Membership administration for clubs

What membership software needs to do for an association

Software for a company is about customers coming and going. An association asks something else: the board changes, the work is voluntary, and the people doing it are there a few evenings a month. A programme that is not built for that gets traded back for a spreadsheet after one treasurer.

So a membership administration package for associations needs more than a list of names. This is what separates software that gets abandoned from software that takes work off the board's hands.

Ledenboek does all of this in one programme, with no modules to buy on top. What is in the smallest plan is in the largest one too; only the number of members differs.

Online, or on the secretary's computer?

For a business this is a matter of taste. For a club it is not, because boards change. If the member list lives in a file on one laptop, sooner or later that laptop moves to someone else, or it does not move and the list is gone.

That is the most common way clubs lose their administration. Not through a crash, but because the previous secretary stopped and nobody knows which version was the right one.

• ✓ Everyone on the board sees the same data, at the same time
• ✓ A change of board is handing over a role, not handing over a file
• ✓ Members update their own details, so you stop retyping address changes
• ✓ Daily backups, and you can always export everything

From Excel to a system

Most clubs come to us from Excel. You can bring that along: upload your file, we recognise the columns, and a column named like one of your custom fields goes straight into it.

• ✓ Import your existing file with a template that already knows your columns
• ✓ Members keep their own details current, so you stop retyping address changes
• ✓ Everyone on the board looks at the same version, even at the same time
• ✓ You can always export again, so you are never locked in

If it turns out differently than you hoped, you pull your data out in one click. The file stays yours.

Outsource your membership administration, or do it yourself?

Boards face this choice every year, usually the moment the secretary steps down and nobody wants to take it over. An administration office takes the work off your hands for an amount per member per year. That is a real option, but it solves less than it promises.

What you outsource is the data entry. What you do not outsource is keeping it current: someone still has to report that a member has moved, that there are six new members and that someone has resigned. In practice that information goes back and forth by email, leaving you one intermediary richer and one live overview poorer. Looking something up means asking instead of looking.

The reason the work felt heavy was usually not the volume but the method: a spreadsheet updated by hand, invoices sitting loose in a word processor, and reminders someone has to chase personally. Once that runs automatically, half an hour a month is left, and then whether to outsource is a different question than it was a year ago.

Outsourcing remains sensible if there is nobody on the board willing to do this, or for an association large enough that it becomes a job. Do ask whether you keep access to the system holding your members. A membership list that lives only at the service provider makes switching expensive later.

Membership administration and bookkeeping

These are two different things that are joined at the hip in an association. Membership administration answers who is a member, bookkeeping answers where the money comes from and goes. The join is the dues: every member is a debtor, and every payment is an entry.

Keep them separate and the manual work sits exactly on that join. You create invoices in one system, record the payments in the other, and at year end the numbers do not match because someone resigned in between. For most associations that is the only place where the administration genuinely costs time.

Bookkeeping software alone is therefore rarely enough: it does not know your members and cannot tell who owes dues. Conversely, membership administration without a financial side tells you who is a member but not who has paid. For most associations one system doing both beats two good systems side by side, precisely because the retyping falls away.

If your treasurer has worked happily with a bookkeeping package for years, it does not have to go. Do make sure the dues originate on the membership side and reach the bookkeeping as a single entry, rather than having someone retype two hundred invoices.

By type of association

The basics are the same everywhere, but where the time goes differs by type of association.