"How many members do you have?" is the most-asked question in boutique fitness and one of the least answerable, because the word does at least five jobs at once. Until a studio writes down which jobs count, no two of its reports will agree — and the owner ends up carrying the real definition around in their head, re-deriving it every time somebody asks.
Here are the five decisions, with a recommended rule for each. The recommendations matter less than the writing-down: there is no universally correct answer, only a consistent one.
Five decisions on one page, written once, is the cheapest reporting improvement available to a studio — and the one almost nobody makes, because it feels like admin rather than strategy.
1 · Comped memberships
Recommended: count in membership, exclude from revenue. A comped member is a real relationship taking a real spot — your instructor's partner, a long-standing referrer, a local business trade. They belong in attendance and class-fill numbers because they consume capacity.
They do not belong in revenue numbers. The failure mode is specific and common: a studio's member count includes twenty comps, so its average revenue per member reads lower than reality and appears to decline as the comp list grows. Any per-member money metric — ARPM, revenue per member, MRR per head — should run on paying members only.
2 · Staff and instructor accounts
Recommended: exclude from everything except capacity. Instructors taking classes, front-desk staff with house accounts, the owner's own profile. These inflate membership, attendance, and retention all at once, and because they never churn they make your retention look better every year they exist.
They still occupy a spot in a full class, so leave them in raw attendance if you use it for scheduling — but flag them as staff so no business metric counts them.
3 · Paid-in-full memberships
Recommended: a member every month of the term; revenue recognized across it, never MRR in the month collected. Someone who paid for a year up front is unambiguously a member for that year. The trap is on the money side: booking the entire amount as one month's recurring revenue creates a spike, and then every subsequent month reads as a fall.
This one matters more than it looks because paid-in-full members are often your best members — high commitment, high attendance, high referral — and studios that mishandle the accounting quietly conclude their promotions "caused a slump" that was actually just the timing of the cash.
4 · Class packs and drop-ins
Recommended: customers, not members. A ten-class pack is a purchase, not a commitment. Counting pack holders as members overstates your base and, worse, corrupts your churn number — a pack holder doesn't cancel, they simply stop rebuying, which never appears as churn while silently reducing revenue.
Track them as customers, and track pack-to-membership conversion as a separate funnel. A studio with a large, stable pack population and a low conversion to membership has a business worth understanding, and it is invisible if packs are folded into the member count.
5 · Freezes and suspensions
Recommended: a defined threshold — 60 or 90 days — after which a freeze counts as churn. This is the single most common cause of a membership number that drifts. A frozen member is not paying, so they are not revenue; they have not canceled, so they are not churn; and without a rule they sit in limbo indefinitely, inflating the base for months.
Pick the threshold and hold it. A studio that says "over 60 days is churn" has a churn number that reflects reality, and a pleasant surprise when a long freeze does come back.
There is no correct definition. There is only the one you wrote down, applied the same way in January and in June.
How do you actually write the rule sheet?
One page, five lines, in the order above. Then two more decisions that travel with them:
- The lead conversion window. How long does a lead have to become a member before it stops counting as a conversion? Thirty days reads fast and understates; ninety is slower and truer for boutique buying decisions.
- Location ownership. Which site owns a member who books across two? Usually their home location — but write it down, because the alternative is location numbers that never sum to the company total.
Then the harder half: make every report obey the sheet. That's where most studios stall, because the definitions live in one place and the reports are generated somewhere else entirely — which is the whole reason studio numbers don't match in the first place.
The version that doesn't rot
A rule sheet in a document decays the moment someone builds a report without reading it. The durable version puts the definitions where the numbers are computed, so obeying them isn't a discipline anybody has to remember.
That's how Xyzios is built: you set these rules once — paid-in-full, packs, freezes, comps, lead window — and every board follows them, at every location, in every month. Not our definitions of your business. Yours. The vocabulary itself is collected on the definitions page; the switches you set live under Your definitions in the product.