The problem
Member records are in three spreadsheets
Three volunteers, three files, and a club that cannot answer a simple question about its own paddlers. What happens when one of those volunteers steps down.
Ask a canoe club a simple question. Who is coming on Sunday's river trip, do they all have a current consent form, and which of them can lead a group on moving water?
The membership secretary has the contact details. The coaching lead has a separate file with everyone's qualifications, last updated in the spring. The person organising the trip has a third list, built from replies in the club chat. To answer the question, someone has to open all three and cross-check them by hand, and the answer is only as good as the oldest file.
That is most clubs. It works because three people are careful. It stops working the day one of them moves house.
How it ends up in three places
Nobody designs it this way. A club starts with one membership list. Then the coaches need to know who is qualified for what, and the membership list does not have a column for it, so they start their own. Then someone runs the first river trip of the year and needs consent forms and emergency contacts, which the membership list does have, but the file is on the secretary's laptop, so they collect them again in a new form.
Each file is owned by the person who needs it most. Each is right for that person's purpose. None of them agree with each other, and none of them are the club's record. They are personal records that the club is borrowing.
What gets lost
When a volunteer steps down, the file usually goes with them. Not out of spite. It is on their machine, in their account, and nobody thought to ask for it until the next trip was being planned. The club then rebuilds it from memory and paper, and gets it about right.
The other loss is quieter. A junior's consent form was collected in March for pool sessions. In June a different volunteer runs a trip and does not know the form exists, so asks the parent again. The parent starts to wonder whether the club knows what it is doing. Multiply that by a season.
And when something goes wrong on the water, the question afterwards is always the same. Who was on the launch list, what did the club know about them, and where is the record. Three spreadsheets do not answer that well.
The app built around this
KanuHQ
AvailableMembership, craft, sessions and trip records for canoe and kayak clubs.
Read before you buy
The longer read.
Canoe club sessions, kit and consent: getting the records right
A canoe club runs two seasons with different limits, borrowed kit and paddlers of every level. This guide covers the records a club needs for sessions, trips, equipment and consent, and how to keep them in one place.
Sound familiar too?
Other problems we built around.
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The flying day still runs on paper
One clipboard at the launch point, five people who need what is on it, and a log that gets argued about in the clubhouse. What a gliding club actually needs from the flight record.