When the coach spends half the week chasing fees: building BiaBashka

Picture a small gym: a hundred and fifty members, a few sessions a week, two coaches. Its problem is not training. Its problem is that at the start of every month somebody has to sit down and work out who has paid, who has not, which member that receipt forwarded over chat yesterday belonged to, and how much this person still owes.

When that work is spread across a notebook, a spreadsheet and a few messaging groups, none of those questions has a settled answer. Each one has to be reconstructed from scratch every time. That is the problem the owner brought to us.

The problem was not the absence of software

The first thing anyone says is “we need software”. But when we sat down and followed the actual process, the trouble turned out to come from a handful of specific places, each with its own answer.

• Membership and session scheduling lived in two separate places, so nobody could say for certain which session a given member belonged to.
• Monthly invoices were raised by hand, so in busy months they slipped.
• Bank-transfer receipts arrived in a chat app and had to be matched against outstanding balances manually.
• If someone paid half their fee, the remainder was recorded nowhere except in the owner's head.
• Fee and sports-insurance reminders went out only when someone happened to remember.

A wallet, instead of manual matching

Rather than attaching each payment to an invoice, every amount received lands in the member's wallet first, and fees that have fallen due are drawn from it. The result is that each person's balance is always a single clear number, even when payments are irregular. Profiles that share a phone number — two children in one family, say — share one wallet, because in practice one person is doing the paying.

That decision shaped the rest of the product. What came out of it is BiaBashka, gym management software that keeps membership, the weekly timetable, invoicing and receipts in one place. You register a member and set their session and fee at the same moment; from then on each period's invoice is raised automatically, with a Persian-calendar due date and the option to pause it for an absence.

Bank-transfer receipts, where most of the time went

The most repetitive job of the week was reading a photographed receipt and matching it to a balance. Now the member sends the image in the app or through Telegram or Bale, the system reads the amount and reference number off it, and the person running the gym only confirms. We describe that path in recording a card-to-card membership payment and reviewing and approving a receipt.

We deliberately kept the human confirmation. The system proposes; the person responsible approves. In work that touches other people's money, we do not move that line.

Things that came out of real use

Some features were not in the original design and were added once the gym had been using it: the weekly training schedule for defining sessions precisely, private sessions with a coach settled from the wallet, fee and insurance reminders over SMS, Telegram and Bale with a full record of whether each message actually arrived, and one phone number across several clubs, because in practice one person can run one gym and train at another.

If you are starting from nothing, setting up your club in the software walks from the first member to the first fee. It runs on the web, as an installable web app, and as an Android app. The interface is entirely Persian and right-to-left, and dates are on the Persian calendar.

What was deliberately left out

What is missing matters as much as what is there. BiaBashka has no online payment gateway, no turnstile or fingerprint access control, and makes no claim to be a sports CRM. The reason is straightforward: a gym whose problem is chasing fees does not get that problem solved by adding them. It just receives heavier software, half of which goes unused.

A good product is not the one with the most features. It is the one that genuinely lightens the daily job that was eating the time.

Why we are writing this here

BiaBashka is a product of Noyan Pishgam Dadeh (ParsinDade), and it shows the method we follow on every project: understand the real process first, then build the smallest thing that fixes it. Our line for this is “same, but better” — not replacing how a gym works with something new and complicated, but the same work with less friction.

If you run a gym and your situation looks like that notebook and spreadsheet, take a look at the membership fee management system. And if your business is something else entirely but you recognise the pattern — repetitive work that eats time and gets expensive when it goes wrong — talk to us.