Guides  ·  2026-08-29  ·  10 min read

What to Look For When Choosing Sports Centre Management Software

The feature list decides nothing

Book three demos of sports centre management software and you will see the same screen three times: a calendar with courts as columns, a member database, a class module and a dashboard with charts. Real-time availability, card payments, waiting lists and email announcements have been table stakes for years.

What the demo does not show is what you are about to sign. That is where the differences worth hundreds a month live: whether the commission is calculated on what you sell or per transaction, whether you are tied in for a year, whether you can pull your member list on a random Tuesday without asking, and whether your customers' money lands in your account or someone else's.

The four questions below have yes-or-no answers. Take them to the demo in writing and ask for the answers before you look at a single screen.

Trap 1: the commission that grows when your prices grow

There are two ways to charge you for a booking paid online, and they are nothing alike:

• A percentage of the ticket. The provider takes a cut of what you sell. In the Spanish market we track, booking platforms working this way sit in the 5-15 % band.
• A small percentage you can lower. With no fee you pay a little on each charge; with a small fixed fee the commission drops, all the way to nothing.

That is not a nuance. On any percentage, the day you raise your court hour from €20 to €24 your provider gives itself a raise alongside you, having done nothing different. So what matters is not only how big it is, but whether you can bring it down as you grow: if you cannot, a high percentage stays with you for good.

Run the numbers on your own figures, which are the only ones that matter. A centre charging 300 bookings a month at €24 takes €7,200. At a 5 % commission that is €360 a month; at 15 %, €1,080. On our 2% with no fee it is €144, and on the Club plan (49 € a month plus 0.6%) it is €92 in total. Same court, same month, same work done by the software.

The three lines of small print around the commission

• The surcharge to the player. Some platforms add a booking fee on top of the price you set: 0,29-0,99 € per booking in the market we track. You do not pay it, your customer does, and it is your front desk they will ask about it.
• The cancellation fee. Cancelling a booking can carry its own cost — we have seen 0,50 € per cancellation — and cancellations are not an edge case, they are part of normal club operations.
• The payment gateway. Always separate, and it varies by currency and card type. No honest platform will hand you an exact net figure: ask them to separate their fee from the gateway's so you can compare like with like.

What you ask: is the commission a percentage or a per-transaction amount? Does it apply to my long-standing members too? Does my customer see any surcharge on my price? What is charged when someone cancels?

Trap 2: the lock-in and the month you close for refurbishment

A fixed monthly fee is a cost that does not discriminate: you pay the same with courts at 40 % as at 90 %, and you pay the same in the August you close for works or the month the pool sits empty. Add a minimum term and that bad month cannot be stopped.

Lock-in rarely appears in the published price. It appears in the contract duration clause, usually with two siblings: auto-renewal with notice (miss the 30 or 60-day window and you renew for another year) and a setup or onboarding fee, paid once and non-refundable.

What you ask: what is the minimum term? How and how far ahead do I cancel? Does it renew by itself? Is there a setup, implementation or training fee? What happens the month I close?

And one almost nobody asks: request the contract before the demo. If it arrives without friction, that tells you plenty. If they say that comes later, that tells you plenty too.

Trap 3: who owns your member data

Your member list and your booking history are yours. That is what the law says and what common sense says, but between owning a piece of data and being able to pull it out on a Tuesday at nine in the morning there is a gap called export.

1. An export button in your own panel, in an open format (CSV), whenever you want, without asking anyone.
2. Export on request: you email support, wait a few days, and they send you a file. It works, but it is not yours: it is a favour.
3. No export, or only in a proprietary format nothing else opens. At that point you are not choosing software, you are choosing a landlord.

Ask what happens after you cancel too: how long you have to download your data and what gets deleted. That is the moment a provider really shows how it understands the relationship.

What you ask: can I export members and bookings myself, today, as CSV? Is that export in the plan I am about to buy or in a higher one? What window do I get to take my data if I leave?

Trap 4: who charges your customer

This is the least asked and the one that changes your books the most. When a player pays for a court online, the money can take two routes:

• It lands in your account. The charge runs against a payment account in your club's name, you are the seller, and your name appears on your customer's statement. The provider keeps its fee out of that transaction.
• It lands in the provider's account and they pay you out later. They collect, hold the money for days or weeks, and transfer your share on their own payout calendar.

The second route is neither illegal nor unusual, but it has very concrete consequences: your cash flow depends on their calendar, a refund depends on their judgement, and your member's statement does not show your club's name. If the provider has a problem, your money is inside that problem.

What you ask: is the receiving account in my name or yours? How often do you pay out, and with what reserve? Who decides and who absorbs a refund? What name does my customer see on their statement?

The checklist, as a table to take to the demo

And a fifth question, which almost nobody asks

All of the above are defensive: they stop you signing something bad. This one can make you money.

What does this software do with the hours I do not sell?

Management software organises what your club already has: the members who are already members, the bookings that were coming anyway. The empty court on Tuesday at eleven costs it exactly what it costs you: nothing. Yet that hour costs you lighting, maintenance, staff and the software subscription itself.

It is a fair question and almost no provider answers it, because most are pure back-office: they have no audience of their own to show your centre to. Our answer is this: your venue page sits in a catalogue people use to find somewhere to play, and the dashboard shows you how many people looked up your centre this month even without booking. That is not a promise of future traffic: it is a fact about the past that you can look at before deciding anything.

Depending on the kind of centre you run, the detail is here: padel club management software, gym management software or leisure centre management software. And if it is the money side that worries you, online payments, deposits and unpaid fees has the detail on how charging works.

The limits you should ask us about too

A checklist that only points at other people is not worth much. These are the uncomfortable answers on our side, so you do not meet them later:

• We do not generate the bank remittance file. Membership fees can go by direct debit — the member picks card or direct debit when authorising and signs their mandate right there — but the batch of debits a club prepares and sends to its bank is not something we produce: each member signs their own mandate instead of you generating it. Direct debit applies only to the recurring charge; a one-off booking or a deposit stays on card, because a debit takes days to clear.
• Capacity is per class, not per time slot. You can set places and a waiting list on a class or a session; you cannot say "the pool holds 40 people from 10 to 11".
• We issue your invoices with Veri*factu, but we do not keep your accounts. Invoices come with a monthly allowance per plan; bookings and members export as CSV for your accountant.
• Access control needs your hardware. We issue the door codes; the lock and its contract are yours.
• Stripe verifies the receiving account, not us. It is opened in the name of whoever runs the centre, and Stripe asks for the paperwork directly.

How you really compare: side by side, not in a demo

The cheap way to get it wrong is to decide in a 45-minute call with a salesperson. The cheap way to get it right is to have both systems running for a few weeks.

If the platform you are looking at can read the calendar of the system you use today, you can run both schedules at once without switching anything off and without risking a double booking. Three weeks later you are no longer comparing brochures, you are comparing two real months of your club. How to set that up step by step is in how to switch club software without stopping, and what each pricing model costs is in how much sports management software costs.

See BookrGo plans and pricing: it opens the table of what each plan includes and each plan's commission. No sign-up needed to read it.