Karate school software tracks belt rank and time-in-grade, ties attendance to testing eligibility, bills families rather than individuals, and collects tuition automatically — four things gym software doesn't do, which is why most dojos end up running their school out of a binder and a third-party billing contract.
If you run a karate, taekwondo, BJJ or mixed martial arts school, you have probably been sold gym software and discovered within a month that it has no concept of a belt.
This is the requirement that separates martial arts software from everything else, and it's the one most platforms simply don't have.
A functioning system needs to hold:
The payoff is not administrative tidiness. It's that a student who is three classes short of eligibility can be told that in week two, when they can still do something about it, instead of in week eight when they're disappointed.
It also makes the parent conversation easy. "He's eleven classes into a fifteen-class requirement" is a very different conversation from "he's not quite ready."
Attendance in a gym is a vanity metric. In a dojo it's a prerequisite.
That means check-in needs to be fast — a tablet at the door, students checking themselves in — and it needs to write to the same record that governs testing. If attendance lives in one system and rank lives in a spreadsheet, you have not solved the problem, you have added a reconciliation step.
Look for attendance that's queryable in both directions: who is eligible to test, and who has quietly stopped coming. The second one is your retention system.
Martial arts schools enrol families. Gym software bills individuals.
The practical requirements: multiple students under one paying account, one invoice covering all of them, sibling discounts applied automatically, and separate schedules and rank records per student even though the money is pooled.
Without this you end up creating three accounts, remembering to discount two of them by hand, and sending a parent three separate charges every month. Every one of those is a small friction, and small frictions on a family plan are how families leave.
This is the fork in the road, and the martial arts industry is unusual in taking it.
For decades, a large share of schools have outsourced tuition collection to specialist billing companies. They handle the direct debits, chase failed payments, and in many cases hold the student agreements. In exchange they typically take a percentage of collections, and the school signs a multi-year contract.
There are real reasons this model took hold. Chasing a parent for a failed payment is unpleasant, and instructors mostly didn't want to do it. Outsourcing the awkward conversation had genuine value.
But run the arithmetic on your own school. If you have 120 students at an average of $130 a month, that's $15,600 in monthly collections. A billing company taking even a modest percentage of that is a meaningful five-figure annual cost — and you're paying it in perpetuity for a function that software now automates.
The other cost is control. Ask, specifically: who owns the student agreements? Who owns the payment relationship? If you leave, do the direct debits transfer, or do you have to re-enrol every family? That last question has ended more than one school's attempt to switch.
If you're evaluating a contract like this, the FTC's guidance on negative option and auto-renewal terms is a reasonable primer on what to look for in cancellation and renewal language before signing anything multi-year.
Mako's position is straightforward: recurring billing, automatic retries on failed payments, and dunning sequences that chase the payment without you making the call — for a flat monthly fee, no percentage of collections, and no contract. You keep the payment relationship and the student agreements.
That is not a reason to fire your billing company tomorrow. It is a reason to know what you're paying them and what you'd be giving up.
Failed payments hit harder here than anywhere else, because one failed card can mean three children stop attending.
The mechanics that matter: automatic retry on a schedule rather than a single attempt, card-updater support so an expired card doesn't become a lost family, and a dunning sequence that emails the parent before it escalates to you. We've written about the arithmetic of failed payments elsewhere — the short version is that most involuntary churn isn't a decision anyone made, it's a card that expired in March.
Mako Starter is $39/month for up to 100 students, Team is $149/month for up to 500, both with no contract. Full pricing is published.
For a 120-student school, that's $149 a month against a percentage-of-collections model on $15,600 a month. Do that comparison with your own numbers before you renew anything.
