Yoga, dance and multi-discipline studios
Six styles, nine teachers,
one timetable and one membership.
The hard part of a studio like this was never taking the money. It is knowing who taught Thursday’s 6pm when the regular teacher was away, which of your six styles is actually carrying the timetable, and what each of nine people is owed at the end of the month.
01 / What a studio is, to the software
One timetable, and everything hangs off it
A class in this system is a standing entry in the timetable, not a calendar event you create every week. It has a name, a start and an end time, the days of the week it runs, a room, a capacity, and one or more teachers — several, because the Wednesday cover is a normal event and not an exception the software should be surprised by. It also has a holiday list of its own, so shutting for Diwali is a date on the class rather than nine cancellation messages.
Each class is tagged with the disciplines it counts toward, and a membership is sold against those tags. That is what lets one card cover yoga and dance without letting it cover the aerial workshop, and it is why a studio with six styles does not need six systems. If you want to cap how much someone uses, the cap lives on the plan and it is weekly: a two-a-week membership and an unlimited one are two products, priced differently, enforced at the moment somebody tries to book.
Booking, capacity and the queue of people waiting for a place work identically to a reformer studio, and there is no point in writing it twice: the mechanics, including the four things it does not do, are set out on the pilates studio page. Read that section, then come back. The rest of this page is the part that is different when you have nine teachers instead of two.
02 / The teachers
Who can do what, per person
Every studio arrives at this problem in month three: the senior teacher should be able to add a client, the visiting teacher should not be able to sell a membership, and nobody wants to work out which is which by asking.
Permissions are a switch per teacher per studio — twelve of them — rather than a role you pick from a list. The ones studios actually change:
- Add a new client, or only work with the ones assigned to them
- Record measurements, or only read them
- Mark attendance for a class they are teaching
- Assign a workout or a diet plan
- Log a personal-training session against a client
- Sell or extend a membership — off by default, and it is the right default
A teacher gets their own app and their own web dashboard: their client list, each client’s measurements and progress, the sessions they have run, their own leave and availability, and their own sales figures split into personal training, new memberships and renewals. Commission can be a flat fee, a share of revenue, a share weighted by attendance, or a fee per attended session — banded by how many clients they carry, with monthly targets in up to five slabs, each at its own rate.
And the reporting that settles arguments: attendance grouped by class, so you can see which of the six styles fills the room and which one is being kept alive by three loyal people on a Tuesday; footfall by hour; and conversion by staff member, so the person on the front desk who is actually closing enquiries is visible without anyone having to make the case.
03 / And then you have staff
The month-end that nobody sells software for
A studio crosses a line somewhere around the fifth teacher. Before it, paying people is a WhatsApp message and a bank transfer. After it, it is a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every month, and the mistakes are in the boring places: the teacher who was on approved leave and got docked anyway, the one who covered two Saturdays, the one whose salary changed mid-month.
Ultimate HRMS is the second product, and it is the answer to that month rather than to a feature list. It reads the attendance the studio is already collecting — the same check-ins, deduplicated so a teacher who is also a member counts once — and turns it into payable days: working days, minus absences, minus unpaid leave, with approved paid leave not docked. Loss of pay is its own line and it is charged only against the fixed part of the salary.
Leave is an append-only ledger. Nobody edits a balance; every accrual, carry-forward, day taken, reversal and year-end lapse is a row, and the balance is recomputed from the rows. Leave is costed in working days, so a holiday inside somebody’s week off does not quietly cost them a day. A mid-month joiner accrues a pro-rated share.
Then a run is submitted, approved, locked and marked paid, in that order, and locking is the irreversible one.
It refuses to approve a bad run
About a dozen blockers stop an approval outright: no salary structure in force, attendance that is incomplete or contradicts itself, a negative net, a missing bank account, an attendance correction still pending, a leave request still pending, two current structures for one person. Overriding one takes a written reason, and the reason is stored with your name and a frozen list of exactly what you overrode.
That is the feature to judge the module by. Everything else calculates; this one declines to.
04 / Limits
Four things to weigh before you move
05 / Two products
Ultimate CRM, and Ultimate HRMS when you are ready
The first has been live since December 2023 and carries 305 centres, 420,624 member records and 12,370,692 check-ins to date. The second is a year younger and says so.
Bring your timetable. Thirty to forty minutes, real software, and a straight yes or no to whatever you think will break it. Or write to crm.sales@proultimate.com.