Every club has someone who chases the money. It is the least popular job in the organisation, it is almost always unpaid, and it is the single most common reason a volunteer stands down at the end of a season.
The usual response is to chase harder: a reminder in the group chat, a list read out at training, a quiet word at the side of the pitch. All of which turns a friend into a debt collector, in front of their own team.
Most of the problem is structural, and structural problems are fixable.
Where the money actually leaks
Late payment in a club is rarely about unwillingness. Broken into causes, it is mostly:
- The moment of asking is wrong. A request that arrives when someone is not holding their phone, or is at work, gets deferred and then forgotten.
- Paying takes more than one step. Bank details in a message, a transfer app, a reference nobody can remember, a note back to say it was done.
- Nobody can see their own position. Parents do not know whether they are behind, and are embarrassed to ask.
- The record lives in one person’s head, or in a spreadsheet only they open.
Every one of those is a design problem rather than a character problem, which is worth saying out loud in a committee meeting occasionally.
Recurring beats reminding
The single biggest change is moving from “ask each month” to “set it up once”. A standing arrangement removes the asking entirely for the majority who would always have paid, which leaves the treasurer dealing with the genuine exceptions rather than the whole squad.
That requires the software to handle the awkward realities of a club:
- Joining part-way through a season, pro-rated without arithmetic.
- Siblings and family accounts, because one parent pays for three players.
- Freezes for injury or a long absence, without cancelling and re-registering.
- Different amounts by team or age group, in the same club.
If any of those has to be handled by hand, it lands back on the volunteer and the benefit disappears.
Make the position visible to the person who owes it
A surprising amount of chasing exists only because people cannot see where they stand. Someone who can open an app and see “paid to March” does not need a reminder, and someone who can see they are two months behind will usually act without being asked publicly.
Moving that information from the treasurer’s spreadsheet to the payer’s own screen removes most of the social friction, because nobody has to be told anything in front of anyone else.
Watch what the payments cost
Payment processing has a cost, and where it sits matters more at grassroots than almost anywhere else. A percentage that looks trivial on a large transaction is material on a £5 weekly sub, and if the platform adds a margin on top of the processor’s fee, the club is paying twice for the same service.
We built The Performance Centre with payments taken at cost rather than marked up, and the grassroots tier priced at £1 per player per month. That is a deliberate constraint: at that price there is no room to disguise a payments margin, and a club can work out exactly what it is paying for.
What good looks like
- Subs set up once, collected automatically.
- Every payer can see their own position without asking.
- Joining, leaving, freezing and family accounts handled by the system.
- Fees visible and at cost.
- The treasurer’s job reduced to genuine exceptions.
The measure is simple enough: the treasurer should be able to name everyone who is behind without opening a spreadsheet, and should not have had to mention it in the group chat.
If subs are eating your volunteers’ time, get in touch or read more about how we build software for sport.