How to manage club membership — without a spreadsheet doing all the work

At minimum: who each member is, what kind of membership they hold, when it renews, and whether they have paid. That sounds like four columns, and for a 30-member club a spreadsheet genuinely is enough — the problems start with everything attached to those columns. Households (two adults, one payment), lapsed members you still want to invite back, the difference between someone who has quit and someone who has just forgotten, and the history of who paid what and when.

The test for whether your spreadsheet is still coping: could a new treasurer take it over in an evening? If the answer involves the phrase “ask Margaret, she knows how the colours work,” the roster has become a single person's memory rather than a record.

The mechanics are simple: each member gets an invoice with a payment link, the card payment lands in the club's own account, and the record marks itself paid. The decisions that matter are around the edges. First, whose payment account: dues should settle into an account the club controls (a Stripe account in the club's name, for example), not a platform's pooled account — it keeps the money legible to your bank and your successor.

Second, watch the fees. Card processing itself costs roughly 3% — unavoidable anywhere. What is avoidable is a platform's own cut on top: some membership platforms add a surcharge of as much as 20% of your subscription for using your own payment processor. Over a few hundred renewals a year that quietly becomes the biggest line in your software budget.

Third, keep a manual lane. Some members will always pay by cheque or cash at the AGM, and the online system has to record those next to the card payments, or you are back to two sources of truth.

Renewal is where volunteer-run clubs lose members by accident. Nobody decides to quit; they just miss the email, and by the time anyone notices, the season has started. The fix is boring and mechanical: reminders on a fixed schedule (30, 7 and 1 days before renewal is a sensible default), automatic charging for members who choose to save a card, and a defined moment where an unpaid membership lapses rather than lingering ambiguously.

The part software does better than any volunteer is the follow-up list: who is about to lapse, who just did, and who has not been to anything in a year. A five-minute pass over that list each month — a personal note, not a form letter — recovers more members than any amount of automation.

The honest threshold is somewhere around 75–100 members, or earlier if you run events with paid tickets. Beyond that, the coordination cost of the spreadsheet exceeds the cost of software. When comparing the best membership software for small clubs, weigh four things: whether the price fits a volunteer budget (roughly $30–$90 a month at club size), whether payments carry a platform markup, whether the importer can read the spreadsheet you already have, and whether a new officer could learn it without a training course.

GatherAMS is our answer to that list — club management software from $45/month with 0% payment markup and an importer built for inherited spreadsheets — and there is a live demo club you can open with an email address to judge it against this guide's own criteria.