Two products are sold to the same committee under names a sentence apart, and a club that buys the wrong one first spends a season working around it. One runs the facility: the court and lane diary, the session register, the coaching rota, sometimes the bar till. The other keeps the membership: who belongs, at what tier, until when, and whether they have paid. Most clubs eventually want both, almost no club needs both on day one, and the order is decided by what hurts on a Saturday morning.
What a club management system actually runs
The diary first: courts, lanes, rinks, ranges or rooms, booked ahead by members who expect to see what is free tonight. Then the register, which is who actually turned up to a session and is the thing coaches and safeguarding officers ask for. Then the people who run those sessions, with their rotas and their qualifications and the reminder when one expires. Often a till, because a club with a bar has takings to reconcile. None of that is membership; all of it assumes membership exists somewhere it can check.
Where a club membership system stops and the facility begins
A club membership system holds the member, the tier, the join date, the renewal date, the dues and whatever proof of membership the club issues at the door. It answers who is current, who lapsed and who owes. It does not know that court three is free at seven, and it should not pretend to. The join between the two is thinner than either vendor suggests: the diary needs to ask one question of the record, which is whether this person is a paid up member today, and a club that keeps that question answerable can run the two halves separately for years.
Why a US club has to tell members from nonmembers in the same system
A club exempt under section 501(c)(7) is taxed on its unrelated business income, and the IRS says in the same place that a club may lose its exempt status if it receives too much of it. Income from nonmembers is the usual source: the open tournament, the room hired out for a wedding, the bar takings from somebody's guests. So the diary is not only an operations tool for a US club, it is where the evidence of who was a member at the time is created, and a system that records a booking without recording whether the payer was a member has thrown that evidence away. The IRS also states that an exempt organization with $1,000 or more of gross income from an unrelated business must file Form 990-T, which is a return somebody has to be able to build from the year's own records.
Buy the timetable or buy the record, and know which you are doing
If the pain is the Saturday timetable, buy the diary and keep the membership somewhere it can be handed over. If the pain is the renewal round and the arrears list, buy the record and leave the timetable wherever the coaches already run it. Buying a suite to solve one of those usually means paying for the other half at the price of the half you needed, and being unable to leave either. The question to put to a vendor selling both is which half their own customers log into on a Tuesday, and what the export looks like for the other one.
Questions people ask about club management systems
Do we need a club management system and a membership record?
Eventually most clubs with a facility do, and rarely from the same vendor on day one. The useful test is which of the two produces work every week. A diary produces work every week; a membership record produces work in bursts around renewal. Buy the weekly one first and keep the other honest.
Can one system do bookings and membership well?
Some do both adequately and price as though they do both well. Check the half you are not buying it for: ask to see the arrears list if you came for the diary, and the booking screen on a phone if you came for the record. Whichever half was built second usually shows.
Does Duesvo do court or room bookings?
No. Duesvo keeps the membership, the dues, the renewals and the card. A club whose central problem is the timetable should buy a booking system for that and keep its membership here, where it can be exported and handed to the next secretary as a file.
What should a small club expect to pay?
The two halves are priced differently. Facility products tend to price per court, per site or on a cut of what is booked and paid through them, so the bill grows with the timetable. Duesvo Pro is $35 a month for the whole club, however many members and however many people on the committee use it.