Fitness Studio or Gym QuickBooks CleanupThe export is the sales journal
The billing file already knows what was charged. The bank feed only knows the lump that arrived.
Open the export
What the file is for
Studios often treat the bank feed as the book, because the feed is what QuickBooks offers first. The feed is a list of deposits and a pile of card charges for rent, software, and supplies. It is not a sales journal. The sales journal is the export from the billing tool, the one that says which member was charged for which product.
Cleanup means teaching QuickBooks to receive that journal. Items are created to match the products. A deposit is entered for the gross and split across those items. The cut kept by the card company is entered as the cost of collecting. The bank feed is then used to match, not to invent the sale.
Lines in the feed that look like member money but carry no product go to a temporary account on the balance sheet. They sit in the open, with a balance anyone can see, until a document says what they were. They are not dropped into sales to make the month look done. They leave that account only along one path. Ordinary expense, owner money, a transfer between the studio's own accounts, or a real asset or liability that needs its own account.
The processor account and the account that pays the rent are both the studio's. Money moving between them is not a sale and it is not an expense. We record that move from the account that received the cash, so the account that sent it can match the departure. The button marked transfer stays unused unless the engagement already says to use it.
Rules come last
A bank rule is a gift when the items already exist and the rule only matches a vendor you have already decided. A bank rule is a trap when it posts every deposit to one income account. We turn those rules off, or we rewrite them after the items are real. The feed's suggestion is a hint. It is not a close.
The reconciliation then has a chance to finish at zero because every statement line already has a home. The human still clicks the finish. The work before that click is the part that used to take the weekend.
None of this prints your totals on a public page. The method is the method. The amounts stay in your file.
Payroll sits beside the journal, not inside it
Trainers are not an item on the member draft. If they are paid, the question is whether a payroll provider is already running, and whether the people are set up there. We set the provider up when it is missing. Once the login exists in the studio's name, we step back and the provider sends the pay. A contract that says contractor does not settle the question by itself if the studio controls how the hour is done. That is a federal test, and it is a conversation with the facts, not a slogan on this page.
Equipment on the floor is not an item on the draft either. A new rig is an asset question for the return, handled with the closed year, not buried in the same income account as a bottle of water.
Where the export sits
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.