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).
Maybe it will be worth considering starting with spreadsheets? They are super super flexible and what have been done for years. You would have time to see what scope and needs you have for more dedicated and automated system down the road. Switching ERP software is very painful and time consuming, while importing spreadsheet to ERP is basic transition.
I’m not opposed to tried and true simple solutions. I think my wife would find it much easier with an automated system however. I really need a way for people to pay for their memberships and keep track of that and I have no background with this stuff. I think having a system that’s already designed for this would make opening the gym less daunting. I appreciate the thought
I have been using Odoo for years to generate invoices for my little IT business. I don’t use any features that cost money. I am working a web store for my wife and have been playing with erpnext. It is written in Python / Javascript and can be installed on your own servers. I has a lot of features that cost in Odoo but are free and looks like it is easer to modify.
www.turnkeylinux.org check them out for a lot of your business, self-hosted needs. Odoo, like others have said, is on there. I once used moodle for new employee onboarding and training.
It was suggested to peruse a big list of projects that might work for you. They pre package a huge amount of open source projects to run on say AWS in their own linux distro. If you find a project that looks interesting you can go to that projects website and look at docs and stuff. Then run that project how you want.
I’ve been using Ubiquiti/Unifi for my brewery setup (cameras, several private networks, phone tree stuff). It comes with some pretty solid management software accessible through the local network, but under the hood, everything’s just running Alpine. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you keep the management software installed (firmware updates wipe out the crontab, for example), but you can customize it pretty aggressively if you know your way around a terminal.
Inventory is through our POS/processor and production records are through Beer30 (though I have plans to write my own and open source it when I have time; we just opened and we’re all still running pretty hard doing new-open stuff). We’re also technically a nano-brewery, so anything we’re doing is a little bespoke (i.e., I think it’s a very situational setup) right now.
The biggest thing from a brewery-specific side that we’re doing is controlling the brewhouse. We’re running an all-electric system, and all the heating and cellar controls expose UIs over the LAN. In addition to being generally nifty, we’re using Unifi to separate brewery-specific stuff onto its own network and the built-in VPN hosting (I opted for the OpenVPN option) to expose that network security. This allows our brewer to do stuff like check the temperature from home or set the boil kettle to start running before he leaves the house. (The useful thing about the UDM (primary server) running Alpine is that I have a task that essentially functions as dynamic DNS and updates an A record with our domain provider so he can always log in at a known hostname).
It also integrates with cameras, phone, and menu boards, which are all useful for the FoH side of things.
All-in-all, we’re not doing that much with it yet, but it’s pretty nice to use so far, and being a software engineer, I’m excited for the possibilities of useful stuff I can host on it.
I used to love Ubiquiti but they’re turning into cunts these days. I also heard there’s been a lot of people leave and low morale due to the enshitification of the products.
I’ve since put OpenWRT onto my ERX and ER4. Will likely put it on the UAP-LC next to get rid of it entirely.
That honestly sounds like the way to go, and I’ll probably look into it when I have more time. I’m more a software person than a sysadmin and I’m not wildly confident that I won’t accidentally close us down for a few days without a lot of prep. 😆
For camera software, zoneminder is a classic, and frigate is probably the new kid in town. Web hosting will depend on your web developers but docker will have you covered for almost anything. Probably just steer clear of asp.net dev shops.
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
You can nope alllllllllll the way out of that. Payment information means credit cards means PCI compliance. That’s something you’ll definitely want to outsource.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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