Three ways grassroots football clubs can reduce their admin burden

Nobody at a football club wants to be buried under a mountain of paperwork or digital admin. Especially when you’re supposed to be doing something you enjoy, whether that’s coaching, improving facilities, or doing things that properly benefit your members and the local community.

Manual payments can be particularly draining. Handling cash on the touchline, chasing parents for bank transfers, or checking bank statements against member lists are all hugely time-consuming tasks.

The experiences of those managing grassroots football club admin are all too familiar. When the onus is on members or parents to make payments manually, club treasurers inevitably have to deal with late payers or those who simply forget.

Volunteers end up spending their evenings tediously comparing online bank statements. Not knowing how to collect match fees from a team efficiently or missing monthly subs negatively affect the football club’s finances, which in turn limits your ability to invest in areas you need to. And the cycle repeats season after season.

If this strikes a chord with your club situation, we’ve put together a three-step process for reducing your admin load, so you can spend more time on the stuff you actually want to.

Identify where your volunteer time is going

Start by understanding exactly where you’re spending your time. Look at your entire process for collecting payments, including working out who’s paid their bills and who hasn’t. For many football clubs, this involves studying spreadsheets, checking standing orders, tracking manual bank transfers, and counting up physical cash.

Things get tricky when fees vary based on different age groups, seasonal training slots, or kit orders. To make matters worse, bank payment references often don’t match the club’s records, leaving volunteers to try and piece together who paid what. Reconciling the accounts can become such a massive chore that it often takes over a volunteer's week.

When payments go missing, someone has the unenviable task of figuring out how best to chase late subs from those members. Committee time is a precious resource, and it’s a shame when it’s spent on avoidable and unfulfilling admin.

Test the waters with technology

Many of the repetitive tasks that occupy committee meetings can be automated immediately, but senior club members often find the idea of introducing digital payments technology intimidating at first. The old adage of sticking with what you know - in this case a tried, tested, but frustrating manual system - often gets in the way.

Club chairs and stakeholders might worry that digital payments will be too expensive, complicated to learn, or prone to going wrong. However, some of the best football club treasurer tips revolve around utilising club payment collection software to do most of the legwork. Plus, it’s easy to put it to the test because it’s often available via free trials or flexible, low-cost options.

In reality, there’s very little risk to running a small trial with just one squad or a single age group, so you can see for yourself how digital payments work within your club infrastructure and how they can lift the burden off your key people.

Automate your payment collection

Once you’ve got the green light on introducing digital payments, you can really put them to work.

Most football clubs invoice players and parents either upfront for annual signing-on fees, or throughout the season for monthly subs. These kinds of recurring payments for sports clubs are ideal for automating, and online subscription collection via Direct Debit makes it incredibly straightforward.

With Direct Debit, you pull the payments directly from your members' bank accounts, with the flexibility to adjust the amount if they need to pay additional fees. Bills are automatically paid exactly when they’re due, so you don’t have to spend time chasing them.

In addition, the Direct Debit process can be integrated with your existing club membership management software - or an accounting solution like Xero - so that payments are reconciled automatically. Streamlining these processes will typically save hours every single week.

As well as reducing administrative workloads, digital payments reduce financial uncertainty and dramatically improve your club cash flow. You get funds sooner, with less effort, and have greater confidence you’re getting what you’re owed. That means you have more resources, including time, to invest on the pitch.

Try GoCardless fee-free for 90 days

If it wasn’t already clear, we can do all of the above for you. As a proud supporter of 18 County FAs and more than 1,500 clubs across England, using GoCardless for membership payments will automate your collection, reduce admin for your club treasurer, and ensure you get paid on time.

You can try us fee-free for 90 days today.