What one credit actually is, before you sell ten of them

A credit is not a number on an account. It is a row with an owner, a scope, an expiry and a defined moment of consumption, and the booking system reads all 4 fields the instant a member taps book. Clubs decide the first one — 10 classes — and let the code decide the rest by default. Every credit argument that follows is about one of the three nobody wrote down.

The four fields, and what each decides at the door

Consumption point is skipped most often and determines the most. Deduct at booking and cancellation becomes a question about returning a credit, so your cancellation window is a credit-return policy under another name. Deduct at attendance and cancellation is free, but members hold places at no cost — pushing the problem onto no-show handling, covered in what a no-show should cost and who decides.

The three events that expose an undecided field

1. A member cancels 40 minutes before a session. If credits are consumed at booking, does it come back, and with the original expiry or a new one? If consumed at attendance, nothing moves and the question becomes whether the seat reaches the waitlist in time.
2. The club cancels the session. The credit returns under either model, and it must keep the expiry it had. Returning it with a fresh 30-day clock shortens what you sold when the original had 90 days left.
3. The club cancels the last session before expiry. The return has nowhere to go, so the expiry must extend — commonly by the days between the cancelled session and the expiry, with a floor of 14. Pick the rule now, or the support inbox picks it one exception at a time.

Expiry is the field with the longest tail

• From purchase or from first use. A pack bought in December and started in February decides this. From first use is kinder and harder to forecast; from purchase is predictable and generates the refund requests.
• Freezes must pause it. A freeze that stops billing while credits keep ageing is not a freeze — it moves the loss from the card to the entitlement. See freeze, pause and hold.
• Unexpired credits are money you owe, which is the argument in unused session packs are a liability. How that is treated in the accounts belongs there, not here.
• Check your market before picking a number. Consumer-protection and prepaid-voucher rules in several countries restrict how quickly a prepaid entitlement may expire, and they differ by market and change. Confirm the current text with the regulator or your advisers rather than copying a competitor.

Store credits as rows, not as a counter

A balance field cannot answer the questions a club asks. Which credit expires next? Which one paid for that booking? Which came from a goodwill gesture and should not be refunded in cash? Give every credit a row: id, member, product, scope, issued date, valid-from, expires-at, consumed-at, the booking that consumed it, and its origin.

With rows the consumption rule is simple and defensible: spend the credit expiring soonest among those whose scope permits the booking, and record which one. That removes most disputes, because the member's oldest entitlement is always the one being protected. It is the same discipline as what one exercise record has to hold — one fully specified row beats an aggregate you reconstruct later.

Where credits top up automatically each month, a silently lapsed mandate presents as a member who stopped booking rather than as a payment failure. The 4 states a dead mandate can be in are separated in the autopay mandate has quietly stopped collecting.

This record is what makes the rest of memberships, session packs and dues tractable, and it is the unglamorous half of any automation above it: an assistant chasing expiring credits is only as trustworthy as the row it reads. That is ordinary AI agents and automation work inside our sports and fitness practice, and what changes once one is live is in AI agents in production.

• credits
• entitlements
• class packs
• billing