Stop Wasting Time: Bitlancer and NetGym Help Mariana Tek Users Get More Done
In Partnership with NetGym
As a boutique fitness business owner, you got Mariana Tek to help automate your operations and save time and money. But most studios still have manual tasks they do every day—like communicating with instructors about subbing or calculating & adjusting payroll.
What if you could automate instructor schedule and payroll tasks alongside Mariana Tek to make the whole end-to-end instructor process much less of a manual hassle? At many studios, that would be a dream come true.
Owners of three growing fitness studios around the US — The Handle Bar Studio, Cut + Flow and Studio Three — recently shared their experiences with automating instructor-related tasks using synergistic tools from Bitlancer and NetGym alongside Mariana Tek. All three reported significant benefits, like saving hours of precious time, eliminating payroll errors, and making life better for members, instructors, staff and themselves.
Saying goodbye to DIY
Manual approaches to scheduling and payroll often require managing complex spreadsheets, running down instructors and reconciling everyone’s schedules. Besides costing studio managers hours of time weekly, these efforts run the risk of introducing schedule and payroll errors that cause confusion and take additional time to resolve.
The more successful a fitness business becomes, the more DIY scheduling and payroll holds everything back. Laura Cieplik, COO at Studio Three, a premier wellness community with three state-of-the-art studios in Chicago, Miami, and Austin, relates: “By our third location, managing subs manually was unmanageable. We relied on spreadsheets and texts, and it just wasn’t sustainable as we grew.”
Jaime Reichlen, owner of The Handle Bar Studios, a Boston-based fitness chain with seven locations, hit that same wall: “Our manual subbing process was time-consuming and didn’t empower us to schedule subs far in advance. Managing payroll by hand wasn’t too complex at first, but as we grew it became a huge time sink.”
For a modest investment in Bitlancer and NetGym software, these three studios have significantly improved efficiency, increased the accuracy of their critical business data, and “bought back” hours of time they had been squandering on unpopular manual tasks.
Smooth transitions and rapid time-to-benefit
Even positive operational changes can be a challenge. Worries about hidden costs, hard-to-use software, and loss of control over business processes are common. But user-friendly software plus hands-on service and support made for smooth transitions and near instant rewards for Studio Three, Cut + Flow and The Handle Bar.
Mackenzie Banta, founder and CEO at Cut + Flow, states “We were using Slack for sub requests and had someone monitoring it around the clock. It was really expensive and not sustainable. Now Cut + Flow has a responsive, automated sub request process that lets instructors schedule subs well in advance.”
Likewise, Bitlancer helped Cut + Flow simplify their complex Mariana Tek payroll calculations, including bonuses for class attendance.
Regarding her transition to Bitlancer for Mariana Tek payroll automation, Jaime states: “It took about 15 minutes to learn. We’ve saved so much time—especially with the Gusto integration—and no manual mistakes are occurring.”
The biggest wins: Saving time and reducing errors
All three studio owners agree that the greatest and most immediate benefit of automation with Bitlancer and NetGym has been time saved. Automating the challenges of two of the largest time-consuming tasks, payroll and sub management, saves each of them hours every week.
“We used to spend so much time on payroll and subbing,” Jaime recalls. “Now the workload is drastically reduced, allowing us to focus on areas of the business that we can’t automate.”
Laura agrees: “Instructors love the automated reminders from NetGym. It gives them peace of mind knowing sub requests are handled, and it’s been a huge time saver.” Bitlancer’s ability to handle commission-based pay and bonuses also reduced manual effort across Studio Three’s multiple locations.
As for reducing errors, Cut + Flow immediately reduced payroll mistakes when they started using Bitlancer. Mackenzie explains, “We used to have frequent errors when managing payroll manually, especially with bonuses. Bitlancer took care of that and made the whole process smoother.”
Advice to peers
What advice do Jaime, Mackenzie and Laura have for fellow studio owners who are wrestling with manual subbing and payroll processes?
“Time is money!” Jaime emphasizes. “If you want to focus on the business, yourself, or your family, you need to consider technology to automate these repetitive tasks.”
Jaime also makes a strong point about the long-term business benefits of automation: “If you’re still doing things manually, you’re spending time on tasks that can be automated. You could be using that time to focus on growing your business.”
Mackenzie amplifies this message: “Even if you feel like you have your sub process handled and your payroll dialed, Bitlancer and NetGym enhance that process even further and will help you see the blind spots in your current process in terms of doing it on your own. They’re inexpensive given what they do for your operations and how much time they give you back.”
For example, automating your subbing efforts eliminates operational headaches like missed classes, which directly impact revenue and the member experience. Laura puts it perfectly: “It only takes one class with a no-show instructor to understand the cost of not having a reliable system in place. Automation prevents that from happening.”
Bitlancer and NetGym combine forces to help studios pay their instructors and find subs for classes much faster and easier, while simplifying studio operations and increasing overall return on technology investments. Either solution alone can be a big win, but using them together compounds the benefits by comprehensively automating the whole scheduling and payroll equation.
At Bitlancer, we like to think of it as “exponential happiness” for our mutual customers!
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