membership tuition payments
- Failed payment notifications and automatic retries if a payment doesn’t go through the first time
- Dashboard reporting that allows you to view declined recurring billings, past due invoices, and unpaid students at a glance
- Bulk actions that allow you to send payment method invites or add recurring billings to multiple students in one step
- Automated student emails with payment receipts, failed payment notifications, and expiring payment method alerts
- A member portal for students where they can view their invoices, recurring billings, and payments, as well as add a new payment method
- The ability to integrate payment processing with Landing Pages, allowing for online membership signups or paid event registrations
Billing automation isn’t just a matter of convenience for your martial arts school. It’s a growth lever that can help you make more money, provide a frictionless experience for your prospects and students, and give you valuable time back. And with the help of a martial arts software system like Kicksite, it can become a simple, integrated piece of your overall martial arts school operations.
Ready to stop chasing payments?
Continue Growing Your School
Looking for more strategies to streamline your martial arts school operations? From student retention to school management, these related articles offer more ways to improve your martial arts business.
