Running Multiple Venues? Why One Admin System Beats Five Separate Spreadsheets

Last updated: 2026-05-26 · operations, growth, multi-location

The first six months after Riverside BJJ opened their Newport mat were fine. Coach split the week: Cardiff on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Newport on Mondays and Wednesdays. Two sessions per location, modest numbers at each, and he had a general sense of who went where.

The problems started small. A family from Cardiff started training Newport occasionally and he couldn’t remember whether they were already paying a full membership or whether the Newport sessions were extra. He checked the Cardiff spreadsheet. He checked the Newport spreadsheet — a copy of the Cardiff spreadsheet, with names crossed out and added in a different colour. He messaged the parent. The parent said they thought they’d already paid. He couldn’t prove otherwise.

By month six: two families billed twice for different locations, three families who’d drifted between sites and weren’t being billed at all, one parent who hadn’t received a single payment request because she’d enrolled at Newport and been added to the wrong sheet. The accountant sent a polite but firm message explaining that she would not be attempting to reconcile two incompatible Excel files ever again.

This is how multi-venue admin fails. Not in one dramatic collapse, but in accumulated small errors that take months to surface and longer to fix.

The structural problem with copy-pasted infrastructure

When a club opens a second venue, the instinct is to duplicate what’s already working. The Cardiff sheet becomes the Newport sheet. The Cardiff WhatsApp becomes the Newport WhatsApp. Two sets of everything, running in parallel, managed by the same person in increasingly fragmented mental overhead.

This works — briefly. The moment a student moves between sites, the moment a family has children at both, the moment a coach covers both venues, the moment you want to understand your total revenue for the month — the parallel structure becomes a liability. You don’t have two clean records. You have two incomplete records that should add up to one accurate picture but don’t, because nobody maintained the link between them.

There are five specific things that break when you run multi-venue on duplicated infrastructure.

Five things that break

1. Student records and duplicate billing

A family enrols at site A. A few months later, they start attending site B. In a duplicated spreadsheet system, this requires a manual note on both sheets, a flag not to bill them twice, and someone to remember that flag exists. If that person is also coaching, scheduling, and running the front desk, the flag gets forgotten. The family receives two payment requests. They reply to one. The other sits unpaid, accruing apparent debt.

The reverse also happens: a family stops attending site A and starts at site B but is removed from the site A list without being added to site B. They train for three months without being billed. When someone notices, recovering that revenue — if you can recover it at all — requires an uncomfortable conversation.

Duplicate billing and missed billing are both caused by the same structural error: student identity living in two separate systems with no shared source of truth.

2. Coach permissions and information access

Your Monday coach at Newport doesn’t need to see Thursday’s Cardiff attendance records. Your Tuesday Cardiff assistant shouldn’t be able to see which families at Newport have outstanding balances. In a spreadsheet or a single-site tool with no permission model, everyone sees everything — which creates both a data protection concern and a clutter problem.

The ICO’s guidance on personal data in sports organisations is clear: you should only share data with the people who need it for a legitimate purpose. Giving every coach access to every member’s financial records across every site is unlikely to satisfy that test, particularly once you’re handling health information, safeguarding notes, or emergency contact details.

Permission granularity — this coach can see and record attendance at Newport but cannot see Cardiff’s financial data — is not a premium enterprise feature. It’s a basic requirement for running a multi-venue operation responsibly.

3. Reporting that requires a manual merge every month

“How much did we take last month?” is a question that should take three seconds to answer. In a multi-spreadsheet world, it takes an hour, a spreadsheet formula you wrote six months ago that may or may not still be correct, and a manual check against your bank statement to confirm the total reconciles.

The same applies to attendance rates, new-member trends, drop-out rates, and capacity planning. Every insight that should be immediate requires a data assembly step that consumes the time you’d normally spend on the insight itself.

Month-end reporting is where the accumulated cost of duplicate infrastructure becomes visible. It’s also the moment when important decisions — should we expand Newport, is Cardiff at sustainable capacity, which venue needs a new coach — are being made on incomplete or stale data.

4. Brand consistency and the “B-site” problem

When each venue develops its own communication culture, the families attending the smaller or newer site start to feel like second-class members. Newport gets a slightly different WhatsApp message cadence. Cardiff parents receive the branded newsletter; Newport parents receive a text. Cardiff gets the new t-shirt design two months before Newport because the order was placed from the Cardiff spreadsheet.

This is rarely intentional. It’s a consequence of running two independent systems that are nominally connected by one person’s attention. When that person’s attention is divided — as it always is — the two systems drift apart, and the drift is always more visible to the families at the secondary site.

5. Cashflow visibility

Which site is profitable? Which is covering its own venue hire? Is the Newport expansion contributing to overall club health, or is it subsidised by Cardiff’s established membership base?

These are not niche questions. They’re the decisions that determine whether a second venue becomes a permanent part of the club or gets quietly wound down because the numbers never quite added up. Without consolidated financial reporting, you’re making those decisions on instinct rather than evidence.

The principle: one entity, multiple venues

The solution isn’t more spreadsheets or more software. It’s a structural reframe.

If you operate one club at multiple physical locations — the same branding, the same membership terms, the same coaching team — you have one entity with multiple venues. Not two clubs. One club, configured once, with location as a sub-dimension of sessions, not a separate administrative universe.

This means:

Students are enrolled in the club, not in a location
Sessions are tagged to a venue, not owned by a venue
Revenue flows to one account and is reportable by venue as a filter
Coaches are assigned to venues, not siloed into separate systems

When a student moves from Cardiff on Tuesdays to Newport on Thursdays, you update their session assignment. Their payment history, their contact record, their emergency information, their safeguarding notes — all of that travels with them. Nothing is duplicated. Nothing is lost.

What the venues feature does in Adminished

In Adminished, you manage multiple venues from a single club account. Each venue has its name, address, and associated sessions. When you create a class or an event, you tag it to a venue. The schedule view filters by venue so parents and coaches see only what’s relevant to them.

For more detail on how venue configuration works, see the help article on venue bookings.

Coach permissions across venues work at the role level: you assign a coach to specific venues. A coach assigned to Newport can view and record attendance for Newport sessions. They cannot see Cardiff data unless explicitly granted access. This satisfies the basic principle of data minimisation without requiring a complex permission system to configure.

Per-venue reporting lets you filter the revenue, attendance, and membership dashboards by venue. You can see Newport’s monthly revenue independently of Cardiff’s, or see both combined. The data lives in one place and the filter is just a view — there’s no separate export or manual merge.

The franchise question

There is one situation where the single-account model doesn’t apply: if you own multiple distinct clubs that happen to be in the same sport but operate independently — separate branding, separate coaching teams, no shared membership — you should use separate Adminished accounts.

The clearest test: would a parent at Club A reasonably expect to be a member of Club B? If yes, it’s one club with multiple venues. If no — if Club B is a separate entity you own as part of a franchise arrangement or an investment in a distinct business — it’s two clubs.

This matters for data protection as much as for admin. Combining the membership records of two genuinely separate clubs in one account creates data governance problems: parents at Club A have not consented to their information being held in a system that also serves Club B. Keep distinct entities distinct.

If you operate a franchise model and are looking for a way to manage a network of clubs with centralised visibility, contact us — that’s a Custom arrangement rather than a standard plan configuration.

When to upgrade

The standard Adminished plans support clubs up to 200 active students. For most clubs running two or three venues, that ceiling is reached slowly — if you’re adding 15-20 students per venue and running 3 venues, you’ll hit 200 at around the 40-member-per-venue mark, which is a healthy, established operation.

The Pro plan (£49/month) is the right level for most multi-venue clubs — it lifts you to 200 students, unlimited classes and rooms, 10 admin seats and unlimited consent forms. Every Adminished feature (venue management, coach permissions, per-venue reporting) is available on every tier; Pro just gives you the headroom multi-venue operations need.

If you’re approaching or exceeding 200 active students, or if you need custom reporting, API access, or franchisor-level visibility across multiple accounts, get in touch and we’ll structure something appropriate.

The white-label question

One feature that matters at multi-venue scale is whether your software is visible to parents at all. A club that runs two venues and has 180 members is a real organisation. It has a reputation. That reputation is built partly by the communications parents receive.

When those communications come from a recognisable club identity — your logo, your colours, your club’s name in the sender line — they reinforce the sense that there is one coherent club operating across two locations. When they come from a generic platform sender, Newport parents and Cardiff parents receive the same generic notification, which doesn’t build shared identity and doesn’t strengthen the brand that justifies the expansion in the first place.

Branded email communications are included on the Essential plan and above. Custom subdomain branding — your club’s domain appearing in the booking URL — is on the roadmap for a future release. For now, Pro clubs can apply their full logo and email branding across all parent-facing communications.

The spreadsheet never tells you what it doesn’t know

The hardest part of the multi-spreadsheet problem is that the spreadsheets don’t fail obviously. They fail quietly. A duplicate billing entry sits unnoticed until a parent points it out. A missing billing entry sits unnoticed until you look at the numbers and they’re lower than expected. A permissions gap sits unnoticed until a coach sees something they shouldn’t.

By the time you notice, the problem is usually months old and the trust damage — with parents, with coaches, with an accountant who’s received one too many inconsistent PDFs — is real.

The time to consolidate is not after the second venue has been running for six months. It’s before the second venue opens, when the system is clean and there’s nothing to migrate. One club, configured correctly, scales to multiple venues without structural change. Two spreadsheets, scaled, become four spreadsheets and then a problem.

Adminished’s Pro plan is designed for growing clubs running multiple venues — consolidated records, per-venue reporting, and coach permissions from £49/month. See what’s included.

Written by the Adminished team · More guides →