Industries / Fitness and wellness
A studio or clinic runs on a booking platform, a payment processor, a charting system and a spreadsheet, and none of them agree on the same person. We build the layer that reads all four, answers the phone and the website, and puts the numbers in one place with the source named. A person still approves anything that touches money, a contract or a health record.
How it actually runs
No software can be scoped from a category name. These are the specifics of fitness and wellness that decide what is worth building and what is not.
One person checks in the 6pm class, sells a drop in, takes a package payment and answers the line. At peak the phone loses. Calls go to voicemail, and a caller asking whether you offer direct billing books somewhere else instead. Nobody counts the missed calls, so the busiest hour of the week is the hour the business is least reachable.
A clinic with a gym floor, or a studio with treatment rooms, is two operations under one roof. The fitness side lives in a class and membership platform. The clinical side lives in a charting system with its own regulator and its own retention rules. Reception works both screens all day, and the same client exists twice with two versions of their phone number.
The card runs on the first of the month whether or not the member has been in since March. Attendance sits in the door system, payments sit in the processor, and no report joins them. The owner finds out someone has gone when the cancellation email arrives, which is weeks after the last visit and long after anything could have been said.
Class times get inherited. The 9:30am was busy in 2021, so it still runs. The instructor is paid the same whether eleven people show up or three. Nobody has a clean number for revenue per class hour against the cost of running it, so a schedule change gets argued on feel and on which instructor will be upset.
Direct billing is why a lot of clients pick a clinic, and it is also where the money slows down. A claim is submitted, one insurer pays part of it, another rejects it for a missing policy number, and the remittance lands weeks later in a bank feed nobody matches back. Short paid claims are usually found by accident, if at all.
Where it leaks
The free audit prices these in your own numbers before anything is scoped. You keep the map whether or not you hire us.
| The leak | How it is measured today | What closes it |
|---|---|---|
| Cards decline and nobody chases them. | Noticed at month end, or when the member mentions it. | A daily decline list with a drafted message and one person approving each one. |
| Classes run half empty at full cost. | The instructor's headcount, remembered. | Attendance per class hour with the instructor cost printed beside it. |
| Insurance claims rejected or short paid. | Found weeks later in the bank reconciliation, if at all. | A nightly match of claim, invoice and remittance, with the exceptions flagged. |
| Calls go to voicemail at peak hours. | Not measured. The phone log at best. | A voice agent answering every call and logging what was asked. |
What we build
Each one states what it reads, what it does, and what a person still approves. Scope is agreed after the audit, one build at a time, against a baseline you sign.
It answers every call, including the ones at 6pm while the desk is checking in a class. It reads the live schedule and the client record, so it can give class times, opening hours, pricing and whether you direct bill, and it books or moves an appointment. Anything clinical, angry or contractual transfers to a person with a written summary attached.
Measured by: Calls answered on the first ring, and the share resolved without a person.
It reads your policies, the schedule, the price list and the insurers you bill, then answers the twenty questions that arrive every week: parking, what to bring, the cancellation window, whether a first visit needs a referral, what a package costs. It names the page it answered from. Health questions and complaints go to staff instead of being guessed at.
Measured by: Emails and messages the front desk still has to answer each week.
The client fills one form before arriving. The system reads it, matches it to an existing record where there is one, scores that match, and drafts the entry: contact details, health history, insurer and policy number, signed waiver. Weak matches are held back rather than merged. Reception approves before anything is written into the platform of record.
Measured by: Minutes of desk time per new client, and the share who arrive with intake complete.
It reads the billing platform, the door scans and the class bookings, then lines them up per member. Three lists come out each morning: cards that failed, members on a paid contract who have not attended in thirty days, and people training on a lapsed one. Each message is drafted and the owner approves it before it sends.
Measured by: Dollars of failed billing recovered each month.
Every claim submitted is matched against the invoice raised and the remittance received. Short payments, rejections and claims with no answer after a set number of days land on one list with the reason beside them. Nothing is resubmitted automatically. The billing clerk reads the list and decides what goes back to which insurer.
Measured by: Dollars outstanding past thirty days, and claims written off per quarter.
Segments are built from what you already hold: first month members who came once, packages expiring with sessions unused, clients who stopped after an injury, people who only ever book the 6am. The system drafts the email or the text for each segment against the consent on file, and the owner reads and approves every send.
Measured by: Ninety day retention of new members, and reactivations per month.
The numbers
None of these are our results. They are the published state of fitness and wellness, linked so you can check them, with the caveat attached where the number is a survey, a forecast or a vendor's own figure.
Operating revenue for Canada's fitness and recreational sports centres reached $5.8 billion in 2024, up 14.9 percent on the year, with an operating profit margin of 8.3 percent.
Statistics Canada, 2025Survey data for the 2024 reference year, released December 2025. It covers fitness and recreational sports centres, not allied health clinics, so the wellness half of the sector sits outside this figure.
The average Canadian small business spends 735 hours a year on regulatory compliance, 256 of those on red tape owners consider avoidable.
Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 2025A CFIB member survey across all sectors, not fitness and wellness specifically, and the hours are self-reported by owners.
46 percent of Canadian adults met the physical activity guideline of 150 minutes a week between 2022 and 2024.
Statistics Canada, 2025Measured by accelerometer on a national sample. It describes the whole adult population rather than paying members, so read it as the size of the market, not demand for any one facility.
Where the data comes from
We read them, we do not replace them. Each one below says what we connect to, how, and the line the build does not cross.
Usually: Mindbody, WellnessLiving, Glofox, Xplor Mariana Tek, ABC Ignite, Perfect Gym, PushPress, Zen Planner
What it holds. Memberships and contract terms, class schedules and capacity, bookings and waitlists, signed waivers, door access records, recurring billing and package balances.
How we connect. Read-only through the platform API where one exists, otherwise a nightly scheduled export into a replica hosted in Canada. Webhooks for bookings and cancellations where the platform sends them.
Where it stops. We never cancel, freeze or alter a membership contract from outside. Contract changes are drafted for the desk and entered by a person in the platform itself.
Usually: Jane App, Juvonno, Noterro, ClinicSense, Practice Better, Cliniko, with TELUS Health eClaims for direct billing to insurers such as Sun Life, Manulife, Canada Life and Pacific Blue Cross
What it holds. Patient demographics, clinical charts and treatment notes, consent records, appointment history, invoices, claim submissions and remittances.
How we connect. Read-only, and only the fields the work needs: appointment times, invoice totals, claim status. Access is scoped per practitioner and every read is logged.
Where it stops. Charts are never written, summarised or copied by software. No claim is submitted, resubmitted or adjusted without the practitioner or the billing clerk approving it on screen.
Usually: Square, Lightspeed, Stripe, Moneris, QuickBooks Online, Xero, with payroll in Payworks or Wagepoint
What it holds. Drop in sales, retail and supplement stock, card transactions and declines, deposits, unused balances on class packs, instructor and practitioner pay.
How we connect. API or scheduled export for transaction and deposit records. Card numbers never enter our systems: tokens and the last four digits only, so cardholder data stays inside the processor.
Where it stops. We do not take payments, refund a card or move money. The system flags what needs chasing and a person acts inside the payment platform.
Built around your rules
Constraints come first, because they decide the architecture. Bring us your hosting, residency and regulatory rules at the start and we design to them rather than around them.
| Regime | What it demands here | How the build complies |
|---|---|---|
| PIPEDA, with BC PIPA, Alberta PIPA and Quebec Law 25 where they apply | Consent to collect personal information, use limited to the stated purpose, safeguards proportionate to how sensitive the information is, and access on request. Quebec adds a named privacy officer, breach reporting, and disclosure when a decision about a person is made by automated means. | Data stays in Canada. Each field is read for one named purpose and nothing else. Access is scoped per role, every read and write is logged, and health information is kept separate from anything used for marketing. |
| CASL | Express or implied consent before any commercial electronic message, clear identification of the sender, and an unsubscribe mechanism that works and is honoured within ten business days. | Consent and where it came from sit on the record, and a send cannot be built against a segment without it. Unsubscribes write back to every connected system the same day, so a member removed in one tool is removed everywhere. |
| Fitness and personal services contract rules: the Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act in BC, personal development services under Ontario's Consumer Protection Act | Limits on contract length, a ten day cancellation window after the customer receives the contract, prescribed contract contents, prominent notice of cancellation rights, and set refund rules when a customer cancels on a change of circumstances. | The system never cancels, renews or alters a contract itself. It flags the dates that matter, drafts the notice, and a person completes the change in the platform of record so the paperwork matches the statute. |
| Regulatory colleges and health information law: PHIPA in Ontario, the Health Information Act in Alberta, plus each college's record rules | Registered practitioners keep records to their college's standard. Ontario massage therapy records, for example, are kept for ten years after the last visit, or ten years after a client who was a minor turns eighteen. | Charts stay inside the practice management system and are never read, copied or written by our software. We take appointment and billing fields only, and retention stays under the clinic's own policy and the college rule. |
Anything that spends money, sends something irreversible, or carries a professional obligation arrives as a draft with a named reviewer. The system prepares the work. A person decides whether it ships.
You own the code and the data at the end of the engagement.
Questions
No. Those hold your bookings, contracts and charts, and moving them is a bad trade for a small gain. We read them and build on top: the phone, the website, the reconciliation, the reporting. If a platform has no usable API we take a scheduled export instead. Your staff keep the system they already know how to work.
No, and that is deliberate. Charts belong to the practitioner and their college. We read appointment times, invoice totals and claim status, which is enough to reconcile the money and fill the schedule. Clinical note text is not read, copied or summarised, and nothing is written back into a chart by software at any point.
It is built to do the opposite. It answers on the first ring instead of sending someone to voicemail at 6pm, handles hours, class times, pricing and rebooking, then hands anything real to a person with a written summary so the caller never repeats themselves. You listen to every call it takes in the first weeks and correct it.
That depends on arithmetic, which is what the free audit produces. We map where the desk time goes, where money leaks, and what each fix is worth, then write the number down before anything is built. You keep that map whether or not you hire us. If we do build, the baseline is agreed in writing and you own the code.
What happens next
Three to five days. We map where the hours and the money go in your fitness and wellness operation and hand you a ranked plan with the payback attached.
We map where time and money leak, and show the arithmetic before you commit to anything. You keep the map whether or not you hire us. If we do build, we agree the baseline in writing first, the clock starts at deployment rather than signature, and you own the code.
