Running membership from your accounting tool: where it rubs

Plenty of businesses with memberships or subscriptions keep their members in their accounting tool. It is a reasonable choice, because the invoices already live there. Moneybird has subscription types, e-Boekhouden.nl has recurring invoices and even a separate member administration. Until you notice you are not managing members, you are managing invoices.

The difference is what the system is built around. An accounting tool revolves around an invoice and a customer. A membership system revolves around a member: since when, which membership, is it still running, and may this person come in today. An invoice line cannot answer that last question.

You feel it in the retyping. Every new sign-up, every switch from monthly to yearly, every pause and every cancellation: someone in the office enters it. That is exactly the work you meant to remove when you turned those subscriptions on.

To be fair about what those tools do, which is quite a lot. e-Boekhouden.nl describes its member administration as importing an existing member list, defining your own fields, collecting periodic dues and sending newsletters. Moneybird lets customers cancel or change their own subscription type and collects through a mandate. For the administrative side, that is well covered.

What is missing is the member’s own side. Signing themselves up without you entering anything. A class pack with a balance that runs down, because ten classes are not an invoice. And the door, because who may come in is the same question as who has paid.

For a gym, dance school or skate park that last part is not a detail. As long as payment and access live in different systems, someone bridges them by hand. Usually that is a list at the counter, or a person who simply knows.

MySubs is built around the member instead of the invoice. Members sign themselves up through a link or QR code and land straight in your member list. Memberships have terms, class packs have a balance. Dues and subscription fees run on direct debit through Mollie, on your own organisation’s Mollie account, so the money goes straight to your account. At the door you scan people in.

The real difference is the side your member sees. A member gets their own app with their pass, their class packs and the balance left on them, their subscriptions and a place to ask a question. You no longer have to look any of that up and pass it on.

There is a family module too. A parent logs in once and adds a child from the app itself, picks which organisation and which membership it belongs to, then switches between family members in that same app. One parent arranging it, several members. Try modelling that in a tool where every invoice belongs to exactly one customer.

What MySubs does not do is replace your bookkeeping. You keep doing your accounts where you do them now. The difference is that the membership work no longer has to happen there: no retyping sign-ups, no changing subscriptions by hand, no separate list for the door.

Starter is free and you need no credit card to begin. Have a look at MySubs for businesses, or request a demo.