Dance school billing software charges term or season tuition rather than monthly membership, bills a family once for several children with sibling discounts applied, handles one-off costume and recital fees on their own schedule, and recovers failed payments automatically — four things gym billing engines are not built to do.
If you're running a dance studio on software designed for gyms, you already know where it breaks. It wants a monthly membership with no end date, and your season ends in June.
A gym membership is open-ended and recurring. Dance tuition is a fixed commitment across a defined season, usually paid in instalments.
That difference matters mechanically:
If you're currently expressing a season as a rolling monthly subscription and manually cancelling everyone in June, that's the mismatch.
Dance studios enrol families. Frequently three children, three schedules, three class levels, one payer.
What you need: one account, one invoice, one payment method, separate enrolment and attendance records per child, and sibling discounts applied automatically rather than remembered.
The manual version — three separate accounts, a discount applied by hand each month, three charges hitting one card — works until you have sixty families. Then it becomes a part-time job, and the errors it produces are the kind parents notice and mention.
Ask specifically whether the discount can be a percentage or a fixed amount, whether it applies to the second child or the second-and-subsequent, and whether it survives a mid-season change when one sibling drops a class.
This is the requirement no fitness software has, because gyms don't have a recital.
Costume fees land at a specific point in the year, are usually non-refundable after an order date, and often differ per class. Recital fees, competition entry fees and tickets all follow the same pattern: one-off, calendared, deadline-driven.
What good handling looks like: charge them as scheduled one-off items against the family account rather than a separate transaction chased by email, tie the deadline to the charge so the non-refundable date is documented, and let a family see their whole year in one place.
The alternative is the spreadsheet-and-reminder-emails approach that most studios run in February and nobody enjoys.
Failed payments matter more here than in almost any other vertical, because one card failing can mean three children stop dancing.
Most of that churn isn't a decision. It's an expired card in March that nobody caught, followed by an awkward conversation nobody wanted to have, followed by a family that quietly doesn't re-enrol in September. You didn't lose them on price or quality. You lost them on card expiry.
The mechanics that prevent it: automatic retries on a sensible schedule rather than one attempt, card-updater support so a reissued card keeps working, and a dunning sequence that emails the parent before it ever reaches you. Stripe's revenue recovery documentation covers why retry timing and network updaters recover a material share of failed charges — it's the clearest public write-up of the mechanism, and worth knowing before you evaluate any billing system.
We've also written the arithmetic out in the hidden math of failed payments.
If you came here looking for "accounting software for dance studios," the honest answer is that you probably want two different things and it's worth separating them.
Billing is charging families and collecting money. That's what this page is about.
Accounting is bookkeeping, tax filing, and formal financial statements. Mako gives you real-time profit and loss, cash flow, and revenue by class without exporting to QuickBooks — which for many studio owners removes the reason they were opening QuickBooks in the first place. It also syncs to QuickBooks Online on the Team plan if your accountant wants it there.
What it doesn't do is file your taxes. If you have an accountant, they stay. What changes is that you stop waiting until quarter-end to find out how the season went.
Starter is $39/month for up to 100 students; Team is $149/month for up to 500, with financial analytics and QuickBooks sync. No contract on either. Pricing is published.
For a 250-student studio that's $149 a month to stop running tuition, siblings, costumes and recital fees out of a spreadsheet.
