Accounting: Costs, Revenue and Profit
Why this matters
Most gym owners can tell you roughly what came in last month. Very few can tell you what they kept. Rent, trainer wages, electricity, a new set of plates, the water delivery. It all goes out in ones and twos. Someone writes it on a receipt, the receipt goes in a drawer, and nobody ever adds it up. So the gym feels busy, and the bank balance disagrees, and nobody knows which one is telling the truth.
Kazafit closes that gap. Your income is already in the system — when a member pays, Kazafit records it and counts it up for you. Once you also record what you spend, the profit figure works itself out — one screen: 4,200,000 in, 3,650,000 out, 550,000 kept — 13%. That last number is the one you can never work out from a receipt drawer.
The second thing this fixes is the monthly re-typing. Rent is the same every month, and so are salaries and the internet bill. Typing them in by hand costs you an evening a month, and sooner or later you skip one. Every month you skip makes your profit look better than it really is. Set them up once as costs that repeat, and Kazafit records them without you.
And when a landlord, a lender or an accountant asks how the business is doing, you have a statement to show them instead of a sum on the back of an envelope.
What you can do
- See whether the gym made money this month. Accounting Overview shows four figures: Revenue (money in), Expenses (money out), Net Profit (what you kept) and Profit Margin (what you kept out of every 100 shillings that came in) — plus a graph of money coming in over time and a graph of profit over time.
- Set the dates every number is counted from. The Report period control covers Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annual, All Time, or your own start and end dates. Every figure and graph on the page follows it.
- Build your own cost groups. Name them the way your gym thinks — Rent, Electricity, Equipment, Wages. Each gets a description, a colour tag that shows beside it in the category list, and an on/off switch so you can retire one without losing the history behind it.
- Record each cost with enough detail to find it again. Amount, group, who you paid, how you paid, a reference number and the date.
- Find a cost you recorded months ago. Search by words in the description, or narrow by group, who you paid, how you paid, reference, amount range, date range, currency, or which staff member entered it. You also get total spend, the number of costs in the period, and a graph of how costs change over time.
- Let repeating costs record themselves. Daily, weekly, monthly, annually or a custom interval, with a start date, an optional end date and a timezone. Kazafit checks regularly and records anything due in the background — nobody has to be logged in.
- Stay in control of those schedules. Pause one while a contract is on hold, resume it later, run one immediately with Run Now, or push everything due through with "Record what is due now".
- Catch anything that failed to save. A tab called Did not go through lists every repeating cost that failed to record itself — with the number of attempts, when it last tried, what went wrong, and a Retry button. Nothing was paid or left unpaid; only the record failed. A panel shows how many costs are due and how many have failed.
- Download the report. Revenue and Profit & Loss each export to CSV or Excel, and you choose what goes in the file — Summary, Time Series, Transactions or Details. The Expenses screen has no download.
- See where your money is coming from. Revenue Reports splits income by where it came from — mainly your invoice payments and subscription payments — counts the payments behind it, compares this period against the last one, and lets you narrow to one member, one invoice or one payment method.
- Read a proper profit and loss statement. Gross Revenue (all the money in before costs), Total Expenses, Net Profit and Profit Margin, with a breakdown of where revenue came from, spend by cost group, a current-versus-previous comparison and a trend chart.
How to get started
- Sign in as the gym owner or a manager. Only those two roles can open any accounting screen — front desk and trainer accounts cannot. Anyone who can open these screens can also add, edit and delete costs and cost groups; there is no view-only accounting access.
- Open Accounting > Expenses and go to the Categories tab first. Use New Category to add your cost groups. The form prompts you: "Name the group this cost belongs to, for example Rent or Electricity."
- Switch to the Expense Records tab and use New Expense to log your first cost. Pick the group, enter the amount, then say who you paid — the box is labelled Vendor Name — then how you paid, a reference number if you have one (the M-Pesa code or bank slip number), and the date.
- Open Accounting > Recurring Expenses and use New Schedule for anything that repeats. Choose the group, the amount, who you pay, set Frequency to Monthly and pick a start date. Save. The schedule appears in the list, showing its frequency, status and its start and end dates. The exact date it will next record the cost is not shown in the list, but you can sort the list to put the soonest ones first, or filter by a range of upcoming dates.
- Open Accounting > Overview. It opens on the current month. Use the Report period control to change the dates, then read the four figures at the top.
- When you want more detail, open Accounting > Revenue or Accounting > Profit & Loss and use Manage Filters to narrow things down.
Good to know
Recording a cost does not pay anyone. This is your book, not your bank. There is no bank feed, no receipt scanning, and no card or bank connection. Every cost is typed in by hand, and a repeating schedule records the cost — it does not move money.
Profit is only as honest as your cost entry. If you never record rent or wages, Kazafit will show you a profit that does not exist.
Cancelling a cost does not remove it from your profit. The Status field (Draft, Confirmed, Cancelled) is a note to yourself — every cost you have saved counts against profit whatever its status. To take a cost out of the figures, delete it.
Money in means money collected, not money owed. Revenue counts paid invoices (amount above zero), plus any subscription payment that was taken without an invoice raised against it. Unpaid and part-paid invoices do not count. Subscription payments are dated by when the subscription was created, not by a separate payment time. For what is still outstanding, use the debt screens.
Amounts show in Tanzanian Shillings on the accounting screens. You can type a different currency code on a cost, but Kazafit does not convert it — it adds the number straight into your shilling totals. Keep everything in one currency.
Kazafit tries a failed entry up to five times, spacing the attempts further apart each time, then stops for good. After the fifth failure the Retry button will not bring that entry back — it stays in the Did not go through tab as a record. Record the cost by hand on the Expenses screen instead. Retry also does nothing while a schedule is paused or before the next scheduled retry time.
Filling in past costs is capped, and only happens when you first create a schedule. Give a brand-new schedule a start date in the past and Kazafit fills in the missed entries, telling you how many were added, skipped or did not save — but it fills in at most 180 entries. A monthly schedule backdated more than 15 years would stop short; a normal backdate of a few months is fine. Changing the start date on a schedule you already saved does not fill anything in.
Imports & Exports is not available. You will see it in the accounting menu, but opening it shows a placeholder — there is no way to bulk-load past costs or revenue from a spreadsheet today.