Setting your own prices in the Fitness pack
Why the Fitness pack's starter catalogue arrives with no prices, which items it holds, the accounts they post to, and how a club builds its price list.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Fitness businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Switch on the Fitness pack and your catalogue fills with familiar items: a joining fee, monthly and annual memberships, personal training, session packages, spa treatments. Every one of them has an empty price. For a moment it can look unfinished.
It is deliberate. A boutique studio in Lagos, a family gym in Pretoria and a hotel spa in Mombasa charge nothing like the same amounts, and any price the pack suggested would be wrong for almost everyone who used it. This article explains why the catalogue arrives unpriced, what it contains, where each item's income goes, and how to build a price list you can stand behind before the first invoice.
No starter item carries a price
No starter catalogue item in any industry pack carries a price: the business sets its own prices. Achekam's own checks enforce it, refusing any pack whose catalogue items come with prices. So it is not that the Fitness pack forgot; a priced starter item would never have been accepted in the first place.
That protects you from a quiet risk. An invented default price sitting in a catalogue tends to get used, by a new receptionist in a hurry or by a bookkeeper copying last month's invoice. An empty price is much harder to issue by accident, because somebody has to stop and fill it in.
What the catalogue starts with
Switching on an industry pack adds that industry's unpriced starter items to your catalogue. For the Fitness, wellness & spas pack they are:
- Joining fees.
- Monthly memberships.
- Annual memberships.
- Personal training.
- Session packages.
- Spa treatments.
Think of them as the skeleton of your price list. You will almost certainly want more than one of some items, for example an off-peak and a full-access monthly membership, or packages of different sizes. The starter items show you the shape; your own offering fills it in.
Each pack sets more than a catalogue. It also sets the words the screens use, its record types, pipelines, workflows, reminders, ledger accounts and home-page counts, which is why the catalogue's items line up with the records the pack keeps for members.
The accounts the items post to
The Fitness pack's starter items post to two revenue accounts, which the pack adds to your chart when it is switched on:
- Membership fees (4500).
- Classes and personal training (4550).
With the pack's second wave, an invoice line names the revenue account and the product it sells, so revenue is posted per account and cost of sales goes in the same journal. In practice that means your management accounts can show membership income separately from personal-training income, as long as each item is set up to post to the right one. Check that before pricing anything.
Building your own prices
Pricing is your call, but a few questions help you set prices you can defend:
- What does it cost you to deliver? For personal training, the trainer's pay or the contractor's rate. For a spa treatment, the therapist's time and the products used. For a membership, a share of rent, staff and equipment.
- What margin do you need? A price that barely covers delivery leaves nothing for the premises and the admin behind it.
- How do packages compare with single sessions? A package priced below the single-session rate rewards commitment; make sure the discount still leaves a margin.
- Is the price VAT-inclusive? Decide how prices are shown to members, and make sure the price you enter is consistent with that, country by country.
- What do members already pay? Existing members on older rates need a decision: honour, phase in or move them.
Investopedia's explanation of gross margin, the share of sales revenue a business keeps after the direct costs of what it sells, is a useful reference when you work through the first two questions.
A worked example in words: a studio prices its personal training. The owner starts with what a trainer costs per session, adds the share of floor and admin the session should carry, and sets the single-session price. She then prices a package of sessions slightly lower per session, checks that the per-session margin is still healthy, and enters both against the item that posts to Classes and personal training. The joining fee and memberships go against the items posting to Membership fees.
Spa treatments deserve the same exercise with one extra step. The products a therapist uses on a client, from oils to masks, are part of the cost of the treatment, and they rise in price over the year. Price treatments with a margin that survives a supplier increase, and look at them again whenever your product costs move.
Reviewing prices before the first invoice
Before anyone invoices from the catalogue, go through it once with a second person, ideally the owner and whoever does the books.
- Every item you will sell has a price, and staff know which starter items you do not sell at all.
- Each item posts to the account you expect.
- Package prices make sense against single-session prices.
- Prices match your website, your price board and what reception tells people.
- Someone owns the price list and reviews it on a set date each year.
The accounts themselves, and what to check before switching the pack on, are covered in Fitness pack accounts added to your chart. How membership income then flows through them is explained in membership revenue in the ledger.
An empty price is an invitation, not a gap. Fill each one in deliberately, check where it posts, and the catalogue becomes the price list your whole team works from.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
