Bitlancer for Mariana Tek Case Study: Improving Efficiency and Accuracy for Studios with One or Multiple Locations

Whether your fitness business operates from a single location or spans multiple sites, Bitlancer for Mariana Tek simplifies payroll with one-click calculations, detailed reporting, and consistently accurate results you can trust.

This case study shares two studio owners’ experiences with Bitlancer for Mariana Tek. Justine Vandenbrink is a studio operator and boutique fitness consultant at The Core Lab, a high-intensity Pilates studio with three locations in the Houston Area. Toby Boyce is the owner of AXL Studios, a one-location indoor cycling studio on Boston’s eastern waterfront.

“Before” pictures and pain points

Studio owners and managers often manage payroll with a spreadsheet-based process. This can take significant time, especially with complexities like multiple locations and/or incentive pay. It may also entail transferring data by hand, which can introduce frustrating errors that consume even more time.

Before discovering Bitlancer, AXL Studio’s payroll process was entirely manual. “We were using ADP for our payroll system,” Toby relates. “First, I’d run a report in Mariana Tek, then export the report to an Excel spreadsheet, and then tailor the spreadsheet to fit ADP’s needs. I’d have two screens going with multiple windows open, and I would manually input data from my spreadsheet into ADP. It was a painful process that took at least an hour!”

At The Core Lab, Justine knew when she transitioned the business to Mariana Tek that they would want Bitlancer to pay bonus incentives per-head. “We’ve been using Bitlancer with Mariana Tek from the very beginning,” confirms Justine. “We never had to calculate payroll without Bitlancer.” 

Quantifiable time savings with Bitlancer

When AXL Studios first adopted Bitlancer they were using ADP for payments rather than Bitlancer’s native Gusto integration. Bitlancer alone enabled them to forgo the spreadsheets and automate payroll calculations in Mariana Tek. But they still had to import data by hand into ADP. That step alone took about 45 minutes.

That adds up to an 80% reduction in payroll processing time with increased accuracy for this single-location studio. 

Since she has used Bitlancer with Mariana Tek all along, Justine doesn’t have a before-and-after time savings to quantify. Instead, she relates her payroll experience to quality of life: “There’s a big difference between being a studio owner and a studio operator. A lot of people are operators, who are in the weeds every day doing everything. And this dream they had of running this amazing studio and having more flexibility and free time falls to the wayside. Bitlancer helps studio owners take their lives back and achieve a better work-life balance.”

Significant accuracy improvements

Bitlancer integrates seamlessly with Mariana Tek as well as Gusto, and can export payroll data for import into other payroll solutions. By exchanging data with both Mariana Tek and the payroll software automatically, Bitlancer eliminates both factors in the manual equation:

This end-to-end integration and automation reduces or eliminates the human errors that are liable to occur with a manual approach. The result is improved data accuracy and much less time spent finding and correcting payroll errors.

Justine agrees: “Bitlancer is more accurate than a spreadsheet-based process for sure. Anytime you have people working in spreadsheets, there is a lot of room for errors. With Bitlancer, you enter in the pay rates and it does all the calculations for you.”

More about Bitlancer’s Gusto integration

With Bitlancer for Mariana Tek you can automatically upload your payroll data to Gusto, or export a payroll report in your choice of format for use with another payroll software or a bookkeeper’s process. 

Bitlancer’s direct integration with Gusto delivers fully automated, one-click payroll processing where you can upload payroll hours and earnings straight into Gusto.
With payroll systems other than Gusto, a few more clicks are required but there is usually no need to rekey data. For example, The Core Lab pays its instructors and staff using Zelle. Bitlancer makes it easy to send everyone their pay details. 

“I love the simplicity of sending the pay stubs,” says Justine. “It’s a really easy process with just a few clicks.”

One-stop error correction

While some software allows users to run reports with incomplete data or other errors, Bitlancer currently flags errors and omissions by default and helps you find and fix them so your payroll report will be complete and correct. Toby and Justine both appreciate this heads-up approach.

“I like that Bitlancer will prompt you and give you the option to proceed while drawing attention to the fact that, for example, you’re running payroll without including a pay rate for one of your instructors, or you failed to add an instructor into Gusto,” explains Toby. “I like that it’s checking me, it’s checking Gusto, it’s checking everything.”

“If you miss something and somebody doesn’t get paid correctly, they’re like, ‘What happened?’” adds Justine. “I prefer to see the errors upfront so I can systematically fix things before I run the report again.”

Save & Share: A favorite feature

Bitlancer makes Mariana Tek payroll calculations super-fast and easy for fitness business leaders. But it can make life better for instructors and staff as well. 

Many studios love Bitlancer’s “Save & Share” feature, which lets you share payment details with one or more payees with just a few clicks. 

Justine clarifies: “With our previous provider it was difficult for us to send pay stubs. Payees just got their Zelle payment or paper check. If someone wanted to verify they were paid correctly, it was a cumbersome process that required us to run individual reports for each payee, and then download those and email them out. Because of that, we didn’t do pay stubs.”

When that studio became part of The Core Lab and moved to Mariana Tek and Bitlancer, the staff was “very excited” about the higher level of transparency with payment details, especially the ability to see incentive pay. Sharing detailed pay data gives a studio more of a professional feel that shows payees you care about keeping them informed.

Share & Save can also give business owners and managers a view on client check-ins/registrations.

“Sometimes we have issues where staff forget to check in some of the clients,” notes Justine. “This is annoying because then the clients get charged a no-show fee, which we have to refund. Plus, the instructor doesn’t get paid for that person who wasn’t checked in.” 

Multi-location support

Bitlancer makes it easy for multi-location fitness businesses to run payroll for the whole business, for individual locations, or for subsets of locations. Our aim is to give multi-location studio owners complete flexibility over their payroll setup.

The Core Lab treats its three locations as separate entities for financial purposes, and each has its own bank account. Therefore, when running payroll they need the ability to keep locations separate. Instructors who work at two locations get two payments, for example. 

With Bitlancer it’s easy to set up separate accounts for different locations and switch between them. Or you can put multiple locations under a single account but still run payroll by location. Some Bitlancer customers also want to keep locations financially separate but aggregate their payroll numbers for reporting purposes. 

Smooth onboarding with personalized support

Bitlancer looks to offer a hands-on, personalized onboarding and configuration process where new customers feel strongly supported and are confident using the software right away. 

“The onboarding process was very simple and quick,” Justine confirms. “Things were set up very cleanly, and it was easy to run payroll right away. It’s very easy to put in your pay rates, your per-head bonuses, and your flat rates. I also appreciate the sidebar that shows per-head payout calculations up to a preset maximum.” 

“We’ve never had any issues,” continues Justine. “And the few times where we’ve had questions, everybody’s always been super helpful and gotten back to us super quick.”

AXL Studios also reports a positive onboarding experience. “We’ve never had any issues at all,” says Toby. “It’s a very seamless integration with both Mariana Tek and Gusto.”

Advice for other studio owners

What advice would Justine and Toby give other studio owners who are considering Bitlancer for payroll automation with Mariana Tek? 

“It’s a no-brainer,” Toby emphasizes. “I can’t even fathom doing payroll the old-fashioned way. And Bitlancer is such a value-add—for the price, it’s great! I would never advise anyone to do payroll without it.”

“Truly, it’s a no-brainer,” echoes Justine. “Don’t do payroll in Mariana Tek without Bitlancer.”

“So many boutique studio owners are strapped for time, and they’re always trying to get their time back somehow,” Justine observes. “Your time is something you can never get back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And there are so many better things that you could be doing than manually calculating payroll.”

Next steps?

Want to find out more? Please reach out to schedule a call. Or get started right away with your 60-day free trial of Bitlancer for Mariana Tek.