Club membership app, and the club membership software behind it: the record, the card and the renewal list a small club actually needs

Put the record in before the app

Members with a tier, a join date and a renewal date, in one place the committee can see. Everything a club app does for a member is a view of that record, so a club that buys the app first spends its first month typing the record into it anyway, and usually from three spreadsheets that disagree.

Issue the card from the record, not beside it

A membership card is a claim that somebody is a paid-up member, so it should be issued by the thing that knows whether they are. Cards issued from a separate design tool outlive the membership: a lapsed member keeps a valid-looking card, and the person on the door has nothing to check it against.

Let renewal be a list, not a memory

The month before renewal, the club needs one list: who is due, who has paid, who has not answered. That list is the whole value of a club app to the person running it, and it only exists if the dues are recorded against members rather than arriving as bank lines to be matched later.

Club membership management software and club management systems are two different purchases

Club membership management means the member, the tier, the join date, the renewal date and the dues, plus whatever proof of membership the club issues. It is the same job a professional association has, with the vocabulary changed. A club membership system that does this well is enough for a club whose facilities are not booked in advance, which is most social, historical, hobby and supporters clubs. Club management systems add the things a facility needs: court and lane booking, session registers, coaches and rotas, sometimes a till. A club whose central pain is the Saturday timetable should buy in that category and hold the membership somewhere it can trust.

Tennis club membership software and private club membership software assume different furniture

Tennis club membership software assumes courts, a ladder and a season that starts when the nets go up. Private club membership software assumes a waiting list, proposers and a house account. Each is the same record with different furniture, and the furniture is where the license fee goes. A club that recognizes itself in neither is buying the record, not the vertical, and should price it that way.

Swim club software and swim club management software assume squads and sessions

Swim club software and swim club management software are sold to the same buyer and mean roughly the same thing: squads, session registers and often meets. That is a timetable problem sitting on top of a membership one, so read which half the price is for before signing. A swimming club whose sessions already run somewhere its coaches trust is buying the membership record on its own, and the quote should say so.

Sports club management software free tiers, and what the free half holds back

Club membership software free and free club membership software mean one of three things: a member cap, a feature cap that stops at renewals, or a payments cut. Sports club management software free tiers usually hold back the membership and give away the booking, because bookings are what drive daily use. All of them are legitimate business models and all of them surface at the same moment, which is your renewal spike. Read which one it is before you load a season's members, because migrating a club mid-season is a job nobody has time for.

Hand it over in an afternoon

Committees change. The record, the card and the renewal list have to be picked up by next year's secretary without the old one in the room, which means the record is in one place with the committee's names on it, the dues are recorded against members rather than reconstructed from the bank, and the export is a file anybody can open. A club whose membership lives in one person's spreadsheet has an app problem that no app fixes; a club whose record can be handed over is one where the app is just the screen.