How IronWorks Gym Dublin stopped writing off failed membership payments

Company Overview

IronWorks Gym Dublin bills 620 members by recurring payment. Roughly 4 percent failed each month for expired cards and insufficient funds, and chasing them was a manual and unpleasant job.

Challenge

• Around 25 failed payments a month, each needing a phone call somebody dreaded making
• Roughly 40 percent of failures were never recovered and were quietly written off
• Two days a month of staff time went into chasing payments rather than serving members
• Some members kept attending for weeks after their payment stopped, which nobody noticed

Solution

• Solstice Studio OS retries a failed payment on a schedule that matches when people are typically paid
• Members receive a friendly notification with a link to update their card themselves
• Cards approaching expiry are flagged before they fail rather than after
• Persistent failures appear on one list with the member's history, so the rare phone call is well informed

Results

• Recovery of failed payments rose from around 60 percent to 94
• Monthly write offs fell from roughly 1,100 euros to under 100
• The two days a month of manual chasing disappeared entirely
• Members updating their own card resolved most failures without any staff contact

Customer Testimonial

"The money matters, but the part I would tell another studio owner about is the awkwardness. Asking a member you see three times a week for money is genuinely horrible. Almost all of it is handled before anyone has to have that conversation now."

Liam O'Connor, Founder, IronWorks Gym Dublin

Key Benefits

• Retries scheduled around typical pay dates
• Members update their own card from a notification
• Card expiry flagged before the payment fails
• One informed list for the rare manual follow up

Solstice Fitness Studios turned IronWorks Gym Dublin's worst monthly job into something that mostly resolves itself, and recovered nearly all of what used to be written off.