Hillingdon Swimming Club

Diving into digital payments

London’s Hillingdon Swimming Club is home to around 600 members running the range of ages from kids learning to swim up to swimmers competing at a national level.

Like most swimming clubs it depends on volunteers and funding from members to keep it running, as its Finance Officer, Laurence Hall, explained: “Hillingdon Swimming Club is a not-for-profit organisation, almost entirely member funded. It takes quite a lot of investment in pool time, coaching and equipment to bring swimmers forward, so reliably getting money in is vital.”

Hillingdon Swimming Club has turned to GoCardless to make this happen, moving away from standing orders, bank transfers, cash and even cheques, to more reliably collect money via Direct Debit. And to spare its volunteers the herculean task of manually reconciling payments.

No easy way of knowing who paid

Before GoCardless, Hillingdon struggled to ascertain who had paid their membership fees and other costs, and who hadn’t. With no reliable audit trail, it struggled to collect all the revenue it was due, and its processes generally added up to an outdated payment experience for members.

“If people said they'd paid us, we really had no easy way of checking,” said Laurence. “The result was that we were probably gathering 95% of the revenue we were entitled to. And from a member’s perspective, the way we collected money was a bit old-fashioned.”

These issues were especially challenging whenever there was a change in fees, according to Ann O’Leary, Club Secretary. “When there was a fee increase it took a long time for parents to update their standing orders, so we found that we were collecting incorrect amounts of money,” she said.

Reconciling the money that did come in with the club’s accounts had also grown into a task so large that it had a dedicated volunteer.

“We'd have payment references that didn’t match our accounts or repetition of surnames – it was a nightmare to work out who’d paid, who hadn't,” said Laurence. “There's always a limited amount of volunteer capacity, and we had a volunteer whose only job was to reconcile payments. That’s not a great use of limited volunteer capacity.”

100% of revenue collected

Laurence knew he had a problem to solve. But it wasn’t until a supplier asked him to pay by GoCardless that he found a solution suitable for a grassroots sporting organisation.

“Its simplicity and scalability meant I could see straight away that we could start off small and grow to solve our payment collection and visibility challenges,” he said.

Carolyn Morrissey, Club Treasurer, Hillingdon Swimming Club agrees: “I find it really useful from an audit point of view because now I've got a record for every swimmer where I can see whether they've paid, if the payment failed, and whether we’ve retried it.”

For these reasons, GoCardless is now the only payment method that Hillingdon accepts. “It's not optional: if you want to join Hillingdon Swimming Club then you sign up for GoCardless on day one,” said Laurence.

Making better use of volunteer time

Digital payments from GoCardless have slotted in nicely alongside the TeamUnify management software solution that Hillingdon Swimming Club uses to manage members’ accounts. Among the benefits of having the two systems in place together is that the club no longer needs a volunteer to handle reconciling payments between bank statements and its accounts.

“TeamUnify and GoCardless work side-by-side in harmony for us, and simply by exporting files from TeamUnify and importing them in GoCardless we’re able to get the best out of both of these leading products,” said Laurence. “That meant that when we moved to GoCardless, one of the early opportunities was to stand down our revenue officer, who we transferred onto much more interesting and rewarding activities.”

Working spectacularly

Hillingdon has also been able to use GoCardless to digitise payments made for kit sold in the club shop, swimming gala entrance fees and costs for overseas camps. “The flexibility of GoCardless is a godsend,” said Laurence. “We can put our full range of payments through a single channel, which is much simpler for both us and members.”

These successes mean Hillingdon hasn’t looked back since implementing GoCardless. Indeed, it’s looking forward to growing more quickly thanks to digital payments.

“We initially signed up on a trial basis partly thinking this is too good to be true, there must be a catch. We’re yet to find the catch – it’s all worked out spectacularly well,” said Laurence.

“Hillingdon Swimming Club is progressive. We want to grow and offer more services, and we know that we’ve taken away any payments pain that might’ve made that difficult. I think we can be proud of how simple it is now to pay Hillingdon Swimming Club, and life without GoCardless is unthinkable.”