Help Center › Switching to MatPilot
Bring your members across from Stripe
Before you start
Connect your existing Stripe account rather than creating a new one. This is the whole trick: a new account is an empty account, and none of your customers or their saved payment methods are in it. See Connecting your Stripe account.
Look before you import
Open Gym, then under Money choose Import from Stripe. Before anything is written, MatPilot reads your account and shows you what is there: how many customers, how many have a live subscription, how many active prices, and a sample of the subscriptions it found with their amounts and status.
If those numbers match what you expect, import. If they do not, that difference is worth understanding before you go further, and we can look at it with you.
What the import does
It runs in two passes, and you watch both finish:
- Plans. Every active price in your Stripe account is mirrored as a MatPilot membership plan, at the same amount and interval.
- Members. Every Stripe customer becomes a member. Where a customer has a live subscription, the member is linked to it and lands on the matching plan with the right status. Customers who only ever paid one-off come across too, so nobody is left behind.
Both passes are safe to re-run. Anyone already linked is skipped rather than duplicated, so if an import stops halfway you simply run it again.
What it does not do
This is the part worth reading twice. The import never creates a charge and never modifies a live subscription. It reads your account and records the link, then stamps the subscription so future payments are attributed to the right member and plan.
In practice that means:
- Nobody is billed early, twice, or at a new price
- Billing dates do not move
- Saved cards and SEPA mandates stay exactly where they are, and no member re-enters anything
- Your members do not need to do anything for their payments to keep working
What Stripe does not carry
Stripe holds billing, not gym life. These are not in your Stripe account and so cannot be imported from it:
- Date of birth
- Belt rank and grading history
- Attendance history
- Emergency contacts and medical notes
- Signed waivers from your old system
MatPilot flags the imported members who are missing a date of birth or profile details so you can fill them in over the first week. Rank matters more than the rest: it drives eligibility and grading. See Setting a member's belt rank and Member grading history.
Your old signed waivers stay valid as your record. Members sign yours in MatPilot when they join, which is what the training gate checks.
What your members receive
Each newly created member gets one email: an invitation to your academy with a code to set up their MatPilot account. Their billing is already working, so this is about access to the app, booking and their profile, not about payment.
Tell them it is coming. An announcement the day before turns an unexpected email into an expected one. See Sending an announcement.
After the import
- Check the summary for anyone that failed, usually a Stripe customer with no email address
- Set belt ranks, and dates of birth for kids
- Review the plans that came across and tidy the names, they arrive named after your Stripe products
- Look at your revenue dashboard: it should match what Stripe was already showing you