Evidence note: Label it as an internal case observation and publish the time-log method and category totals if retained. The CMS gives a case narrative but not raw logs, sampling method, category definitions, or independent corroboration. Source status: No primary source was found for the earlier universal claim as of 2026-09-01.
Here's the breakdown.
Billing follow-up: 2.1 hours/week
Manual review of the billing report (Mindbody CSV export, opened in Excel), identification of failed payments, individual emails drafted to members with outstanding balances, phone calls to members who hadn't responded to the initial email, logging of updates back in the spreadsheet. This happened twice a week and consumed just over an hour each time. The work wasn't complex — it was repetitive data review and manual outreach, all of which could have been automated.
Schedule management: 1.8 hours/week
Class schedule updates, instructor substitution logistics when a coach called out sick, manual re-notification of affected members (copied from Mindbody attendance list into a group text), rebooking requests for members who'd signed up for a class that was now cancelled. A single substitute teacher per week generated approximately 45 minutes of downstream admin. Two substitutions was most of the 1.8 hours.
New member onboarding: 1.6 hours/week
The studio was adding roughly 18–22 new members per month. Each new member got a manual welcome email (not templated — the owner wrote them individually, which she believed made them more personal), a waiver sent separately via a third-party form tool, an intro pack lookup to verify their balance, and an entry in a separate spreadsheet she maintained as a "new member tracker." Over a week, with 5 new members on average, this consumed just under 20 minutes per member.
Reporting: 1.4 hours/week
Sunday afternoon: Mindbody revenue export, pasted into a running Excel file with formulas that calculated monthly totals, YTD revenue, member count, and a rough churn estimate (manual — based on the owner counting cancellations in the CRM and subtracting from the previous count). This was the only way she could see a financial picture of the business. It had to be rebuilt every week from scratch.
Member inquiries and manual booking: 1.2 hours/week
Instagram DMs asking what classes were available, email replies to members asking to cancel or pause memberships, requests from members who'd forgotten their login, manual class bookings for members who "couldn't figure out the app." This was front-desk territory but the owner handled most of it because front desk coverage was inconsistent.
Retail and POS reconciliation: 0.9 hours/week
The studio sold a small retail line (water bottles, branded apparel, supplements from a local partner). The retail data lived in a separate system that didn't sync with Mindbody. Manual reconciliation once a week: comparing the POS report with the revenue total to make sure the numbers added up.
Staff communication and scheduling: 0.8 hours/week
Instructor schedule confirmation, payroll prep (hours logged manually by instructors in a shared Google Sheet, verified by the owner), sub request coordination when instructors needed coverage. Not technically "software admin" but driven in part by the absence of a staff scheduling layer in the gym management system.
Miscellaneous / administrative overhead: 1.5 hours/week
Everything else: digital waiver filing, checking whether intro pack limits had been reached, resolving billing discrepancies, responding to one-off questions from front desk staff who weren't sure how to handle something in the system.
Evidence note: $580 times 52 equals $30,160, which supports the rounded annual estimate. The implicit owner hourly rate, rounding, and opportunity-cost framing are unverified; this is not necessarily cash expense. Source status: No primary source was found for the earlier universal claim as of 2026-09-01.
The studio moved to Mako three months after we ran this audit. Six months after that, we re-ran the time log for one week. The results:
Billing follow-up: 0.2 hours/week — automated retry sequences, dunning SMS, and email handle the outreach. The owner's job is to review a dashboard once a week showing recovery status, not to manually work each case.
Schedule management: 0.9 hours/week — the core logistics of sub coverage still require human coordination. The downstream admin (re-notifying members of schedule changes) is now automated. Reduction: ~0.9 hours.
New member onboarding: 0.4 hours/week — digital waiver, welcome sequence, intro pack assignment, and CRM entry are all automated on signup. The owner still writes a personal note to roughly half of new members, but the infrastructure tasks are gone.
Reporting: 0.1 hours/week — dashboard is live. Revenue, member count, MRR trend, churn rate. Opens, looks, closes. The Sunday afternoon Excel session doesn't exist anymore.
Member inquiries: 0.6 hours/week — no system changes here; still manual. Modest improvement from a better member-facing app that handles more self-service bookings and account management.
Evidence note: Mako first-party docs cover SKU quantities, reorder points, stock movements, cost tracking, staff schedules, availability, and pay structures. The target POS synchronization, payroll-preparation reduction, and time savings are not documented or independently verified. Say Mako documents inventory and team-scheduling features and verify POS integration and savings for the account. Sources: Mako first-party: Mako Inventory and Equipment; Mako first-party: Mako Team Management.
Miscellaneous: 0.6 hours/week
Evidence note: Mako first-party pages document automatic reminders, recurring-billing failure flags, attendance and check-in workflows, live dashboards, and published plans; the checked pricing page does not show a $199 plan. The case reduction, recovered value, timing, and historical price are not independently verified. Describe the documented workflows and label the savings as an unverified case result measured with a before-and-after time log. Sources: Mako first-party: Mako Payments and Invoicing; Mako first-party: Mako Classes and Memberships; Mako first-party: Mako Analytics; Mako first-party: Mako Pricing.
Evidence note: Replace with the studio’s measured task categories and clearly labeled annualization. No task-time study supports universal automability, and 11.3 hours times 52 weeks is about 588 hours, not 550. Source status: No primary source was found for the earlier universal claim as of 2026-09-01.
The owner of this studio is now using those 7.9 recovered hours per week on things that actually require her: coaching, member relationships, strategic planning, and building the program that makes the studio worth being a member of. Those activities have no upper bound on value. The billing follow-up did.
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