ASF Payment Solutions vs. Exercise.com’s All-in-One Fitness Business Software

Manage and Grow Your Business Better with Exercise.com. Learn more below.

Review our head-to-head ASF Payment Solutions software comparison to see why Exercise.com has a leg up. Get a custom web and smartphone app designed for your brand with additional customization available throughout your custom-built software. Grow your business. Turn leads into clients. Increase revenue. All with Exercise.com’s All-in-One Business Management Software

For small businesses and large corporations in the fitness industry, forming the right systems and processes is crucial to success both day-to-day and long-term. The lynchpin in a gym’s systems that drastically affects operational efficiency is their management software. In most cases, it is the key to scheduling, payments, and membership management.

Gyms and independent fitness pros increasingly favor all-in-one software solutions; those which house the services mentioned above plus specialty fitness features like workout design, workout delivery, and nutrition planning. Doing so allows for an increased range of services to clients and much greater efficiency than dividing up these tasks between numerous platforms.

Nevertheless, there are still those companies which operate one-dimensionally, choosing to specialize in a particular facet of business operations. One such example is the subject of this review, ASF Payment Solutions. For busy businesses, one-dimensional software programs probably aren’t going to be as valuable as an all-in-one business management software like the software offered by Exercise.com.

If you don’t need convincing, book a demo with the Exercise.com team today.

Read on to find out why. 

ASF Payment Solutions Company Overview

ASF Payment Solutions is a company based in Colorado and was established in 1973. The company was founded by martial artist and entrepreneur Richard Reed who also co-founded the American Tae Kwon Do Association. Reed founded ASF when he was unable to find a company that fulfilled the billing and contract management needs of his martial arts schools and fitness facilities.

While ASF’s methods have adapted to exist in the digital world, their essential purpose has remained the same: providing payment processing and support for businesses in the fitness industry.

ASF Payment Solutions Features vs Exercise.com

The software created by ASF Payment Solutions is called My Club Business. Throughout this review, there will be references to ASF, the company, and My Club Business, the software.

The company describes their product as a software suite in which multiple components work in tandem but may also be subscribed to separately for businesses that don’t need the whole package. What this translates to is companies needing to secure features like full web and app customization elsewhere.

With Exercise.com, you don’t need to pay multiple companies so that your business is managed well. Our all-in-one fitness business management software has many features, including:

• Full customization for webpages and smartphone applications
• Endless email marketing integrations
• Automated payments
• Appointment scheduling
• Automated email, text, and app reminders
• Performance health assessments
• A full exercise video library
• Workout planning and delivery
• Nutrition tracking
• And more…

– Fitness Business Management

My Club Business offers a detailed scheduling system for managing a gym’s group classes and personal training sessions.

Exercise.com does as well.

– Calendar and Booking

With Exercise.com’s all-in-one software you can manage all appointment types from classes to in-person training to workouts your clients perform remotely. Easily set up recurring events and set your available times so that clients using your custom-branded app can book appointments conveniently without the old-fashioned phone tag process.

We bet you’d rather be spending your time working on growing your business. That’s why we’ve developed our All-in-One Fitness Business Management (FBM) software.

How many more clients could you onboard, engage, and retain if you had an easy to use software to schedule and book clients?

Plus what if that software was built into the same platform you use to build workouts, sell plans, and deliver assessments?

• No more learning a dozen different software to run your business.
• No more teaching a bunch of different systems to your staff.
• No more confusion and fractured experiences for your clients.

It’s the same unified experience for your staff and clients from web to apps.

FBM will empower you to track visits, book classes and sessions, engage your clients with recurring appointment reminders via email and text, and provide calendar integration with google and apple for easy management.

With FBM’s calendar, you can also sort by:

• Trainer
• Location
• Service
• Recurring
• Time
• Availability

– Accept Payments Securely & Easily

We know accepting payments securely and easily takes a lot of time, especially using one software for booking, another for workouts, and another for payments.

That’s why we came up with a Fitness Business Management (FBM) software where you can access all of your payment tools in the same custom-branded web and mobile apps, so that professionals like you could spend less time tracking down failed charges, taking payments, and managing payment details and have more time for growing your business.

FBM makes it easy to set up packages for your training where clients can pay a one-time or recurring price with cash, check, or credit card. Plus accept direct deposits and allow online purchasing of packages — all in one easy to use software.

And you’ll have sales and business reports for all your clients, classes, and workout packages to make managing your business easy.

– Increase Business Efficiency & Revenue

Never worry about sales, staff, clients, or data logged falling between the cracks with reporting at your fingertips in your custom web and mobile apps.

Managing a staff of any size is time-consuming but FBM saves you time with assignable staff roles, so you can put staff management on autopilot.

Plus all your reports can be run in a single software. No more safaris for which software has which reports. Exercise.com’s Fitness Business Management (FBM) software makes reports easy — sales, business, appointments, class, and payroll reports all in one place. Plus you can also sort reports by:

These reports empower you to have your finger on the pulse of your business and if you’re bringing on new trainers you’ll know how much to pay staff based on commissions.

For your business’ marketing, automate your efforts by connecting to MailChimp, ConstantContact, ConvertKit, Zapier, Google Analytics, & Facebook Pixel.

Are you catching the pattern?

• Implement systems that save you time
• Have all your management tools in one software
• Manage your business from anywhere

Now you might be able to do these things on your own, but that’s the hard way. Exercise.com makes it easy.

– Custom-Branded Web & Smartphone Apps

My Club Business offers gym owners the ability to perform certain limited customizations to the software in both the web app and mobile app. The account holder can upload their company logo to be shown in the header along with a primary and an alternate color that matches their branding.

Exercise.com, on the other hand, offers complete custom-branding which far exceeds simple color changes. We fully customize your web and smartphone app to meet your appearance and functionality needs. Your company’s app even displays with your own branding in the App and Google Play Stores, another customization feature that My Club Business does not provide.

Despite their attempt at modernizing with the member app, one can’t help but feel that ASF is well behind the times with their marketing and general presentation.

When it comes to ensuring client retention, it’s important to partner with a software service that understands the importance of marketing in the digital space and knows how to present your brand in an aesthetically-pleasing way. Exercise.com’s world-class dev team does just that. 

– Workout Creation and Delivery

ASF’s My Club Business lacks any workout-related feature such as building, logging, or tracking performance. It follows, obviously, that gym owners cannot use the software to deliver workouts or related products within the member app.

To put it bluntly, My Club Business does not have any component indicative of a platform for use in fitness over any other industry. Other than the company’s marketing of the software to the health club industry, there’s nothing which distinguishes it from tools used to sell any general product or service.

If you’re looking for powerful and flexible workout software for your gym or online business, you’ll find it with Exercise.com. Our platform lets you design programs for any goal and easily build workouts using a vast exercise library.

Your custom programs are then delivered to clients automatically through the mobile app designed to give them the best workout tracking experience available while keeping your brand front-and-center.

Professional coaches are using Exercise.com every day to create and deliver workouts for their face-to-face and online clients. Mike Boyle, one of the country’s foremost experts on sports performance training, gave this feedback after implementing our software at Mike Boyle Strength & Conditioning:

“The Exercise.com team is amazing and their web and mobile workout technology is more than we ever expected! Not only can clients watch exercise video demonstrations, but they can also select alternative exercises, log workouts, and track their performance. All of this is made possible by a high-quality platform and tremendous team!”

– E-Commerce / POS

My Club Business software is capable of billing and accepting payments for services you provide in-person at a gym or studio. As a web-based platform, it supports online membership enrollment but potential subscribers should be aware that the platform is not designed to provide services online.

Business Management Software from Exercise.com offers all the tools you need to accept payments online for your training and other products. Your customers can pay you quickly and securely through your custom mobile app or through integration with your website.

Whether you want to sell training packages to clients in person or digital products like e-books to remote clients, our software helps you get paid and elevates your company’s professional appearance in the process.

– Performance Assessments

While My Club Business enables the delivery of documents like liability waivers and PAR-Q forms within its online enrollment system, it noticeably lacks the capability to perform fitness assessments or track progress data. While this is not an important feature for those in industries outside of health and fitness, having the ability to track client data and to conduct various health and fitness assessments is crucial for an owner of a fitness facility or online training program.

Exercise.com goes beyond basic paperwork by letting you create customized client assessments in which you’ll collect physical measurements and performance data to help you build the most effective fitness program for your client.

 

Using detailed and accurate data on your client’s performance, you can even deliver pre-designed training programs automatically based on their current ability and needs. Exercise.com helps you provide better training and helps you retain clients with follow-up assessments that prove the effectiveness of your coaching.

– Client Engagement

One of ASF’s unique offerings is the ability to outsource your gym’s payment collection and the discomfort that often comes with it, to their team in what they euphemistically call Member Support. While they claim to build relationships and “ensure member satisfaction”, let’s be honest about their role: performing collection calls on your clients who have past due bills.

No matter how they phrase it, any interaction your clients have with them is not a pleasant experience:

“I had never even heard of ASF before a few days ago when I tried to cancel my gym membership. Long story short, they charged me for dues that even my gym agreed I didn’t owe. They lied and they stuck to their lie even when called out on it.” – Wylie W., Yelp

“Do NOT use any gym that uses ASF for their payment solution. [The gym I attended] closed in December 2016. I tried to cancel multiple times and was still charged in December. I had to have my bank reverse the charges. I’ve been harassed by ASF ever since for December payment and late fees FOR A GYM THAT HAD CLOSED!” – Tammy V., Yelp

“The software presents itself as a full health club management and billing software. It is nothing more than a merchant service company with a very poor attempt to wrap a health club management around its merchant services.” – Jeff B., Google

On Google, the company has a rating of 1.9 / 5 and on Yelp 1 / 5. The biggest concern for gym owners is the astounding number of reviewers who advised others “don’t go to any gym that uses ASF.”

Client engagement means something else entirely to Exercise.com and the gyms who use our software. We provide a way for you to efficiently interact with clients through in-app messaging on your custom-branded smartphone app. You can also build your community by hosting workout challenges and generating digital leaderboards which fuel clients’ motivation.

– Automation

The limited scope of My Club Business means that there are few actions in which automation is even relevant.

Some examples of automations that benefit gyms and members they serve are those available from Exercise.com:

Because our software automatically sends assessments and uses those assessments to generate your client’s workout plan, you are able to provide clients with training that evolves as they do.

For example, when Exercise.com sends your client their initial fitness assessment based on your specifications, you can have another assessment sent automatically every 2 months. This will test their progress and will then adapt their training program accordingly. The end result is that your client continues to progress, and you have more time to keep advancing your fitness business.

ASF Payment Solutions Pricing

ASF offers three service plans at different price points based on their level of involvement with your business beyond providing the My Club Business software.

• Process-Only – Access to the MCB software suite, Basic payment processing
• Economy – Access to the MCB software suite, Payment processing with auto-retry for failed payments, Payment collection services up to 90 days past due.
• Premium – Access to the MCB software suite, on-call Member Support, Payment processing with more auto-retries for failed payments, Payment collection services up to 120 days past due.

The My Club Business software alone costs $249 per month and there is also a monthly fee to integrate the basic software with the My Member Connect app; $59 per month. Keep in mind that the additional fee for payment processing will be charged in addition to these set monthly fees for software and customer support.

Top Direct Competitors

Exercise.com, offering the most complete custom branding for your business’s online platform and mobile apps. Our software is an all-in-one solution that provides specialty fitness features in addition to billing and scheduling operations.

ABC Financial, providing similar services to ASF in the vein of billing and collections for corporate gyms.

MindBody, a widely-used platform for small and large businesses with scheduling, billing, and a lengthy list of integrations with other software and apps.

The Bottom Line: Pros and Cons

Le’s boil this down into the Pros and Cons:

– ASF Payment Solutions Cons

ASF Payment Solutions is used by large health clubs for the primary purpose of billing and collections. For small businesses, particularly those engaging in online services, ASF is not the solution to your needs since it cannot fulfill all the tasks expected by those who provide high-quality fitness training.

Further, the negative reviews online paired with bare-bones customization points toward a software “solution” that is anything but a solution.

If you’re looking for a platform that offers the whole package, check out Exercise.com’s Business Management Software, the all-in-one solution for your fitness business. Get started with a demo call with our team and learn how we’re helping our clients manage some of the most successful fitness businesses in the country.

– Exercise.com Pros

Exercise.com not only acts as a payment processing tool; our software also acts as a one-stop-shop for all of your business management needs. From building web and smartphone apps with your brand in mind, to seamless integrations, performance health assessments, nutrition tracking, workout creation, management, and delivery, and a world-class dev team at your disposal, Exercise.com has you covered.

If you need custom features, easy integration, and engaging performance health software, contact us today for a demo. Our development team will work with you to create software for your business that not only works but that works well.

Hopefully, you see the benefit of not waiting to have a system and software in place that allows you to manage and grow your business for years to come.

What features are most important for your business?

If you’re ready to grow and manage your business with a software that can be customized to your business, book a demo with Exercise.com.