What's New in FencR: Join Funnels, a Check-In Kiosk, Session Announcements, and Analytics That Answer Real Questions
The July release is FencR's biggest since 1.0: a lead-capture join funnel with a visual pipeline builder, a self-serve check-in kiosk for the front desk, announcements and staff notes posted directly on sessions, coach and lesson analytics, and full participation for coaches and parents who fence. All of it free, for every club.
The last few weeks have been the busiest stretch of building since FencR 1.0. Five substantial features land together in this release, and they share a theme: the everyday moments of running a club, handled where they actually happen. Someone walks in the door, someone asks to join, practice moves rooms, a coach wonders who is actually taking lessons. Each of those now has a home.
Here is the tour.
Turn "can I try fencing?" into a pipeline, not a sticky note
Every club gets inquiries: the parent who found you on Google, the student who wandered past the gym. What happens next is usually a sticky note, a half-remembered email, and a prospect who never hears back.
Leads and Pipelines gives that moment structure. You design a join funnel with a visual builder, choosing the steps a newcomer walks through: an intake form, a plan payment or application fee, even class placement, ending in a confirmation. The funnel runs on your public club page, your embedded website widget, and the club directory. Every submission becomes a lead in a new Leads tab, with a lifecycle tracker showing exactly how far each person got: filled out the form, created an account, paid, attended a first practice, became a full member.
Clubs that want a velvet rope get one: joining can be approval-gated, so new sign-ups wait in a queue until staff says yes. And a traffic card shows how many people are viewing your join surfaces, so you know whether the funnel needs more visitors or a better pitch.
Read the full deep dive: Introducing Leads and Pipelines.
The front desk runs itself now
The Check-In Kiosk turns any signed-in staff device, a tablet by the door or the front-desk laptop, into a locked, club-branded check-in station. Athletes tap their name, confirm, done. Two taps, no app, no login.
The important part is what it does not add: a second attendance system. Kiosk check-ins mark the same attendance record coaches already manage, with the true arrival time on top, so your attendance views and analytics pick everything up natively. A 4-digit staff code locks the kiosk, and it survives page refreshes and flaky gym wifi.
Read the full deep dive: Self-Serve Check-In for Fencing Clubs.
Tell the people who are actually coming
Practice moved to the back gym? Tournament carpool leaves at seven? Announcements now live directly on the session they are about. Post one and everyone signed up gets an in-app notification that opens the exact practice it concerns, with parents notified for their minor children. A separate internal notes tab keeps staff logistics, "strip 3 lights are flaky," visible to coaches and admins only, enforced at the database level.
The session view itself was rebuilt around this: a wide two-column layout with details and a tap-for-directions location on one side, announcements and the roster on the other. Long rosters and long announcement threads collapse politely instead of burying the sign-up button.
Read the full deep dive: Session Announcements and Coach Notes.
Analytics that answer the questions coaches actually ask
The analytics suite grew from charts into answers:
- Coaching Activity. How many lessons and classes has each coach led, and how many did they assist? A new leaderboard splits the two, with a drill-down per coach: by student, by class name, and a monthly trend. Coaches get their own My Coaching page scoped to their own sessions.
- Student lesson tracking. Open any member and see their lesson life: which coaches they work with, how often, private versus group, and whether lessons were taken or missed.
- Taken / Missed marking. Past private lessons get one-tap marking right in the lesson view, with a gentle amber nudge on the calendar for anything unmarked. Missed lessons keep their credit by design; comping one is the normal cancel flow.
Underneath, the numbers got more honest: revenue analytics are genuinely net of refunds, timezone-aware by month, and locked down so every analytics query verifies your role in the club before answering.
Coaches fence too (and so do parents)
FencR now fully embraces a truth of club life: the person running the club is often also training in it. Coaches and admins can enroll in plans, book themselves into practices with the same credits and quotas as any athlete, and pay their own invoices, through new personal My Plans and My Billing pages that sit alongside their management tools. Parents who fence get the same treatment.
Staff still keep their privileges where it counts: a coach joining a session can choose to join as staff, without spending a plan credit. The principle, now written into how FencR is built: roles gate management, participation belongs to everyone.
Free, for every club, like always
No tiers, no caps, no feature gates. Everything above is live for every FencR club as it rolls out, at the price the whole platform costs: nothing.
If your club is not on FencR yet, creating one takes about fifteen minutes. You will get the join funnel, the kiosk, the announcements, and the analytics on day one, and we will keep shipping.