Cutting the club admin load

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with running a club. It is not the exhaustion of doing one hard thing — it is the exhaustion of doing thirty small things that never stop arriving. A new Member joins and needs a record. Subscriptions fall due and someone has to raise them, tell people what they owe, and chase the ones who have not paid. Minutes from last month's meeting are sitting in a draft that nobody has approved. A message needs to go out before Thursday. The Secretary already has a day job. So does the Treasurer. So does every other Committee Member who stepped up when nobody else would.

Daviah does not make all of that disappear. There is no automatic chaser for Members who have not renewed, and the burden of answering questions that come in through the contact form still falls on whoever picks it up. What Daviah does is bring the records, the messages, the dues, the meetings and the minutes into one place, so the work that remains is the work itself — not the work of keeping five separate systems pointing at the same truth.

Member records that do not live in one person's files

The membership list is often the first thing that goes wrong. It lives in a spreadsheet on the Membership Secretary's laptop, or in an inbox thread that nobody else has access to, and it quietly falls behind reality every time someone moves, changes their name or stops coming. When the next Secretary takes over, they inherit a list they cannot fully trust.

In Daviah the office keeps a record for each Member with a dated history of every change made to it. If you already have a list, you can bring it in from a CSV spreadsheet — columns are matched automatically and the software shows you problems and duplicates before saving anything. Once the records are in, they stay in one place, readable by anyone on the Committee you have invited to help run the office.

Each Member record carries a history of changes with dates, so you can see what was recorded and when.
Bringing in an existing list from a spreadsheet shows you problems and duplicates before anything is saved.
Inviting another Committee Member to the office means the records are no longer held by one person alone.

Thirty small tasks that never stop arriving — the goal is to do each one once, in the same place.

Subscriptions raised and recorded without starting from scratch

At renewal time the Treasurer typically has to work out what each Member owes, communicate that separately, and then keep track of who has paid, who has paid in cash, and who has paid nothing at all. It is slow, it is error-prone, and it has to be done again every year.

In Daviah the Treasurer raises the year's Subscriptions for everyone in one step. Members see what they owe in the member portal and can pay by card if the organisation has connected a Stripe account — the payment is recorded only once Stripe confirms the money has moved. Cash and cheque payments can be entered by hand, each with a receipt number that runs in sequence for the year. Waiving or correcting a charge is the Treasurer's decision, and it is recorded with a reason in the audit trail.

One thing to be clear about: Daviah does not automatically send renewal reminders or chase Members who have not paid. That message still has to be written and sent by a person.

The year's Subscriptions are raised for everyone in one step — no manual row by row.
Card payments are recorded only when Stripe confirms the money moved, not before.
Cash and cheque payments each get a sequenced receipt number entered by hand.
Corrections and waivers are recorded with a reason, so the audit trail stays clean.

Messages to the right people at the right time

Club communication tends to spread across personal email accounts, messaging groups and whatever the previous Secretary set up. Sending a message to only the Members who have unpaid Subscriptions, or only the people who said they were coming to an event, means building that list by hand every time.

The office can send a message to all Members, to officers, to a named Committee, to the attendees of an event, or specifically to Members with unpaid dues — without you having to build that list yourself. Messages can be written now and scheduled to send at a chosen time, and the same message is guaranteed never to go out twice by accident.

Send to all Members, to officers, to a Committee, to event attendees, or to Members with unpaid dues.
Write a message today and schedule it to send on the day it is needed.
A scheduled message is guaranteed never to be sent twice.

Meetings, minutes and attendance in one minute book

Keeping a proper minute book takes more effort than most clubs have the capacity to give it. The Secretary writes up the minutes after the meeting, someone has to approve them at the next meeting, and the approved version needs to be somewhere the whole Committee can find it. In practice this often means email threads, shared folders nobody remembers to check, or a document that lives on one Committee Member's machine.

Daviah records meetings and moves the minutes through a clear sequence — draft, submitted, approved — with approved minutes able to be amended only with a recorded reason. Attendance at a meeting can be taken from the office, and if you use a tablet at the door, Members can sign themselves in by finding their own name. The tablet shows only a first name and initial, and an officer can switch it off at any time.

Minutes move from draft to submitted to approved, with amendments recorded with a reason.
Attendance is taken from the office, or Members can sign in themselves on a tablet at the door.
The tablet at the door shows only a first name and initial — nothing more.

Reports and exports the Committee can actually use

At the end of the quarter, or before the AGM, someone has to pull together the numbers. Who are the current Members? Who has paid? What did attendance look like? Getting those figures out of a spreadsheet that has been edited by three different people in three different versions is its own project.

Reports on membership, officers, attendance and dues are counted live from the records in Daviah — not from an export that may be out of date. Members, dues, payments and officers can all be exported to CSV if you need to take them into another tool or share them with an auditor.

The member portal: what Members do for themselves

A lot of the work that lands on the Secretary or Membership Secretary is Members asking to update their address, checking what they owe, or asking for a document they should have access to. The member portal lets Members sign in to a private area on your own site to update their own details, see their record and what they owe, pay by card, reply to events, and open members-only documents and photos.

This does reduce the volume of routine update requests. It does not remove the need to answer questions that come in through the contact form — that message still lands in the office for someone on the Committee to answer.

What this guide does not cover

Daviah does not automatically send renewal reminders or chase Members who have not paid. There is no rule you set once that goes out to everyone whose Subscription is overdue — that message has to be written and sent by a person using the dues-targeted send.

The contact form and the member portal both help, but they do not fully remove the burden of answering questions. Members can update their own details and see their own record, but if a Member writes in with a question that requires a considered answer, someone on the Committee still has to give it.

More broadly, the relief Daviah offers is specific to the tasks described in this guide — records, messages, dues, meetings, minutes and attendance. The broader weight of running a small volunteer group, the coordination, the decision-making, the recruitment of the next Committee — none of that is something software solves.

Questions

Can I bring in our existing membership list?

Yes. You can import Members from a CSV spreadsheet. The office matches your columns automatically and shows you any problems or duplicates before saving anything, so you can review the list before it goes in.

Does Daviah automatically chase Members whose Subscriptions are overdue?

No. There is no automated renewal reminder or chaser. You can send a message specifically to Members with unpaid dues, but that message has to be written and sent by a person in the office.

What can Members do in the portal without coming to us?

Members can sign in to the portal on your own site to update their details, see their record, pay what they owe by card, reply to events, and open members-only documents and photos. They cannot, however, change their membership status or access anything outside their own record.

How do offline payments like cash get recorded?

Cash, cheque and any other offline payment can be entered by hand in the office. Each one gets a receipt number that runs in sequence for the year, so your Treasurer has a clear, ordered record without having to manage it in a separate spreadsheet.

What happens to the records if we stop paying for the plan?

Your records stay readable and your CSV exports — Members, dues, payments and officers — continue to work. Nothing is withheld. The office and the public site come back as soon as you pay again.

Can more than one Committee Member have access to the office?

Yes. You can invite other people to help run the office. You can also give someone a Website Editor role that lets them update the site without giving them access to the financial records or Member details.

How to carry less of the club's administrative weight