Every club reaches the same point eventually. The Membership Secretary has one version of the member list. The Treasurer has another, with payments marked up in a different colour. Someone's inbox holds the most recent joining requests. The constitution and last year's minutes are on a laptop that belongs to a person, not the club. When the Committee needs a straight answer — who has paid, who is a current member, what was decided at the AGM — nobody can give one with confidence, because nobody is looking at the same thing.

The copies multiply quietly. Someone exports the spreadsheet to update it, someone else makes corrections on the original, and within weeks there are three versions of the truth and no reliable way to know which one is right. This guide explains specifically what Daviah keeps in one place and where the honest limits of that answer are, so you can decide whether it addresses what is making your week harder.

One member record that everyone on the Committee looks at

In Daviah the club keeps a single record for each Member, held in the office and readable by any administrator you invite. There is no separate copy for the Membership Secretary and another for the Treasurer. When someone's address changes, it changes once, and everyone sees the same thing the next time they look.

Each record carries a dated history of changes. That history does not depend on anyone remembering to write it down — it accumulates as the record is used, so you can see what the record said before it was updated, not just what it says now.

Bringing in what you already have from a spreadsheet

If your current member list lives in a CSV spreadsheet, you can import it directly. Columns are matched automatically, and the office shows you any problems or likely duplicates before saving anything, so you can check the import rather than discover mistakes later.

It is worth being direct about the limit here. CSV import helps you bring an existing list into Daviah once. It does not solve the problem of the same data continuing to be held in separate places by different people after that point. The ongoing sync problem is not answered by import alone — what import does is give you a starting point in a single shared record rather than continuing from a spreadsheet.

Documents in one place, visible to the right people

Documents are private by default and can be shared with officers, with Members, or published on the public site. This means constitutions, policies and other documents the club needs to keep exist in one place, and the right people can reach them without anyone having to email a copy around.

Documents held on personal devices or in private inboxes are a separate matter. Daviah has no way to reach out and consolidate files that have not been uploaded. What it does is give you a single place to keep documents going forward, with access controlled by role rather than by who thought to send the attachment.

An audit trail that records what changed and who changed it

Changes to records are written to an append-only audit trail. When something is corrected — a payment voided, a membership status updated, a charge waived — there is a permanent record of what changed and when. The original entry is not overwritten; it stays in the trail.

This partially addresses the risk of mistakes accumulating silently. If a correction is made inside Daviah, the trail captures it. What the audit trail cannot do is detect or record changes made outside Daviah — in a spreadsheet someone is still maintaining separately, or in an email thread nobody has looked at. The protection the audit trail gives you is real, but it applies only to what happens inside the system.

Officer history and reports the Committee can rely on

Officer terms are recorded year by year, so the Committee can always see who held each role in previous years — President, Secretary, Treasurer and every other role — without depending on anyone's memory or a spreadsheet someone made at the time.

Reports on membership, officer terms, attendance and subscriptions are counted live from the records in the office, and Members, dues, payments and officers can be exported to CSV at any point. Because the reports draw from one set of records rather than from whichever copy of a spreadsheet you have open, the numbers reflect what is actually in the system.

Your club's records, separate from every other organisation's

Each organisation's records are walled off from every other organisation's on the platform, and this separation is checked by automated tests. Your club's member list, payment history, documents and audit trail are not visible to anyone outside your club's own administrators.

In practice this means access to your records is determined by which administrators you have invited, not by who happens to have a copy of the right spreadsheet. When someone's role ends, you remove their access rather than hoping they delete their local copy — though what to do about data they already hold outside the system is a question Daviah cannot answer for you.

Questions

Can we carry on using our existing spreadsheet alongside Daviah?

You can, but that is exactly the situation this guide is about. The records in Daviah and the records in your spreadsheet will diverge over time, and you will be back to reconciling two copies. The value of keeping records in Daviah comes from making it the one place people look rather than one of several.

What happens to records held on a departing officer's personal laptop or in their inbox?

Daviah does not have a way to retrieve or consolidate files and emails held outside the platform. The honest answer is that this part of the scattered-data problem is only partially addressed. What Daviah does is give you a place to keep records going forward that belongs to the club rather than to a person, so the problem stops growing from this point.

If an administrator makes a change to a record, can we see what it was before?

Changes to records are written to an append-only audit trail, so the history of each change is preserved. This gives you visibility into what was altered and when, though it applies only to changes made inside Daviah.

How many people can access the club's records in Daviah?

You can invite other people to help run the organisation. Each person signs in with their own account and sees the same live records, so there is no need to email updated copies around.

Can Members see their own records without contacting the Secretary?

Members sign in to a private portal on your club's own site where they can see their record, update their details and pay what they owe. This reduces the back-and-forth that comes from members emailing to ask what is on file for them.

Is there a way to see who was Treasurer three years ago?

Officer terms are kept year by year, so you can see who held each role in past years without relying on anyone's memory or a spreadsheet made at the time.

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