Help Center › Switching to MatPilot
Moving your academy to MatPilot
1. Create your account
Download the app, sign up, and create your academy. You will name it, say where it trains, and pick the arts you teach, which is what sets the belt ladders your members are ranked on.
That is the whole of setup, and it takes a couple of minutes. See What is MatPilot? and Setting up your gym profile.
2. Connect Stripe
Payments run through your own Stripe account, not ours. Members pay you directly and the money lands in your bank account on Stripe's normal payout schedule.
Two ways in, and the first matters if you are switching:
- You already have a Stripe account. Connect that one. Your existing customers, their cards, their direct-debit mandates and their live subscriptions are all already in it, which is what makes step 6 a five-minute job.
- You do not. Create one from inside the app. Stripe asks for your business details and a bank account for payouts.
See Connecting your Stripe account and Stripe account setup, step by step.
3. Add your waiver
Upload or write the document every member signs before they train. Members sign it on their phone when they join, and guardians sign for anyone under 18.
This is worth doing before your members arrive rather than after, because MatPilot will hold an unsigned member out of class rather than let them train uncovered. See Waiver and document management and, for kids, Minors, waivers and the training gate.
4. Create at least one membership plan
A plan is what someone pays and how often: €95 a month unlimited, €70 for two classes a week, a 10-class pack, an annual. Create the ones you actually sell, and match the prices you charge today. You can add more later.
See Creating a membership plan, Monthly vs. annual plans and Class packs and credit bundles.
5. Build your timetable
Add your classes. Anything that runs every week is created once as a repeating class, so a full weekly schedule is minutes of work, not an entry per session.
While you are there, set capacity on the classes that fill up and put the right instructor on each one. See Creating a new class, Setting up recurring classes, Setting class capacity limits and Assigning instructors to classes.
6. Bring your members in
This is the step people worry about, and there is exactly one question that decides how it goes.
If your members are already billed through Stripe, which is the case with most gym platforms, connect that same Stripe account and import. MatPilot reads your customers, mirrors your prices as plans, and links each customer to a member. It never creates a charge and never touches a live subscription: the amount, the billing date and the saved card or mandate all stay exactly as they are. Nobody re-enters a card, nobody's payment date moves. See Bring your members across from Stripe.
If they are billed somewhere else, card details and direct-debit mandates cannot be moved between processors, by anyone. Your members subscribe once in MatPilot and you cancel the old subscriptions. It is a single message and a single tap for each member, and there is a clean way to run it without anyone paying twice. See Moving members who are billed somewhere else.
Not billing online at all today, or holding a list in a spreadsheet? Paste the names and emails in. See Bulk importing members via CSV.
What your members experience
Whichever path you take, each member gets one email: an invitation to their academy with a code that sets up their MatPilot account. They open the app, set a password, sign your waiver, and from then on they book classes, see their attendance and rank, and manage their own membership.
They do not have to do it the day you send it. You can run your gym, take attendance and manage plans while people are still setting up. See Joining your gym: what members do and Understanding member statuses.
Then the fine-tuning
Live is live at step 6. Everything below makes it yours, and none of it blocks you:
- Your cancellation policy and notice period
- Moving members to direct debit, which costs a fraction of card
- Belt ranks and dates of birth on each profile: see Setting a member's belt rank
- Inviting staff and instructors
- A kiosk tablet at the door for self check-in
- Your intake form and emergency contacts
- Xero if your accountant wants the books to reconcile themselves
There is a full list in the go-live checklist.
How long it takes
An academy that already bills through Stripe can do all six steps in an afternoon and be taking payments the same day. Coming off a system that bills elsewhere, the honest answer is a week: your members need a few days to switch, and that is the only part that is not in your hands.
You do not have to do it alone
Send us your export, or the name of the platform you are leaving, and we will do the move with you: the plans, the timetable, the import, the message to your members. There is a Contact us button at the bottom of this help centre, and we answer.