How to collect team fees and subs without chasing cash

Every community club has one person quietly doing the least fun job of all: chasing money. Match fees, weekly subs, season registrations — someone has to collect it, track it and remember who still owes. If that person is you, there's a much easier way to run it.

The problem: chasing cash is a thankless job

Collecting team fees the old way is a slog. Cash gets handed over at training in crumpled notes that live in a coach's bag until someone forgets whose is whose. Bank transfers land with references like "Payment" or nothing at all, leaving the treasurer to play detective. And then there's the spreadsheet — a colour-coded record of who's paid, who's part-paid and who you'll have to gently remind again this week.

Those reminders are the worst part. Nobody enjoys messaging a parent or teammate to ask, again, if they've sorted their subs. It's awkward, it's repetitive, and it usually falls on one volunteer who's already giving up their weekends. Meanwhile part-payers slip through the cracks, cash goes uncounted, and the money the club actually needs trickles in weeks late.

The fix isn't working harder at chasing. It's removing the chase altogether.

Collect fees online, right where members already are

With ClubApp, members pay their fees and subs online, straight from the app they already have on their phone. There's no cash to count, no bank reference to decode and no shoebox of receipts. When a fee is due, the member opens the app and pays — and the money flows to the club.

Payments run through Stripe, so members can pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. That means most people can settle up in a couple of taps using the payment method already saved on their phone. For a busy parent juggling three kids' teams, or a player rushing off after training, that low-friction moment is the difference between "paid now" and "I'll do it later" (which too often means never).

See who's paid and who's outstanding at a glance

This is where the real relief kicks in. Instead of maintaining your own spreadsheet, you can see who has paid and who is still outstanding at a glance. The record updates itself as members pay, so there's no manual reconciling and no wondering whether that transfer from last Tuesday was Sam's subs or Sarah's.

Because ClubApp includes a member directory, every payment is tied to a real person in your club — not an anonymous line on a bank statement. When you need to know who still owes, the answer is right there rather than buried in three different places.

Send a reminder without the awkward text

When someone hasn't paid, you don't have to draft an uncomfortable one-to-one message. ClubApp lets you send announcements and notifications to members, so a friendly nudge about outstanding fees can go out to the people who need it — clearly, consistently and without singling anyone out in a group chat. A well-timed reminder does the chasing for you, and most people simply pay on the spot once it lands on their phone.

Works for subs, match fees and season registrations

Community clubs don't have just one kind of fee, and neither does ClubApp. It handles the different ways money comes in across a season:

• Membership fees — collect them through online membership registration and renewals, with tiers so juniors, seniors, families and social members each pay the right amount.
• Season registrations — sign players up and take payment in the same flow, so nobody is registered but unpaid.
• Match fees and weekly subs — the smaller, recurring amounts that are hardest to chase in cash are exactly the ones online payment makes painless.

Setting fees by tier also means you're not manually working out who owes what. A junior tier, a senior tier and a family tier can each carry their own price, and members simply pay the amount attached to their membership.

Clean records the treasurer will actually thank you for

Every online payment is captured against the member who made it, which gives your treasurer a reconciled record instead of a pile of transfers to match by hand. At the end of the month — or the season — the picture of what's come in is already there. No reconstructing payments from memory, no chasing down that one cash amount nobody can account for.

And because the money moves through Stripe, the club collects fees cleanly after the low 2.7% + 30c transaction fee. Your fees stay your fees.

Up and running today

You don't need a big rollout to start collecting fees this way. A club can be live within the hour — set up your membership tiers and fees, invite your members, and start taking payments. The member app is free to download, so there's no barrier for the people you're asking to pay; the club simply pays for the platform. From there, the chasing largely takes care of itself.