Is Your Martial Arts School’s Software Provider Financially Stable? A Due-Diligence Checklist

The company that runs your billing holds your member list, your attendance history and, most weeks, your tuition. If it fails, is sold or changes direction, your school feels it before you read about it. Almost no school owner checks. Here is why you should, and how.

Why does a vendor’s balance sheet matter to a school?

A school can survive a bad marketing month. It is much harder to survive a billing system that stops collecting, a vendor that is sold and repriced, or a platform that shuts down and leaves you rebuilding 300 recurring payment schedules by hand. Your software provider is not a utility. It is a counterparty, and counterparties can fail.

What one public vendor’s filings show

Mixed Martial Arts Group Limited (MMA.INC), owner of BJJLink, reports in Australian dollars and its fiscal year ends June 30. From its filings:

The auditor’s report on the fiscal 2025 statements included an explanatory paragraph expressing substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The company’s own wording is that it has incurred operating losses and operating cash outflows, and that continuing depends on raising additional financing and/or generating enough cash from operations.

Since then the company has taken steps it describes as strengthening the business. It returned to positive net assets by December 2025. It completed a US$4.0 million private placement at US$1.00 a share in August 2026. On September 10 it said it had removed about US$1.71 million from its annualized cash operating costs.

On November 3, 2026, it filed a Form 12b-25 notifying the SEC that its annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended June 30, 2026 would be late. It said it needed more time to finalize its financial statements, expected to file within the 15-day extension the rule allows, and did not anticipate a significant change in operating results from the prior year. As of this writing we have not seen the fiscal 2026 report. Until it is filed, the most recent audited picture is the one above.

A note for readers who have seen these numbers elsewhere: some summaries have quoted them in U.S. dollars. They are Australian dollars.

What does this tell an academy owner?

It does not tell you the company will fail. Plenty of software businesses lose money for years while they grow, and this one has raised capital and cut costs. It tells you three narrower things. First, your vendor’s survival can depend on investors, not on you. Second, a vendor under financial pressure has strong reasons to raise prices, add fees or monetize your students, which is exactly the plan MMA.INC laid out on November 12 (see Who Owns the Martial Arts Student?). Third, and most important, you only know this because the company is listed. Most of your alternatives disclose nothing at all.

Consolidation is the other half of the risk. Mindbody’s parent closed a US$7.5 billion merger with EGYM in March 2026. Gymdesk acquired Smoothcomp. A sale is not a failure, but it can change pricing, support, product direction and contract terms on a date you did not choose.

The vendor due-diligence checklist

Print this, and put the answers in a file before you sign or renew.

1. Financial stability

• Is the company public or private? If public, read the latest annual report and look for the words “going concern.”
• If private, who owns it: founders, private equity, a strategic buyer? Has it been sold in the last three years?
• Ask directly: is the company profitable, and how many months of operating cash does it hold? A vendor may decline. Note that it did.
• How many paying customers does it have, as distinct from “profiles,” “listings” or “users”?

2. Data ownership and portability

• Does the contract say the school owns all member, attendance, rank and payment data?
• Can you export everything yourself, today, in a standard format? Test it before you need it.
• Can recurring billing and stored payment methods be migrated to a new processor, or will every family need to re-enter a card?
• Does the vendor keep a right to use your members’ data, or to contact them, for its own products?

3. Payment continuity

• Who is the actual payment processor, and is it the vendor or a third party? MMA.INC itself lists reliance on third-party payment providers as a risk.
• How quickly are funds deposited to your account, and could they be held if the vendor has a dispute with its processor?
• What notice does the vendor give before changing processing rates or adding fees?

4. Contract terms

• What is the term, the auto-renewal date and the cancellation notice period?
• Does the contract survive a sale of the vendor, and can a buyer reprice it?
• Is there a price cap on renewal?
• What happens to your data if the vendor shuts down? Is there a wind-down or escrow commitment?

5. Your own continuity plan

• Export your full member list and billing schedule every month and store it outside the platform.
• Know which second vendor you would move to, and roughly how long migration would take.
• Keep at least one direct communication channel to your families, email or text, that you own and the platform does not.

Frequently asked questions

Is BJJLink about to shut down?

Nothing in the public record says so. MMA.INC’s filings carry going-concern language and it has told the SEC its fiscal 2026 annual report will be late, but the company has raised capital, cut costs and returned to positive net assets. The point is that owners should check every vendor, not that this one will fail.

How do I find out if a private software company is financially stable?

You usually cannot see its accounts. Ask about ownership, profitability, cash runway and customer count, note what it declines to answer, and protect yourself contractually with export, migration and wind-down terms.

What is a going-concern warning?

A statement, often in an auditor’s report, that there is substantial doubt about whether a company can keep operating for the next year without new financing or improved cash flow. It is a warning, not a prediction of failure.

What is the single most important protection?

Regular full exports of your member and billing data, stored outside the platform, plus a contract clause confirming you own that data.

Related reading

• Who Owns the Martial Arts Student? Inside MMA.INC’s $180 Million Monetization Model
• Martial Arts School Software: What the Vendors Publish
• Who Collects Your Tuition: Four Billing Models Compared