Everything the studio sorted out today, before the 6am even started.
A day in a room of eighteen ergs, and the work nobody had to stop and do.
100% free to use, no hidden fees. Members pay about 5% at checkout.
Erg 6 comes free and the waitlist takes it.
An indoor rowing studio has a harder capacity problem than almost any other discipline. You have a fixed number of machines, every one of them is assigned, and a person who books and does not turn up has not just missed a class. She has taken an erg out of circulation that eight people would have wanted.
The 6am filled on Monday. At 5:32 someone cancels, and the machine she was on goes straight back into the pool rather than sitting empty because nobody was awake to reassign it.
Recess promotes the next person on the waitlist, charges the booking against her pack or her membership, and texts her that she is in and which erg she has. She walks in at ten to six knowing where to go, which is the whole point of assigning machines in the first place. The room is full at 6am.
The no show is recorded while the class is still running.
The coach counts the room and there is a gap. In most systems that gap stays a gap: a booking that was never marked either way, reconciled later by somebody with a clipboard, or not at all.
Recess records the no show against her profile at the class, not at the end of the month. That matters twice. It feeds the attendance picture that tells you who is slipping, and if you charge for late cancels or no shows, it is a custom fee you configure once and stop having awkward conversations about.
At that room size, a handful of no shows a week is the difference between a full schedule and a thin one.
Someone books the technique class she has not done the intro for.
Except she does not, because it never appears as bookable on her phone. She has been in twice, both times to the beginner session, and Thursday's technique class asks for the intro completed first. She is told that in one line, with the beginner and all levels classes she can take this week underneath it.
Form on an erg is not a style question. Bad form is a back injury waiting for the third piece, and it is also what pulls a class apart, because a coach who spends forty minutes fixing one person's catch is not coaching the other seventeen. The alternative to the gate is that she rows in on Thursday, sits down on the machine she picked, and the coach has to walk over in front of the whole room and tell her she is in the wrong class.
You set it once on the class. Require the intro as a prerequisite, or a skill a coach has signed off, a level, a tag you keep on her record, an age range, or the membership or program she holds. Stack two if it suits your room. The rest of the schedule stays open to anyone who wants to try.
Someone crosses a million meters.
You have run a distance club since the studio opened, and tonight she goes past the line in the 5:30. In most software that is a note in somebody's phone. In Recess it is a milestone you defined, so she gets the badge in your app, her name goes on the leaderboard, and you can print her a certificate with your own artwork.
Performance is the reason people stay at a rowing studio. Not the class, the number. Recess gives you the ladder around it: challenges, points, clubs, levels and milestones, all visible to the member in your app so progress is something she can see between classes rather than something she has to remember.
The day adds itself up.
Attendance for six classes is already recorded, because it came off the seat map and the door rather than a sheet. Coach pay for those six classes is already calculated at the right rate, including the 9:30 that somebody covered this morning. And the money side is not a separate exercise: Business Health connects QuickBooks, so what you took, what you spent, what is in the bank and how long the debt takes to clear sit on one screen.
And the thing you would never have got to: two members who used to come three times a week have not been in for eighteen days, and the win back message already went out. That is the whole difference. The software did the work instead of preparing a report about it.
Their meters, their streak, and your name on the app.
Your studio gets its own branded app carrying your name, your logo and your colors, publishable to the Apple App Store and Google Play under your own listing. Members are not asked to download another company's app.
They book their erg there, pay, join waitlists, sign forms and see their progress there: the club they are in, the milestone they are closing on, the challenge they are running and where they sit on the leaderboard.
Progress a member can see between classes is progress she does not have to remember, and that is most of the reason people stay at a rowing studio.
At 12:40 someone who has never rowed fills in your form.
She wants to know if she needs experience, which is the question every rowing studio gets, and it needs answering while she is still thinking about it rather than on Friday.
The Recess lead agent replies, answers her actual question, and books her into your beginner class rather than into the 6am with the regulars. That one difference decides whether she comes back.
It works at lunchtime on a Wednesday and it works at eleven at night, without anyone on your staff being involved.
The rest is table stakes. It is all here.
There is no plan to choose and nothing behind a paywall, so an eighteen erg studio runs on the same system as a much larger one and pays the same for it, which is nothing.
Free for the studio. The sums are short.
No monthly platform fee, no per feature add ons, no setup cost. Recess earns a service fee of approximately 5% paid by the member at checkout, and card and bank processing is covered by Recess out of that rather than billed to you on top. We only do well when you are actually collecting money.
Where we are not the right fit.
If one of these is you, we would rather say so now than six weeks into an onboarding.
What rowing studios ask first.
Yes. You lay out the room as a seat map, name the machines the way you actually call them, and members choose when they book. They can see which erg they have before they arrive, and the coach can see the room as it will look, including which machine is empty.
That specific machine goes back into the pool. Recess promotes the next person on the waitlist, charges the booking against her pack or membership, and tells her by text or push notification which erg she has. If you charge a late cancel or no show fee, you configure it once and it applies without a conversation.
No. Recess does not read performance data from erg monitors, and it would be wrong to imply it. It handles booking, the seat map, membership, retention and the progression structure around performance: clubs, distance milestones, challenges, points and leaderboards that you define and members see in your app.
Yes, alongside contracts, bundles, payment plans and drop ins. A member can hold more than one, and Recess applies the right one when she books, including on an automatic waitlist promotion. You can see who is on a pack and burning through it quickly enough that a membership would suit them better.
Attendance is tracked per person, so a drop from three classes a week to none becomes a name within days rather than a number in a quarterly report. You can filter your client list by falling attendance, and automated win back sequences run without waiting for you. Failed payment recovery sits underneath it, because an expired card is a more common reason for a quiet departure than most owners expect.
Pay rates are set per coach by class type or by head count, and Recess already knows who taught what and how many people were in the room. Coaches can clock in and out if you use shifts. Payroll reporting comes off the same data that ran the schedule, including a class somebody covered at short notice.
Yes. The migration is automated and our team runs it for you, whatever you are on now: Mindbody, Momence, Walla, Arketa, Glofox and others. Members, history and billing information come across, so people arrive with their pack balances and attendance behind them rather than as a blank list.
No. Your studio gets its own branded app with your name, logo and colors, and it can be published to the Apple App Store and Google Play under your own listing. Members book their erg, pay, join waitlists, sign forms and see their progress there.