Choosing gym management software in Sri Lanka

Before you look at features, write down five things. Every vendor will answer them differently, and they decide which differences matter to you.

• How members pay — cash or card at the desk, bank transfer, or online.
• Which plans you sell — day passes, weekly, monthly, three-month, six-month or annual memberships.
• How many active members you have, and how many you expect in a year.
• Who works the desk — just you, or several staff who each need their own login.
• Whether the door should follow payments, with a fingerprint reader that lets members in only while they are paid up.

Ask for a monthly price in rupees, what it covers, and what happens when you outgrow it. A price per member grows with every sign-up; a price per tier changes only when you cross a limit.

For comparison, Metric is billed monthly: Lite LKR 2,990, Pro LKR 4,990 and Enterprise LKR 6,990 a month. Lite covers up to 100 active members; expired and cancelled members do not count towards the limit. SMS reminders, receipts and announcements are included in every plan. Lite and Pro can be tried free for 30 days without payment details. The details are on the pricing page.

Most Sri Lankan gyms are paid at the desk, so the question that matters is how quickly a desk payment is recorded and what the member gets back. If a vendor offers online payments, ask which payment provider takes them and who pays its fees.

Members do not pay online in Metric. They pay at your desk, you record the payment, and Metric texts them a receipt with their next due date. A member who pays before their due date keeps it, so paying early never costs them days. Your own Metric subscription is paid by card through PayHere, and Metric never sees the card number.

Reminders are where software earns its price, so ask four questions: which number or name the texts come from, whether each text names your gym, when they are sent, and whether they cost extra.

In Metric, texts come from one sender name shared by every gym on the platform, so every message names your gym in its text. The reminder run starts at 9:00 every morning, Sri Lanka time, and the schedule follows the plan length: a week ahead for long plans, three days ahead for monthly ones, and on the due date. Daily and weekly members get no reminders. Messages are in English. The full schedule is on the SMS reminders page.

Sri Lanka’s Personal Data Protection Act, No. 9 of 2022, gives your members rights over the data kept about them: to see it (Section 13), to withdraw their consent or object (Section 14), to have it corrected (Section 15), and to have it erased in the cases the Act sets out (Section 16). A member can complain to the Data Protection Authority of Sri Lanka. Whatever system you choose, you should be able to find, correct and remove one member’s records when asked.

• Collect only what you need. Metric does not ask for National Identity Card numbers or home addresses and discourages collecting them: they serve no purpose in running a membership, and collecting them may go against the Act’s data-minimisation requirements.
• Fingerprints need explicit consent. Biometric data is special-category data under the Act. In Metric, a member’s consent is recorded before a fingerprint is enrolled, and giving a fingerprint is never a condition of membership. The fingerprint template is created on the reader and held by the hardware provider; Metric never receives it. Door scans are deleted after 365 days.
• Ask where the data is kept. Each gym’s data in Metric is walled off in the database, so one gym can never read another’s members. Some of Metric’s service providers process data outside Sri Lanka, under contractual safeguards consistent with Section 26 of the Act.

Metric’s privacy policy sets out how it handles gym and member data. This guide is a checklist, not legal advice.

If members walk in past an empty desk, a fingerprint reader can do the checking. Ask two questions of any system that offers it: does the door update itself when a member pays or lapses, and does it still work when the internet is down?

On the Enterprise plan, Metric connects to ZKTeco fingerprint readers from our hardware partner. Each payment sends the member’s paid-through date to the reader, which refuses entry after it using its own clock, so the door keeps following payments offline. See access control.

• What does it cost a month in rupees for my number of members?
• Are SMS reminders and receipts included, or charged per text?
• Does every text name my gym?
• How is a desk payment recorded, and what does the member get?
• What happens to a member’s due date if they pay early or late?
• Can I find, correct and delete one member’s data when they ask?
• Where is the data stored, and who else processes it?
• Is a fingerprint ever required, and how is consent recorded?
• Can I try it with my own members before I pay?

• It does not send WhatsApp messages — reminders are SMS.
• There is no member app and no online payment for members.
• There is no class booking and no check-in.
• The app is in English only.
• There is one login per gym, with no separate staff accounts.

If you run the gym on a spreadsheet today, the honest comparison of Excel and WhatsApp with gym software helps decide whether to switch at all.