In rowing, running the club takes more than a timetable: you need a free boat, a full crew and a rower who is awake at 6am. BetterSport brings boat booking, memberships, payments and communication together in a single tool you can check from your phone.
A named fleet, crews to put together, membership files to keep up to date and a team of volunteers that changes as the season goes on.
Your slots stay bookable 24/7, including Sunday evening for Monday morning. Everyone sees the places left and signs up without calling you.
Sign-ups for an outing show who is coming and who is missing. You fill out an eight, or you cancel before anyone travels for nothing.
Payment is taken by card at sign-up or at booking, through Stripe. Class passes and subscriptions keep track of themselves, with no manual tally.
Pick a group, write, send: the contacts are already there. Confirmations and reminders, for their part, go out on their own.
Rowing happens before work. An outing is decided the evening before and plays out in two hours, between first light and the first coffee at the office. A paper timetable and a messaging group are enough while the club stays small. Past that point, an online calendar changes everything: each outing becomes a slot with limited places, the rower signs up from their phone, gets an automatic reminder the day before and confirms they are coming. You handle the exceptions, not the sign-ups one by one.
The fleet remains the club's real ceiling. A single scull taken at 7am cannot be in two places at once, and a double taken out without clearance sometimes ends up in the workshop. In the software, every boat is a resource: it can be booked, blocked for maintenance, opened up according to the rower's level. The finest boats stay reserved for experienced crews. The waiting list picks up last-minute drop-outs, which keeps the equipment moving instead of leaving it in the boathouse on a fine morning.
Then there is the weather. A gust of wind cancels an outing, and fifteen people need to know before they get in the car. A message sent straight to the group concerned settles it in two minutes. That is also where trust is won: a club that warns people in time keeps its members longer. Rescheduled training, taster sessions and regattas then slot back into the same calendar, with no double entry.
To get on the water you need a licence, a health certificate in some cases and a swimming test. These documents are compulsory and they get lost fast in an inbox. So every member has their own record: contact details, group, documents uploaded, deadlines coming up. Member data lives in one place, and the September restart no longer begins with a paper chase. Background checks, required as soon as minors are being supervised, are tracked the same way.
On the money side, memberships, class passes and courses are paid online through Stripe. Every payment is tied to a person and to a service. BetterSport is not accounting software: it supplies the raw material. The treasurer turns up to the meeting with dated amounts rather than a chequebook and three spreadsheets, and the accounting work finally starts from clean data.
A club runs on volunteers. Multi-coach mode gives each coach, paid or volunteer, their own access and their own groups, with no shared password. The rowing school, holiday courses, club events and competitions are handled as separate services, each with its own places and prices. You set the season up once, then adjust. And the curious, who simply want to try one morning, book a taster session without writing to you.
Most club management tools come from the world of indoor studios: a timetable, classes, people signed up. Rowing works differently. You don't book an hour, you book a boat, and you need a full crew to leave the pontoon. So any credible solution has to treat the fleet, the groups and the early-morning sessions as one whole, not as three separate lists.
Everything starts from the calendar. Your outings, your training sessions and your learn-to-row sessions become slots that can be booked online at any hour. The booking system applies the capped places, the waiting list and the automatic reminders. Rowers sign up easily, even at 10pm, and you get your evenings back.
Each boat is booked like a named piece of equipment. You block out a hull under repair, you keep the trickiest boats for experienced crews, you can see who took one out and when. That is equipment management as much as scheduling, and it matters when one hull represents several years of membership fees.
Sign-ups are the peak of the year. Forms, documents to chase, cheques to bank, follow-ups: dozens of tasks repeated over a fortnight, usually by one person. Online, the file is filled in once and payment is taken by card at sign-up. The money coming in is tracked as it arrives instead of being discovered in November.
Let's be clear: BetterSport does not replace accounting software. It acts as a reliable source. Who paid what, when and for which service: the information is dated and attached to a member. Club life gets simpler for it. Member management, payments and communication all draw on the same record, and the treasurer stops piecing the history back together by hand.
A club can offer several options: a season membership fee, a ten-outing pass, a subscription for the open sessions, a student rate. These features save keeping a tally in a notebook. The rower's balance updates with every session confirmed, and nobody argues over a number at the end of the year.
A rowing club does a lot of talking: call-ups for regattas, times moved, a shout for volunteers at a home competition, the end-of-season round-up. When the contacts are already sorted by group, emails and campaigns go out in moments. Newsletters, reminders and cancellation messages all draw on the same database, with no pasting of addresses.
Centralising is not a brochure word. It means no longer having one spreadsheet for licences, another for crews, a messaging group for times and an inbox for payments. One database, open to the whole committee, saves time at every meeting. Going digital must not make life harder for the volunteers: it has to make it easier, or it won't last two seasons.
Training and competition are not prepared the same way. The first comes round every week. The second needs named call-ups, away trips to organise and serious attendance tracking. Both fit in the same calendar, with separate groups. You create your groups once, you get more out of your boat rotations, and you know who will be on the pontoon.
BetterSport Pro is a platform for coaches and sports organisations, and rowing belongs on it. Nobody runs their club exactly like the club next door: the software is built bespoke around the way you work rather than squeezed into a template. Your members find the club in the iOS and Android mobile app under your own brand, and you keep control of what appears in it.
If you already have a site, a booking widget slots into it without rebuilding anything; if not, we also take on building the club website. The approach is close to that of a watersports centre or a sailing school, with different equipment constraints. The most telling test is still a typical week with your real sessions: start your free 14-day trial, with no card details.
Yes. Every boat is a bookable resource, with its own access rules depending on the rower's level.
By email, from the list for the group concerned: the contacts are already in the software and the message goes out in one go.
Yes, by card through Stripe, at the moment of sign-up. Class passes and subscriptions follow the same route.
Yes. Multi-coach gives each coach their own groups and schedule, with no shared account.
Yes. Each option becomes a service with capped places, free or paid, with its own calendar. A holiday camp fills up like an ordinary outing, payment included.
You cancel the session and an email goes out to everyone booked. The places free up, and rowers on the waiting list for another session can take them the same day.
No. A booking widget is added to an existing site. If you would rather start again from scratch, the site can be built bespoke and search-optimised for the activity.
Long enough to create your groups, your sessions and your pricing options: one evening is often enough for a first version. The 14-day trial asks for no card details.
