Martial Arts Studio Billing: Pricing Models, Past-Due Policy, and Cash Flow

Pick a pricing model deliberately

Most schools land on one of three models. Unlimited monthly memberships are the simplest to sell and administer, and they reward your most engaged students. Class packages (e.g. 10 classes) suit adults with variable schedules but create breakage disputes and irregular revenue. Per-program pricing (separate fees for sparring team, leadership, weapons) raises revenue per student but multiplies billing complexity.

A defensible default: unlimited base membership plus one or two premium program add-ons. Avoid more than three published price points — pricing complexity reads as a used-car lot to parents comparing schools.

Autopay is not optional

Schools that invoice manually or take cash at the desk spend hours monthly chasing payments and still run 5-10% past-due. Card-on-file autopay through a processor like Stripe turns collections into an exception process instead of a monthly project. Pass-through processing fees (~3%) are the cost of predictable cash flow — price them into your membership rather than itemizing them.

Write your past-due policy before you need it

Decide in advance: after how many days past-due does a student lose check-in privileges? Most schools settle between 15 and 30 days, with an automatic retry and a friendly reminder sequence first. Enforcing it at the kiosk — the system flags the account rather than the front desk improvising — keeps the awkward conversation between the parent and the policy, not the parent and your staff.

• Day 1: automatic payment retry
• Day 3: friendly email — card may have expired
• Day 7: SMS reminder with self-service payment link
• Day 15-30: check-in flagged; owner conversation before anything escalates

Watch four numbers

Monthly recurring revenue, past-due percentage (target under 3%), revenue per active student, and involuntary churn (cancellations caused by failed payments, which good dunning largely eliminates). If your management software shows these on a dashboard, billing health is a glance, not an accounting session — MyDojang's billing reports and kiosk past-due flags implement this playbook directly.