Belt and Attendance Tracking Software for Martial Arts Clubs
Belt tracking sounds like a storage problem and is actually a calculation problem. Any tool can hold the fact that someone is a green belt. The job that costs you an evening every term is working out who is eligible — which needs time in rank, attendance since the last grading, and whether they have covered the syllabus for the grade they are going for.
If your software cannot answer that question, you will export a register into a spreadsheet several times a year. That, rather than any feature list, is the thing to test.
Quick Verdict
Martialytics has the clearest answer to the eligibility question. Its grading system presents a traffic-light view of who is ready to advance, built from attendance and time in rank, so the pre-grading job becomes reading one screen rather than reconciling two.
Zen Planner is the better fit if your progression runs through stripes as well as belts — it tracks class hours, technique milestones, instructor assessments and stripe additions in the student profile, and flags promotion-ready students automatically. Gymdesk and Kicksite both record rank competently but leave the eligibility judgement to you.
The Three Things That Make Grading Admin Hard
Eligibility is derived, not stored. It is a function of promotion date, attendance since that date, and syllabus coverage. Software that stores rank without calculating from it has done the easy third of the job.
Attendance quality decides everything downstream. If the register is unreliable, so is every eligibility figure built on it. This is why check-in method matters more than it looks.
Your register is also a safeguarding record. For kids’ classes, emergency contact details, medical notes and authorised collection sit alongside attendance. Keeping that in the same system as the register is a genuine practical benefit — Martialytics holds emergency contact details with attendance, for example.
How Each Tool Handles It
Martialytics
A traffic-light grading view shows who is ready to advance based on attendance and time in rank, turning belt testing from guesswork into something you can read at a glance. Attendance, emergency contact details, grading lists and group email all live in one place. Priced from £69/month for 50 students, in pounds.
The catch: reviewers report there is no reduced-permission login, so an assistant instructor who only needs to take the register gets full system access or none. Reviewers also note there is no family grouping and no true one-off payment option, and at least one club reported outgrowing key features past around 200 members.
Zen Planner
Tracks class hours, technique milestones, instructor assessments, stripe additions and belt promotions within each student profile, and automatically flags promotion-ready students once all criteria are met. The most granular progression tracking in this comparison, which matters most for BJJ.
The catch: it is a general fitness platform rather than a martial-arts-first tool, priced in dollars from $99/month, with marketing, website and branded-app modules charged separately on top. Price the configuration you will actually use.
Gymdesk
Includes belt and rank tracking plus skills tracking in the base price, alongside family accounts, POS and a member app, from $75/month for up to 50 members. Good value if you want everything included and are comfortable making the eligibility call yourself.
Kicksite
Handles belt rank promotion alongside attendance and billing, from $49/month for up to 25 students, and rates 4.8 out of 5 across 126 Capterra reviews with consistent praise for how easy it is to learn.
The catch that matters here: reviewers report the attendance scanner is unreliable. Since every eligibility calculation depends on register accuracy, test check-in properly during a trial before you build a grading process on it.
Attendance: The Part People Get Wrong
Three practical decisions worth making before you choose a tool, because they affect which one fits.
Who takes the register. Instructor-marked is slower but accurate. Student self-check-in is faster but depends on hardware working every session — and reviewers report scanner reliability problems on at least one tool here.
What counts as attendance. Does open mat count toward grading? Does a seminar? Decide first, then check the software lets you configure it rather than assuming its default matches your syllabus.
Who can access it. If assistant instructors take registers, check the permission model. Martialytics has no lite login, which means giving an assistant register access means giving them everything.
Check this before anything else if you are a UK club: how the tool takes money. Most of these platforms are American and route payments through card processors. A great many UK clubs collect monthly fees by Direct Debit, commonly through GoCardless, because it is cheaper than card fees and fails less often on recurring payments. None of the tools in this comparison has confirmed GoCardless support, and Martialytics documentation lists it explicitly as not yet compatible. Confirm the migration path with the vendor before you commit, not after.
Comparison
| Tool | Grading readiness | Stripe tracking | Permission tiers | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Martialytics | Traffic-light view | Confirm for your syllabus | No lite login | £69/mo |
| Zen Planner | Auto-flags when criteria met | Yes | Not confirmed | $99/mo |
| Gymdesk | Manual judgement | Skills tracking | Not confirmed | $75/mo |
| Kicksite | Manual judgement | Belt rank promotion | Not confirmed | $49/mo |
Prices are approximate and change — verify current plans on each vendor’s website. USD-priced tools cost a moving amount in pounds depending on the exchange rate. “Not confirmed” means we could not verify the feature from the vendor’s own published material, not that it is absent.
Who This Is NOT For
This guide is for club owners choosing software to run grading and attendance. It is not for:
Clubs with informal or infrequent gradings — if you promote once a year on instructor judgement alone, the readiness features are not worth paying for.
Anyone looking for syllabus design help — this is about recording progression, not deciding what should be in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which martial arts software shows who is ready to grade?
Martialytics presents this directly through a traffic-light readiness view driven by attendance and time in rank. Zen Planner flags promotion-ready students once configured criteria are met. Gymdesk and Kicksite record rank and attendance accurately but leave you to make the eligibility call from the underlying data.
Can I let assistant instructors take the register without full system access?
Not on Martialytics — reviewers specifically raise the absence of a lite login for assistants who only need registers. We could not confirm granular permission tiers on the other three from published material, so if several people take registers at your club, ask each vendor directly and treat it as a real selection criterion rather than a detail.
Is self-check-in worth it, or should instructors mark the register?
Self-check-in saves instructor time but every eligibility figure depends on it working. Reviewers report the Kicksite scanner is unreliable, which is exactly the failure mode to worry about — a register with gaps produces grading lists you cannot trust. If you go self-check-in, test it across a full week of real classes during the trial.
Can attendance records double as safeguarding records for kids’ classes?
Partly, and it is worth setting up deliberately. Martialytics holds emergency contact details alongside attendance, which keeps the register and the safeguarding information in one place. Whichever tool you choose, check what happens to that data on export and deletion — you are holding children’s medical and contact details, and your data protection obligations do not transfer to the vendor.