I have been with Pike13 for over 5 years. They have great customer service and are always open to suggestions. It is user friendly for both staff and clients.

I like having the options for classes, events and private sessions.

The reporting is sometimes hard to get just what you are looking for. I would also like to have an option to for different price points on courses and options to sign up for just one date of a series.

I am a swim coach at a very successful Swim School. We have hundreds of clients who are scheduling several hundred lessons a week in three locations with over 20 coaches. That would be a scheduling NIGHTMARE for a front desk staff. With this software, we are able to provide a polished website and portal where families can register for and schedule their own lessons. It also manages auto-draft payments and sends email reminders to families. As a coach, I can take attendance on my phone and also leave notes for other coaches or myself.

This software is easy to use on my phone, which is very helpful. I use it daily to keep track of attendance and also leave detailed notes on how the lesson went, which is beneficial for me to review before the next lesson, or to share with another coach who may sub. The scheduling aspect is professional and most families are able to navigate it on their own.

The scheduling process is sometimes a little confusing to families, and they have to call or email our scheduler to work them out. When I am doing attendance and notes on my class roster, I can't just click "back" to return to my list. I have to go through the process of picking the calendar day and reloading.

Pike13 is easy to set up and easy to use for the most basic services.

Features are limited, reporting is also limited. Website navigation is not user friendly or intuitive (until recently there was no "back" button and even now the "back" button is limited to a small range of functions. Customer service can be responsive, but generally is unable to do much to help you.

The best aspect Pike13 has brought to my business is organization of scheduling and billing, including how the business is doing. I would, however, like to see more qualifiers in the "Insight" dashboard, of monthly financials, customer growth, with a more drag and drop method of viewing what I want to see...in other words more of the quick snapshots that all businesses want to look at quickly, without making everything only buildable reporting, that I have to spend a lot ot time learning and creating, etc....more like QuickBooks, or typical Dashboard applications that display what's going on with the business.

No doubt, dependability of the system, being available but the support is really excellent. They know the system they support and response to issues as well as resolution is one of the best I've ever experienced.

The system is applicable to private instruction businesses, such as music lessons, but the mindset of being able to adapt the system to bring the best user experience to people of the business world of the Arts, such as music education, can be a struggle and I have asked for some changes in future upgrades but have yet to see them. For example - being able to edit naming like clients to students, or allowing automatic attendance taken, enabling the instructor to only need to manually change for cancellations, etc. There needs to be a part of the applications design that can address the broader needs of their targeted customers, such as a music school and not a one size fits all, like an exercise business.

I have been with FDHQ from the very beginning. Not only did they start off with a very solid product, they have improved incrementally over the years. They know their "Why" and do not stray from what they are really good at.

Ease of use. I can train new staff members very quickly in how to use FDHQ. The mobile functionality is great, too.

I wish their were billets for class services. That way I could assign different pay rates for each class to the same person for doing different jobs. It would be a lot cleaner of a look if the FDHQ website could be separated by services and embedded into the gym website. Also, this would create a more seamless experience for the user. Courses need to have wait lists.

Not user friendly.

When it works, it's okay but still not right for my business.

Reporting is difficult. It is not intuitive. It is quite frustrating when it is slow.

The software is very user friendly and has a quick learning curve for new users. Scheduling classes, managing multiple locations, processing automatic recurring billing for tuition, and booking recurring appointments are at the top of the list. Having the ability to see class openings across the week allows staff to quickly sell enrollments to new and existing customers. Scheduling new classes is a simple process with just a few clicks. Customizing memberships is also a simple process and billing is automatic. Pike13's Customer Service is outstanding and they really listen to feedback from their clients.

The lag time in reporting is frustrating. I would like to see all reporting in real-time. I would also like the ability from the Franchisor side to control the standard service offerings across all locations.

We've been using FD for 3 years and we have grown to rely on it and trust it. We especially like the thoughtfulness of features like time zone support that its competitors do NOT have.

It is scalable and there is plenty of room for us to grow into it. The new bulk enrollment feature makes it easier than ever.

No customer service telephone support. Can't tag plans and passes so they appear where you want them in the menu which forces you to make custom HTML menus. Clients sometimes find the interface confusing mainly because you can't just sign up for a class or workshop without going to the date of that class or work shop first.

I would discourage anyone looking into Pike13 to look elsewhere. This is not an honest company and you will be locked into a long contract you will not be able to get out of for a full year. Mindbody, Zenrez and other fitness software provide much better customer service and a much more honest experience.

Their Mailchimp integration is great. While there is no way to section clients based on membership purchased, it gives us some great ways to follow up with clients. Although this is more thanks to MailChimp's versatility, not so much Pike13's.

We were sold a contract to this software on a false pretense. We were told that their software integrates with a third party site (ClassPass). Once we signed the contract, management informed us that the integration was not working, but would be fixed. It is now close to 5 months later and there has been no progress made. They also refused to compensate us, or take any responsibility for any inconvenience they have caused. There are several other components of the software which are also significantly inferior to Mindbody Online and other fitness studio software.

All in all the software was excellent for what we needed. Hated that we outgrew it.

I like the simplicity of the software. We were able to create training for our other locations with ease. Onboarding was so quick when we hired a new staff member.

As our company was growing we needed members to be able to go to any location they wanted to and check in with their original account. The software wouldn't allow for this.

Appointments for coaches, payscale, that's about it.

works on mobile and ipad through web function, easy to take attendance in sessions, easy to see client images. payscale for paying coaches per client is best feature.

again, no improvements in two years, hasn't updated any feature for sales, integration, Zapier integration - poor leadership, went to report functions as their key improvement for past two years, but doesn't work, integrate with Zapier or Google Sheets, doesn't allow shared reporting, so each staff person has to customize their own reports leaving a business to have more time on boarding, rather than less time to onboard. Focus was supposed to be easy for people to buy online and is actually the worst software to purchase online for parents of kids in a sports program. Lost thousands of dollars went we went to Front Desk from EZ Facility. As a former ICON Small Business Finalist with Infusionsoft, I DO NOT recommend this software to anyone wanting over per year in revenue. We've had to modify every feature of the software to make it work, would leave in a heartbeat if it didn't waste thousands of dollars in changing.

All too common software company switchero. They promise functionality, flexibility, and support, all of which mysteriously vanish once you are invested in the product enough that they hope the energy required to switch products is high enough that you make due with crap you have. They have changed my pricing structure without my permission. They took away functionality despite my protest, and they have began trying to up-sell me on features and functionality that I have not requested nor desire. It's silliness like this that make me want to get into the software business, because apparently you can say whatever you want to make the sale and never actually have to deliver on those promises. The most recent scam is to take away the reporting features I have been using for three years in order to "upgrade" me to a more expensive option that requires more of my time to figure out. Not helpful, not designed to be helpful.

the sales pitch

the actual product that came after the sales pitch

Pike 13 did not suit our needs. We weren’t able to get valuable reports, customer service was less than average and the back end was not decreasing our admin time.

It has an app which was liked by our staff. Duplicating a session and editing it was easy for repeating classes.

No ability to do payment plans, enroll multiple students at one time, do auto discounts. It would work better for a gym/studio but did not work well for our mostly youth programming. Was impossible to get financial info (credit card fee report) from them.

I tested many management systems and my final choice was Front Desk. The main reason is that the front end and back end are well thought out and well layout. It doesn't take university level training to run this platform. It was made to be simple first. When testing some other platforms i would get lost in the setup process and I'm very knowledgeable of all tech stuff... The sales staff and support staff is uber friendly and you always get the impression you're calling a friend.... Here in Quebec we have bilingual costumers. The system doesn't allow on the costumer side to pick their language. Once you pick your language all the system will reflect that language. This is an issue for some of our costumers and this could be a cool options to offer in the near future. Also, some of the french translation are bizarre and inaccurate' and some sections aren't fully translated. There's some annoying bugs ( i already sent all this to their support team) 1. Locations don't display correctly this is confusing for my customers... Its been a couple of months and it hasn't been fixed... We have 3 locations and sometimes the incorrect location would show up on the client sent bills... I always get confused clients calls) 2. Not having a direct call line was a problem sometimes... 3. Bugs are fixed a little slow to my liking. 4. The selling enrollment layout on the admin side is just a mess' we have about 40 enrollments that we sell and they are organized randomly' we can't manually organize them either' so every time we sell stuff we have to go one by one' we loose a lot of time doing this. 5. There's no possibility to show and make a client accept terms and conditions in enrollments' its possible in classes but not enrollments' don't understand why? Pros Friendly customer service Ease of use Easy to setup Clear Apple like layout Cons No possibility to call... They will call you if you request' Email support sometimes slow to respond more than 48 hours Follow up on bugs is somewhat shaky.. sometimes I wouldn't get a return email 95% of our clients didn't sign the Docusign waiver upon registering' so the implementation of this option is not great More bugs than I expected Future wants Capacity to segment each class in man and women section. Very use full when you run a latin dance school ( Mindbody gives you this option by putting a lead and follow option to each class )

Front Desk HQ has an amazing team of support specialists that are incredibly responsive and patient with their customers. I just recently made a big transition with my strength and nutrition business and wouldn't have been able to make the switch if not for the expert team of professionals who assisted me throughout the process.

It's honestly not as much about the software as it is about the people. I find the software requiring some workarounds

It'd be cool if clients with account credits can have plans attached to them that are auto debited monthly instead of manually having to go in and do it. It'd also be nice to be able to create a plan that allowed for unlimited of one service and a set amount of another service so I don't have to sell one person multiple plans and have them accept multiple terms and conditions as a result.

I really like the system if the refund can be fixed.

It schedules, emails clients, bills, reports and keeps me on track.

The refund process, there is no safety net. If you have a new employee they could easily refund the tuition without any stop gap. There needs to be a level of security such only allowing owner level to refund, at the very least force you to comment why your refunding or have to put a code in. We deal with thousands of dollars and it could all be refunded with 1 click of the mouse. I have used this software for almost 3 years and have to train that NO one other than me is allowed to refund.

Does many things well BUT lacks owner/manager total control. My major gripe is the lack of giving the owner complete control (customization) of all aspects of the financials per client. My business model is monthly plans where a client trains 8-12x/month with a contract commitment of 3, 6, to 12 months. Here are some gripes: 1) Partial Payments: 2) Flexibility of Plans/contracts: 3) Scheduler: Here are my applause points: 1) Customer service: 2) Client Communication: 3) Flexible monthly rate: 4) Online documents: In conclusion: A good software with some growing pains. Front Desk has the potential to be one of the best. The payment/billing aspect is where I had the most issues due to that lack of per client customization. Allow one to change a due date that is reflective in the billing cycle and the plan without having the user to jump through hoops. Allow user to add (by picking time slot), change, cancel, view remaining sessions. Allow the user to accept partial payments and the ability for software to reflect the accuracy of payments per client.

Overall our experience was exceptional, we are still using and will continue to use PIKE13!

Direct online booking for clients, the ability to require a stored credit card in order to reserve time on our schedules, recurring billing and payments, links to MailChimp email marketing, simple interface, easy to navigate and work together among teammates.

No PIKE13 integration to our main Web site aside from Widgets. It was like managing and having two Web sites, somewhat redundant. Customer support is via email. It's hard to get a hold of a person directly but they do their best.