A Fitness Studio's Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Reports with Mindbody

You are in an elite group—a fitness studio owner utilizing the Mindbody software system. 

At the click of a button, you have access to a wealth of data and information that can significantly and positively impact your businesses’ success.  

The Mindbody app has capabilities that no other software can match. 

In this article we’ll help you understand how to get the most out of your Mindbody reports as well as provide actionable insights that can elevate your studio’s operations. All of this to drive better financial performance, to enhance client retention, and optimize staff productivity. 

Data takes the guesswork out of running your fitness business.

Let’s dive in to discover how you can turn data into actionable strategies for growth and efficiency. 

As a business owner, why do you want to get the most out of the reports?

Owning a fitness business is more than delivering top-notch workouts for your clients and fostering a positive environment. 

Your clients want to see results, and so do you. The difference is, you want financial results—to make a profit and grow the overall value of your business.

To get these results, you need to know what’s happening in your business. Mindbody tracks everything that happens in your business across several reports, so you can keep an eye on key areas of your business:

1. Money: The sales reports provide a clear view of your studio’s financial performance helping you track income, identify trends, and make informed decisions about pricing strategies. 

2. Client acquisition and retention reports: These reports help you to track customer engagement, identify patterns in member behavior, and assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.  

3. Staff performance and productivity: As a fitness business owner, it’s essential to have accurate data on staff performance, including class attendance and feedback to manage and motivate your team, to help identify top performers, address areas needing improvement, and to make data-driven decisions about staffing and training.  

4. Strategic planning: Data-driven decisions are the backbone of successful business strategies. Reports enable you to spot growth opportunities, assess the effectiveness of new programs, and plan for future expansions.

Which reports do you need and how often do you need them?

One of the key mistakes that many business owners make is that they try to monitor and analyze too much data in too many reports too often.

Less is more. Follow these 3 simple steps: 

1. Decide for yourself and your business what is the most important data you need on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. 
2. Make a commitment for a specific time each day, week and month to look at the data. Book this into your calendar. 
3. Set up the reports as favorites and add them to your dashboard home page. 

Let’s dive into which reports you need for tracking and making decisions in your fitness business.

Sales reports

Sales reports generate a list of every sale in your business for any period you select. These reports can be specific to sales by service, by category, by product, employee, or venue.

Daily tracking of your revenue is important to ensure you meet your pre-set daily revenue targets.  Your revenue targets are based on your Profit and Loss analysis and business budgeting to ensure that overall revenue will cover all fixed and variable costs and make a profit, ensuring financial viability of your business.

Sales by Service and Sales by Category reports

This report provides data that helps you see which services and categories generate the most revenue, and this data forms the basis for making decisions about which services to continue to offer or perhaps to reduce.

Case Study: Gerard runs a gym and has noticed a shift in demand for certain sessions. Using the data from the Sales by Category report to show revenue from the various sessions Gerard can then make informed decisions about which sessions perform best. 

Action step: Think about what ways you generate revenue in your business and decide which Mindbody Sales reports will be most useful to look at on a regular basis. If you are new to tracking, select two sales reports and add them to your dashboard home page. If your business is currently facing a specific revenue challenge, find the sales report to provide data about that aspect of your business.

Client acquisition and retention reports

One of the key features of Mindbody is how much valuable data is available to help you keep and retain your precious clients and members.

Every fitness business invests enormous effort to attract and acquire clients and Mindbody gives you all the help you need to keep them.

Retention report

This report shows clients who have had an initial visit during a specific period and then returned during a later period.

Case study: Jason knows they have 500 current clients. He’s keen to know how long it will take him to reach his target of 750 clients, i.e. grow by 250 clients. His fitness business attracts about 30 new clients every week, so it should take about 8-9 weeks. He uses the Retention report and discovers that while he is attracting 30 clients a week, they are also losing 12 clients a week.  At this rate, it will take Jason and the team a lot longer than 9 weeks to reach their target of 750 clients.

The Retention report gives them the data they need so they can focus efforts on retaining clients as well as attracting new ones since growth depends as much on retention as acquisition/ attraction.

No Return report

This report shows all the people who were previously clients but are no longer attending sessions or coming in for visits.

Case study: Blake’s gym runs a special offer for 3 weeks to attract new clients. Lots of people are attracted by the offer but most of them have disappeared. The No Return report shows all the people who signed up for the special offer and did not return. Blake and their team can then focus their efforts on outreach to this subset of prospects.

First Visit report

Where do your clients come from and how do they get started with you?  

This report gives a wealth of information about your new clients that takes away all the guesswork around how they found you. 

For example, you can use the filters to analyze: 

• How did they book?  
• How did they find out about you?  
• Which service options attract the most first visits?

Last Visit report

This report helps you track clients who haven’t been in for a while by identifying the date of their last visit and their pattern of attendance over a specified period. This information complements both the No Return report and the Retention report. 

Case study: The team at a busy Pilates and Barre studio are having their team meeting and someone says, “I haven’t seen Jean for a while” and then another team member says, “You know Daniel hasn’t been in for a while either.” Using the Last Visit report, they discovered several clients who have not been in for a while.

This data provides the opportunity for the team to follow up and invite them back into the studio, perhaps using an enticing return offer. The best part is, they don’t need to rely on their memories since the data is there.

These are just the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to retention and acquisition reports and for a fitness studio using Mindbody software, the depth and wealth of data is immense. 

Action step: In the Mindbody app, head to Insights > Reports > Clients > Visits & Retention and look at the available reports and thinking about your fitness business choose the ones which will help you the most right now in your business. 

Staff performance and productivity

Managing a team is made much easier with the reports in Mindbody.

Schedule at Glance report

This is one of the few places in the software where you can see all appointments and classes in one place, and you can filter by location, service category, teacher, or status.

Staff Performance report

This report has a variety of filters that allow you to track clients’ attendance for individual instructors—both the total attendance and unique client numbers. This report is particularly helpful to track and compare performance over time.

Appointment Metrics report

If productivity is important in regard to individual instructor retention, this report gives valuable data about hours booked and client retention.

Action step: In the Mindbody app, head to Insights > Reports > Staff to find the reports that will best help you understand team performance.

Client activity

There are two reports that provide a wealth of information around client behavior, giving you an opportunity to take actions to better their experience.

No Shows report

When a client books a service and doesn’t show up, this report will show you.

Case study: Andrea runs two busy Pilates studios with a waitlist for most of their sessions. A “no show” means another client misses out. The No Shows report demonstrated this was happening a lot more than they thought. Andrea decided to introduce a No-show fee and a 12-hour cancellation policy. Since then, no-shows have significantly decreased and clients from the waitlist are having the chance to join sessions in those available spots.

Big Spenders report

Who spends the most at your fitness business? Run the Big Spenders report for a specific period to find the top 50 or top 10 most loyal and repeat clients. You can do a lot with this information, for example, create a VIP list, offer them special referral bonuses, or simply express your gratitude for their continued support.

How to make the most of your Mindbody reports

When it comes to strategic planning, all the above-mentioned reports can feed into your ideas and plans to grow and develop your business. If you are like many fitness business owners, you may feel you just don’t have time to dig into all this data, but it may be the key to your business growth.

The most effective way to make more time to analyze the data in your reports is to: 

1. Set up your Dashboard so that you can see the most important data “at a glance” 
2. Have one of member your team, maybe your office manager, run the reports for you  
3. Make the most of the graphics features, i.e. turn the data into graphs to simplify the data with a visual demonstration of the information. 
4. Schedule uninterrupted time each week to review the reports and plan some action items. 

As the business owner it is your role to analyze the data and make decisions that will help grow your business. Your Mindbody software is your superpower in this regard. 

Take your fitness business to new heights

You are sitting on a goldmine with the insights to be gained from Mindbody reports. Use this data to identify trends, find ways to enhance member engagement, optimize your studio’s performance, and, ultimately, grow your business.

Embracing a data driven approach helps you make informed decisions to position your studio for sustained success. When you invest the time to understand these reports you will unlock your business’ full potential and provide you, your team and your clients with the best experience.