How Planet Fitness keeps 2,400 gym locations compliant without a dedicated lease team

Planet Fitness opens gyms the way most companies open browser tabs. With over 2,400 locations and a franchise model that adds more than 100 new sites annually, the lease portfolio never stops changing. Every new location means a new lease. Every renewal, every rent escalation, every modification feeds into a portfolio that is always in motion.

Jennifer Walsh oversees accounting for both corporate-owned and franchise-supported locations. When she joined in 2022, the lease accounting process had been designed for a company half the current size. "We were managing leases the same way we did when we had 1,200 locations," Walsh says. "The spreadsheet was enormous and it broke constantly. Reports would fall apart when too much data was added."

The breaking point at scale

The franchise model added a layer of complexity that most lease accounting tools are not built to handle. Corporate locations had one set of reporting requirements. Franchise locations had another. Some franchisees provided lease data in structured spreadsheets. Others sent scanned PDFs. A few sent photos of paper documents taken on their phones.

Three full-time employees spent their days transcribing lease terms into a centralized workbook that fed the ERP system. The workbook had grown so large it took minutes to open and corrupted when multiple people edited simultaneously.

"We were finding roughly 120 errors per quarter," Walsh says. "Wrong commencement dates, transposed payment amounts, missing escalation clauses. Each one meant tracing it back to the source document and fixing it by hand."

The quarterly close stretched to 14 days. Auditors were spending extra time validating lease data, inflating fees by nearly $200,000 annually.

A platform that handles the chaos

Walsh looked at several options, but most assumed a clean data set as a starting point. Planet Fitness did not have clean data. It had a sprawling collection of documents in every format imaginable, coming from hundreds of different franchisees with no standardized process.

Arvexi's Document Intelligence module was the reason Walsh chose the platform. "I needed something that could take a photo of a lease amendment taken on an iPhone and turn it into structured data," she says. "Arvexi actually does that."

The rollout happened in three phases over four months. Phase one covered 400 corporate locations, establishing the baseline configuration and journal entry templates. Phase two added the top 1,000 franchise locations by lease value. Phase three swept in the remaining locations.

Arvexi's team built a custom intake workflow for franchise operators. Franchisees upload lease documents through a simple portal. The Document Intelligence module extracts the terms, flags anything unusual, and routes it for review. "The franchisees find it easy because there are no forms to fill out. We find it valuable because the data is clean before we ever touch it."

The new operating rhythm

Data entry is no longer a full-time job for anyone on the team. The three employees who previously spent their days on transcription now focus on lease analysis and franchise support - work that actually requires human judgment.

The review queue has become the team's primary workspace. When a new lease comes in or an existing one gets modified, it appears with the extracted terms pre-populated. Walsh's team reviews, approves, and the journal entries generate automatically.

"My favorite part is the critical date alerts," Walsh says. "When a lease is coming up for renewal or has an option expiring, the system tells us 90 days out. We used to track that on a spreadsheet and I guarantee we were missing things. We almost lost a renewal option on a high-traffic location in Texas - that would have been a six-figure mistake."

The Intelligence module helps Walsh answer questions from the executive team on demand. Average lease term by region. Occupancy cost per square foot across markets. The financial impact of consolidating two locations in the same metro area. Answers that used to take a week now take minutes.

Results that compound with growth

In the first year, the quarterly close dropped from 14 days to 5. Lease data errors fell from roughly 120 per quarter to fewer than 5. Audit preparation time was cut in half, and the external auditors reduced their fees accordingly.

But Walsh highlights scalability as the most important outcome. "We opened 110 new locations last year," she says. "Our lease accounting process handled every single one without us adding a person or extending the close. That is what success looks like when you are growing this fast."

The team is now exploring using Arvexi for equipment leases, including gym equipment under capital lease arrangements across the franchise network. "It definitely helps with getting through the end-of-month financial prep much quicker," Walsh says. "I do not need to spend an entire day on prepaids anymore. And that is lovely."