Club Management Software

[Nomoreheroes]

Can anyone help? I'm trying to look at a better way of checking to see that members of club of about 200 are paying the correct fees every month. At present, we have a time consuming process where we manually check through bank statements and standing order payments for each individual.

Can anyone recommend a better more automated way?

P.S. I've got access to Excel. I'm sure there must be a template there that I can use so am looking down that route initially.

[thedarkprince]

Shouldn't there be a way to filter a statement based on the reference? If everyone used the same reference when paying fees, you could filter and then work out who's paid based on a quick vlookup against a record of bank accounts?

[Nomoreheroes]

Must admit to being a bit of a dunce when it comes to this stuff. What I think I have is the following:

Dataset 1: Name of person, amount they should pay (e.g. John Smith, £52.50)
Dataset 2: Standing order name, amount (e.g Smith_swim, £52.50)

The first problem I have is that the standing order names are different for each individual. So, presumably, I'd have to add an extra field to the first dataset so it could correlate with the second.

The next problem I have is the amount that is charged each month can vary for upto 10% of the membership.

The third problem I face is that I've never used Excel to do anything than add up totals in columns! :-)

[@MacPhlea]

This is the sort of thing I help businesses resolve...

if you want something that actively advises you that a payment is overdue or calculates what payment should be made then excel isn't necessarily the best route (its the cheapest to set up but the most costly in terms of time spent managing it.

I recently created a website with membership solution linked to paypal that automatically records and manages club subscriptions and also makes it easier to manage DD/SO/Cash payments. There are also some accounting systems that can do a similar thing with API's (sage, Kashflow etc) which I can do as well.

If the club can fund it, it will make it a lot more efficient in tracking payments...

[Nomoreheroes]

I've been surfing and looking at some similar website solutions. Unfortunately, being a non profit making club, volunteer time is (allegedly) easier to come by than funding for making processes more efficient.

[Samdy Gray]

If you add the standing order names to the first dataset it'll be a piece of piss to use excel to compare two lists.

[Nomoreheroes]

What do you do if you have this scenario:

Expected:
John Smith £10  Smith_monies
James Smith £10 Smith_monies
Jack smith £10 Smith_monies

Actual
Smith_monies £10

[thedarkprince]

You would definitely need a second field to identify the correct Smith even if that were a sort code or account number. I presume this is being scrape from the club's bank statement so you should have some more information to hand (hopefully).

[Nomoreheroes]

Yes, scraped from bank statements. However, the example I was trying to get a cross was if there are 3 children in the Smith family and Mum is paying for all 3.

[thedarkprince]

Ah right, then you're screwed

[@MacPhlea]

You need at least 3 data sets...

Account payer (master data set)

Account members (linked to account payer with amounts for each)

Transaction details (linked to account payer)

Which means you're better off with a simple database...

[blinkpip]

That Smith family must have money to burn.

[thedarkprince]

In that example does it matter who the money is attributed to? Or can the money vary per child? You can search for a string of text within a cell so you can start to pull out the relevant info but as MacPhlea said its gonna cost you a fair bit of time with tinkering.

[thedarkprince]

That Smith family must have money to burn.

Wonder if they want to invest in STFC?

[jonny72]

Can't they put a reference number on the payment?