Cards, GCash, Maya, GrabPay and QR Ph: Kaayu Now Takes Every Payment Your Members Use

A member walks up to your front desk to renew. They have ₱2,500 sitting in GCash, no cash in their wallet, and a card they left at home. If your gym can only take cash or a card terminal, you have just turned a completed sale into a promise to come back tomorrow — and a meaningful share of those people never do. The payment method gap is one of the quietest ways a gym loses money, because nothing shows up in your reports. The sale simply never happens.

We have spent the last stretch of development closing that gap properly. Kaayu's payment layer is now finished and live: one integration that accepts cards, GCash, Maya, GrabPay and QR Ph, works at the front desk, on your own website, and on automatic renewal — and it runs through whichever payment provider you prefer.

The Payment Method Gap

In the Philippines, how people pay has moved much faster than how gyms collect. E-wallets are now a default for everyday spending, QR Ph has given the country a single interoperable QR standard across banks and wallets, and a growing share of members simply do not carry cash. Meanwhile a lot of gyms are still running on a cash drawer, a notebook, and a card terminal that only comes out for the big annual plans.

The cost of that mismatch is not dramatic enough to notice day to day. It looks like a renewal that slips two weeks, a walk-in who does not convert, a personal-training package discussed but never bought. It is the same leak we wrote about in our piece on gym revenue leaks, and payment friction is the version of it that is easiest to fix — because the fix is purely technical.

What Kaayu Accepts Now

Kaayu talks to three payment providers, and you pick the one that suits your business. The methods available depend on which you choose:

You run one provider at a time, deliberately. We considered letting gyms mix providers per payment surface and decided against it: two live gateways means two dashboards, two settlement schedules, two reconciliation problems, and a support conversation that starts with "which one did that payment go through?" One provider, every method it supports, everywhere in the system.

Cash, bank transfer and manual e-wallet payments have not gone anywhere either. They are recorded as offline payments against the same invoice and the same member record, so your reporting stays whole regardless of how someone actually paid.

QR Ph at the Front Desk

The point-of-sale register can now put a QR Ph code straight on the screen. The member scans it with whichever banking or wallet app they already have, pays, and the register confirms the sale by itself — no staff member squinting at a phone screen to verify a screenshot, which is both slow and the single easiest payment fraud to pull on a busy front desk.

The details matter here, so we built them in: the QR modal shows a live countdown to expiry, staff can cancel a pending payment if the member changes their mind, and a successful payment produces an unmistakable confirmation before the register resets for the next customer. It is designed for a queue at 6pm, not a quiet demo.

Memberships That Renew Themselves

Manual renewal is a tax on your staff and a monthly opportunity for a member to reconsider. Kaayu supports true recurring billing on Xendit and PayMongo: the member authorises payment once, and the membership renews on schedule without anyone chasing it.

This is the difference between a membership that continues by default and one that has to be actively re-bought every month. Every renewal cycle you remove is a decision point you remove, and decision points are where members leak away — usually not because they were unhappy, but because renewing was mildly inconvenient on the day they were asked.

Selling While the Gym Is Closed

Kaayu's web store lets someone buy a membership without ever speaking to your staff. There are two ways to run it: embed the store widget directly into your existing website with a snippet of code, or use the hosted storefront page we generate for your gym if you would rather not touch your site at all.

The whole purchase runs end to end on its own. The buyer picks a plan, verifies their email with a six-digit code, reads and signs your membership agreement — drawn with a finger or typed, both producing a stored signature document — and pays with any method your provider supports. The moment the payment confirms, their account, invoice, signed contract and membership all come into existence together.

No Merchant Account? No Problem

The usual barrier to accepting digital payments is not the software — it is getting a merchant account in the first place. So Kaayu can create one for you. Choose "Kaayu managed account" in your payment settings, give us your business name and the owner's email, and we create a Xendit sub-account for your gym under Kaayu's platform account.

You still complete Xendit's verification yourself: accept their emailed invitation, submit your business registration and a government ID, pass their identity check, and add the bank account you want your money settled into. When Xendit approves it, your settings page flips to active on its own and digital payments start working.

Kaayu takes no cut of these payments. There is no platform fee layered on top — you pay your provider's rates and nothing more to us. Until verification completes, sales are simply recorded as offline payments so nothing is lost in the meantime.

What Happens After the Payment

The part that actually saves your staff time is not the payment — it is everything that follows it without anybody doing data entry. When a payment confirms, whether at the register, on your website, or from an automatic renewal that fired at 3am, Kaayu writes the invoice, extends the membership, refreshes the member's door access so the turnstile lets them in on the next visit, and sends the receipt.

That chain is also built to survive the messy reality of payment webhooks. Providers retry, duplicate and occasionally deliver notifications out of order; a payment that arrives twice must not create two memberships. Every step is idempotent, so a replayed notification quietly does nothing instead of corrupting a member's record. Refunds run through the same interface, against the same invoice, on any of the three providers.

What We Are Building Next

To be straight about where the line currently sits: bank payments are not done. Direct bank transfer as a one-off method, and bank direct debit for recurring memberships, are specified and in progress — we have the Philippine bank channel catalogue built and the implementation planned in phases. They are not live yet, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out after signing up. Recurring billing on Stripe is likewise not offered today; if you need auto-renew, Xendit or PayMongo is the answer.

Everything else described above is live and running in production gyms right now.

If you are still taking cash and hoping members remember to come back with it, the gap between what your members carry and what you can accept is costing you more than you can see in your reports. If you would like a walk through what Kaayu's payment setup would look like for your gym — including whether a managed account makes sense for you — get in touch here.