Most studio owners have more data than they think and less information than they need. The booking system knows every class, every attendee and every package sold. What it rarely gives back is a clear answer to the three questions that matter on a Monday morning: Is the studio healthy? Where am I losing money? Who do I need to call this week?
This guide is a reader's guide to studio numbers: the handful of metrics that actually change decisions in a yoga or Pilates studio, what each one means, the traps that make them lie, and how often to look.
First, two distinctions that explain most confusion
Before any metric, get these two right. Almost every "the numbers don't add up" conversation comes back to one of them.
Collected vs recognised revenue
Collected is money received in the period. Recognised is the value of the classes actually attended: what each customer paid for their package, divided by its classes, times the classes they used.
Sell twenty three-month packages in January and January looks spectacular on a collected basis; February and March look weak. Recognised revenue spreads that money over the months the classes are actually taught, which is what your costs do. Read collected for cash; read recognised for performance.
Bookings vs attendances
A booking is an intention. An attendance is a class that happened for that customer. Because most studios do not check every customer in at the door, a sensible rule is: a booking on a class that has started, and was not cancelled, counts as attended. That makes your fill rate and your retention work even without check-in — and it is why a customer who tells you they cannot come should have their booking cancelled.
The daily numbers: is the studio healthy today?
Four numbers deserve a glance every morning:
| Number | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Recognised revenue | What the classes attended in the period were worth, and the margin left after instructor pay |
| Attendance (fill) | How full your classes were, as a share of the places offered |
| New customers | Who joined, and how many leads are waiting for a call |
| Likely to leave | Paying customers showing signs of going, as of today |
The last one is the most valuable number on the page, because it is the only one you can still change this week. More on that below.
The weekly numbers: are customers staying?
Retention: the first six months
The single most useful chart for a studio is the first-six-months curve: of the customers whose first visit was in a given window, how many were seen again in each following 30-day period. If the curve falls off a cliff in month one, your problem is not marketing. It is the first two weeks: the welcome, the second booking, the instructor who remembered their name.
Renewals and unused classes
For each period, how many packages ended, how many were renewed within 30 days, and how many ended with unused classes. That last line is the loudest warning signal in a class-based business: customers who leave classes on the table rarely renew. If it climbs, look at your package validity and your customers' rhythm before you look at your prices. Our guide to class packs vs memberships covers how to fix it.
Cohorts
A cohort table puts each sign-up month in a row and the share still holding a package after 1, 2, 3 months in the columns. Read it left to right for one month's loyalty, and top to bottom to see whether you are getting better at keeping people. Ignore tiny cohorts: ten customers is an anecdote, not a trend.
Churn, defined honestly
"Churn" means nothing until you define it. A clear, defensible definition for a studio: a customer is churned when their last package ended more than 60 days ago, or they have not come to a class in six months. In Owelz, every customer sits in one of four stages (Lead, Active, Expired, meaning ended within the last 60 days, and Churned), so "how many customers did we lose?" has one answer, used the same way on every screen.
The monthly numbers: is the timetable right?
The occupancy heatmap
Attendances over places, by weekday and hour. It is the report that rebuilds a timetable: the busiest slots (candidates for a second class or a higher price) and the quietest ones (candidates to move or merge). Set your own target from what a class costs you, but the heatmap matters more than the average, because one dead slot can hide inside a healthy number.
Classes and instructors, side by side
Put every class family and every instructor in a league table with the same columns: sessions, fill, cancellations, empty sessions, waiting lists, revenue recognised, instructor cost and margin, plus two columns most studios never see:
- Came back: customers with two or more attendances. A class with high attendance and low return is a class people try once.
- First-timers: customers whose first ever visit was in that class or with that instructor.
An instructor with many first-timers who come back is the person to build your timetable around, and the one to pay well before someone else does. See our guide to paying yoga and Pilates instructors.
Profit per class
The question every owner asks and few systems answer: does this class make money? It needs each class's recognised revenue and the instructor's pay for that class, under whatever deal they are on: a flat fee, a share of revenue, per attendee or a monthly salary. A popular class can lose money if half its customers come on guest invitations or the room is too small for the instructor's rate. A quiet early class can be your most profitable hour. You only see it when the cost and the revenue are calculated the same way the payslip is.
The metrics that need a warning label
Some numbers are useful and easily misread:
- MRR for a studio that sells packages. A studio has no monthly subscriptions, so MRR here means every paid package valid today, priced per 30 days. It makes a three-month package comparable with a monthly one. Do not compare it with a software company's MRR.
- Lifetime value. Average lifetime spend per paying customer. Useful for deciding what a new customer is worth acquiring; misleading in a studio younger than a year.
- A health score. A single number out of 100 is only as good as its parts. Insist on seeing them, weakest first.
- Any metric built on four people. A retention rate from a handful of customers is noise. A trustworthy system says not enough data yet instead of printing it.
How Owelz shows your numbers
Owelz was designed around one rule: no number you have to take on trust.
- Home shows the four daily numbers, three alert cards (Likely to leave, Revenue opportunities and Operational issues) and six key metrics, each with its own arithmetic on hover: "31 of the 48 active 12 months ago still hold a package." See Home.
- Twelve reports cover the overview, customers, retention, revenue, packages, sessions, bookings, classes, instructors, schedule, branches and expenses & profit, each compared with the previous period of the same length. See the reports.
- Metrics refuse to answer when the data cannot support them ("Needs 12 months of package history") rather than inventing a figure.
- Instructor cost follows payroll. Profit per class uses the same pay calculation as the payslip, so the report and the payslip agree to the cent. Cost figures are visible only to people with payroll access.
- Every list is a to-do list. The Likely to leave card lists each customer with the reason in plain words and a suggested action, with Call, WhatsApp and Email one tap away, and the tap logs the outreach.
- A Weekly Revenue Brief. Once a week, at the press of a button, Owelz reads your last 30 days and gives you 3 to 5 actions for the week. Each shows the customers and the money behind it, opens the filtered list of those customers and has a message ready to copy. The full consultant report, with studio health, costs and margins, is for people with the Consultant report permission. See Home.
Checked to the cent, on every page
A dashboard is only useful if you can trust it. Before analytics ship, we build a test studio exactly the way a front desk would (selling packages in cash and by transfer, booking, cancelling, removing a sale made by mistake), work out every expected figure by hand, and check that every page shows the same number, to the cent. When the revenue on Home, the revenue report and the branch report disagree by a single pound, the check fails, and the change does not go out until it passes. That discipline is invisible to you, which is exactly the point.
A reading rhythm that works
Every morning
Home: the four numbers and the Likely to leave list. Call the top of the list.Every week
Retention: the first-six-months curve, renewals and unused classes.Every month
Schedule and Classes: the heatmap, the quiet slots, the classes people do not come back to.Month end
Expenses & profit: what each class and instructor left after pay, and where you lost money.
A studio that reads four reports on a rhythm will outperform one that opens twelve in a panic at the end of the quarter.
If you have never seen your own studio this way, that is the best reason to book a demo below. We migrate your customers, packages and attendance history, so your first report opens on your own past, not on a blank page.
Common questions
- What is a good fill rate for a Pilates class?
- There is no universal number: it depends on what a class costs you. Work out the fill at which a class covers its instructor and room, and aim comfortably above it. Consistently full classes with waiting lists suggest adding a session or reviewing price; slots that run under half full are candidates to move or merge.
- What is the difference between collected and recognised revenue?
- Collected revenue is the money received in a period. Recognised revenue is the value of the classes actually attended: the package price per class times the classes used. A studio that sells a three-month package collects in the first month and recognises it over three.
- How do I calculate customer retention for a studio?
- A useful definition is the share of customers who held a package a year ago and still hold one today. Owelz shows it with the arithmetic, such as 31 of the 48 customers active 12 months ago still holding a package, and refuses to show it until there is enough history to mean something.
- How do I know if a class is profitable?
- Compare what the class earned, using the value of each attendee's visit, with what the instructor was paid for it. Owelz does this for every class, using the same calculation that pays the instructor, and lists where you are losing money with the reason.
- How often should a studio owner check their numbers?
- A glance at the daily screen each morning, retention once a week, the schedule once a month and profit at month end. Reading a few reports on a rhythm beats opening every report once a quarter.
Run your studio on Owelz
Booking and waiting lists, class packs and transfer payments, instructor pay plans and analytics you can check line by line, in Arabic and English. One plan, every feature.