How to integrate GoCardless with your current football club software

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Connect your team management platforms and accounting software with GoCardless to automate your financial workflows, get rid of manual data entry, and bring together your squad payments seamlessly.

If you’re currently managing your football club’s finances through club management software and spending countless unnecessary hours on financial admin, GoCardless could be the biggest signing you make this season. We offer some of the best payment software for sports clubs that’ll significantly reduce admin time, allowing you to redirect your volunteers’ efforts away from spreadsheets and back closer to the pitch.

As a proud supporter of 18 County FAs and more than 1,500 clubs across England, we’re fully invested in taking the stress out of payment collection for clubs like yours. That’s why we integrate seamlessly with more than 350 membership management and accounting software systems - including all major platforms used widely across community football like Pitchero, Clubmate, LoveAdmin, Spond, Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage50.

Integrating GoCardless with your chosen software is straightforward and comes with plenty of benefits from day one. Here’s what’s on offer.

The benefits of bringing your management and payments software together

Managing a community club often means using different digital tools for different tasks. For instance, tools like Spond or Pitchero are great for managing squads, match schedules, and player availability, while platforms like GoCardless specialise in automated subscription collection and banking security.

However, using these systems away from one another can present challenges, such as time-consuming data entry, fragmented financial reports, and the need for manual bank reconciliation. These extra steps can complicate your operations and take up hours of volunteer time on an evening, making your digital tools less effective than they should be.

How can integrating help your club?

Integrating GoCardless with your football club management software can significantly alleviate these pain points. We offer over 350 integrations, allowing you to seamlessly combine your payment and team management processes.

The key benefits of an integrated setup are:

Improved cash flow: We’ll give you real-time insights into the status of player subs and active Direct Debit mandates right inside your daily management app. This transparency helps your treasurer manage the club's finances effectively and ensures a steady cash flow to cover things like pitch hire and league registration fees.
Dramatically reduced admin: Automating payment processing through GoCardless allows you to shave hours off the time your volunteers spend on processing, monitoring, and reconciling payments.
Smarter player tracking: By linking your club membership database with your payments platform, keeping track of active players becomes effortless. For instance, clubs like Hemington Hammers link their player databases directly with us. This allows them to add official Player IDs from the Football Association’s portal into the GoCardless database, making it incredibly simple to run reports that verify exactly which active players are up to date with their monthly subs.
Enhanced member experience and boosted player retention: By integrating your payment and squad systems, you reduce the likelihood of human error in the billing process. This leads to a smoother, more professional experience for members. If a payment does happen to fail, our smart retry function, Success+, automatically recovers the funds at an optimal time without your team managers having to send an awkward text or chase people on a training night.

“GoCardless collects the lot together and posts the funds to Sage50, where the receipts are all allocated. Using GoCardless has halved the time I spend doing the accounts from eight hours a month down to around four hours, which means I can spend more time doing what I joined to do—coaching my son’s team.”

Paul Swift, Treasurer & Coach, Amaranth FC

How to integrate GoCardless with your current software

First things first, use our Partner Directory to see if we integrate with your club's chosen management or accounting software - the chances are we do.

There are two ways to connect depending on whether your committee already has a GoCardless account set up or not. Both options take just a few clicks to help you manage your club payments in one centralised place.

Option 1: You’re new to GoCardless and need to create an account

You can create your GoCardless account directly through your existing club management software in three steps:

Log in to your chosen club software or accounting platform.
Navigate to the settings, app store, or invoicing section to find the standard GoCardless set up link.
Click the link and simply follow the on-screen prompts to create and verify your new GoCardless account for the club.

Option 2: Connecting software to an existing GoCardless account

If your club already has an active GoCardless account, it’s easy to connect it to a new software platform to process your squad payments. Don’t worry - you’ll still retain direct access to your main GoCardless dashboard and all of your standalone tools, even if you choose to process payments through a connected app.

To connect your software, either:

Find GoCardless within the settings of your chosen club management software and click ‘Sign in’. You’ll be securely directed to log into your primary GoCardless account to authorise the link.

Or:

Select the software you’re using via our Partner Directory and click ‘Get started’.

Bench the admin and promote better processes off the pitch

As your club grows - whether you are adding new youth squads, starting a girls' academy, or expanding your senior teams - we’ll grow with you, offering a transparent pricing model and a reliable payment solution to get your club paid on time, every time.

Ready to get started? Try GoCardless fee-free for 90 days.