Zen PlannerReviews of zenplanner.com

Dislike: 1) I am obliged to use your Credit Card payment processor (CardPointe) which is super expensive (~3.5%). 2) ZP app has very limited functionality. Need to show open classes, attendance, bills & payments 3) ZP Kiosk app does not filter by location. 4) Can not inquiry on method of payment in AP ledger.

Edit: The team at ZP reached out to me personally and sounded shocked that all of this happened. I was just as shocked to hear from someone who actually cared. They are working with me to make things right. I will update this again. Original: I was THE biggest Zen Planner fan for years. I created a blog and a facebook group to help other users like me who needed more Zen Planner resources. I scheduled meetings with the ZP staff to show them the features we needed. I spent hours helping them improve their software. I volunteered at their booth during the Martial Arts Supershow, inviting people over to their booth. I even considered working at Zen Planner at one time. After being with them for many years, I decided to open another business, but suddenly had a terrible life-altering accident happen with our 9 year old daughter. I therefore cancelled the business plans and used that money for hospital bills. I immediately cancelled the new location's ZP account. In the middle of my family tragedy, ZP used deceptive and unfair tactics to uncancel my account. They removed my access to the database but kept charging me for it. Now I find out years later that they've been charging me all these years - upwards of $10,000, unjustly. They took their time during my cancellation process, and whoops another payment came out. Oh well. What's another $150? I save my 1 star reviews for the few that deserve it. Let this be a warning to anyone even thinking about joining Zen Planner. These guys are crooks. The software founders were awesome, but I pity them as they have to watch their legacy be destroyed by the new owners.

I’m a previous customer of zenplanner and decided to go back as the have an excellent platform for my needs however this second rollout has been really choppy. The app has not allowed my clients to add their payment info causing clients payments to be late our business receipts to not come through. This business is my livelihood. I have called numerous times to customer care and while they have “tickets” out with the texh people I have not had the issue resolved and it has been well over a week. I am not planning to leave this platform but I am extremely disappointed with how this rollout has gone.

In contrast with the business owners who commented here, I would like to share my experience as a regular guy who hits the box from time to time and happens to be involved in the software industry. The lack of investment in native app development is obvious. Providing a web app instead is good for starters but not for a company that makes good profits and can obviously afford something better. Moreover, it would make sense if the web app (and the experience on the website as well) was somewhat contemporary but not stuck to and ugly UI and 15 years old UX. There's also an obvious lack of features like: - structured workout entry and formatting - proper purchase history - calendar reminders - body metrics - 3rd party integration (Strava?) - integration APIs Still, I give it 3/5 just because it somewhat does its basic job. However, I bet there are better options on the market and I believe it's just a matter of time for another service to get Zen Planner's share.

I compared ZP to dozens of other software in the industry and eventually decided to switch to ZP from Member Solutions, as I felt that Member Solutions had entirely abandoned any effort to modernize their technology. After using ZP for almost six years, I'm seeing a familiar pattern. While ZP's efforts seem to have pivoted to transforming the company to an online marketing agency, the core software experiences numerous outages on a monthly basis. I'm currently seeking other solutions as a next step.

Excited to learn more

I have yet to fully deploy Zen Planner and need a good degree of help to do that. I am hoping to get that assistance today!

There are some things it does well. But there are many things that are lacking, that really ought to work. There are a number of common business practices that it doesn't support by itself -- fairly standard ways of doing monthly account billing, or signing up for memberships that start at the beginning of the month, or scheduling appointments in perpetuity but paying for them monthly. You can always run a custom report to get what you need - except when you need info from two tables and neither type of report can get at the other table. You can do things with batch updates - except when the thing you need to update isn't available to batch update. There are significant usability issues in all aspects of the system. In the administrative back-end, staff can learn to work around these problems, although they lead to very tedious workflows (EVERYTHING is several clicks away). For the customer-facing side, new customers constantly get confused by the interface. Keeping up with customer requests and making sure membership and schedule data are current and intact is a full-time job. Zen Planner is better than nothing, but the overhead is quite significant. Expect it to be a big impact on your staff's workload. Edit: I'm amused by all the five-star ratings that say that tech support is so great. Well-designed software is usable on its own without having to call tech support every week.