Recently we sent out a few sample keytags to a gym owner and we got a call back that 3 of them worked fine with his software but 1 of them didn’t. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the keytag that didn’t work had a letter preceding the numbers (T45464). A quick call to the software vendor revealed that this particular software was not able to process letters combined with numbers in a barcode.
A common convention when numbering your keytags is to start with a 5 digit number – in fact, our printer defaults to barcode number 12345 if no starting number is requested. What is nice about 12345 as a starting number is that it allows you a lot of future members before anything changes about your numbering convention (after all – if you have a gym with 99,999 members, you probably have a full time IT department that can make anything work!).
So the moral of the story is, if you don’t have a preference for your starting number, try starting with 12345. And if you decide for some reason that you would like a letter in your barcode number, you might want to check with your software vendor to ask them if the software is able to read letters in barcode keytags.
