Deportivo San Agustin

Deportivo San Agustín runs fitness classes, court bookings, coaching programmes and swimming across a membership with different access levels and prices. Until recently the whole thing ran on a paper register and the front desk's memory of who was allowed to attend what. Bookings were verbal. Payments were cash or a manual note. The owner had no reliable view of which services made money and which quietly lost it.

The most visible failure was class capacity. A popular class overbooked because there was nothing to book: members turned up, found a space or were turned away at the door. A quiet class ran under capacity for weeks before anyone could say so with evidence, because there was no evidence.

Behind that sat the money. Fees collected by hand, tallied at the end of the week, and never broken down by service. The club knew it was busy. It did not know where.

Every core function had to work on a phone, for members and for staff. A member checking whether a class has spots, booking a session or viewing their membership status was not going to open a laptop to do it. Front desk staff checking members in during a busy hour could not turn to a desktop terminal for each one.

That set the shape of the build: native mobile, with the admin and member experiences sharing one codebase and surfacing different functionality by role. A member sees classes, bookings, services and their own account. Staff see check-ins, the day's schedule and member lookup. The owner sees the numbers. Same app, different doors.

Members browse available classes, see remaining capacity and book a spot. Bookings confirm immediately and the capacity count updates in real time, so a full class shows as full and cannot be booked past its limit. Members receive a confirmation and can cancel within a defined window before the session starts, which releases the spot back to the pool.

Membership tiers control access. Different tiers open different class types, booking windows and on-site service credits, so the rules the front desk used to hold in their heads are now enforced by the app. On-site services, equipment hire, locker use and guest passes, are purchased in the app and logged against the member's account.

Finances run through the same platform. Monthly membership fees charge automatically via Stripe. The owner dashboard shows revenue by service category, class occupancy across the week and which membership tiers are most active. The reporting that used to require manual tallying is available on demand and always current.

A mobile-responsive web app was the faster build, and for many clubs it would be the right one. The decision to go native came from the operational context rather than a preference for platforms.

During a busy morning, front desk staff need an app that opens instantly and responds without hesitation while members are waiting. A web app in a browser adds enough friction, a page load, a tap to focus, a moment of lag, that it becomes the bottleneck at the exact moment throughput matters. Native removes that friction at the door.

Native also made push notifications a first-class part of the product. Booking reminders and class availability updates were in the feature set from the start, and reliable notifications are far easier to deliver from a native app than from a browser. The cost was a longer initial build. The gain was an app staff and members reach for without thinking about it.

A member wakes up, opens the app, sees the morning class has spots and books one. If their tier does not include that class, the app says so rather than the receptionist. A reminder arrives before the session. At the door, staff find them in seconds and check them in from a phone.

During the day, members buy a locker or a guest pass in the app and it lands on their account. Fees charge on schedule through Stripe. Cancellations release spots automatically and the capacity count moves with them. Nobody at the desk keeps a list.

The owner no longer waits for the end of the week to learn how it went. Occupancy by class and revenue by category are in the dashboard as they happen, which turns decisions about the timetable and pricing from guesses into readings.

Members book classes through the app without involving front desk staff. Capacity is visible and enforced automatically, so overbooking is no longer possible. Membership fees collect via Stripe without manual billing. The owner has a real-time view of revenue and occupancy that used to require end-of-week tallying.

The paper register and verbal coordination that ran the club have been replaced by a system that runs its operations in the background. With every booking, purchase and payment recorded against a member, the club now has the data to see which services earn their place, and a platform that can carry new classes, tiers and services without adding work at the desk.