How to choose club management software: a buyer's guide

The software you choose decides how your members reach you, how much of your week goes to admin, and how painful the next change will be. It is one of the highest-leverage decisions a club makes, and most of it comes down to one question people ask too late.

Decide what you are replacing, and what you are adding

Club software splits into two kinds, and they are not competing with each other.

One kind runs your courts: the calendar, the prices, the payment, the member accounts. Replacing it is a migration - your bookings, your members, your payouts, your staff's habits. It is worth doing when the system genuinely fails you, and it is a bad way to solve a smaller problem.

The other kind sits on top of whatever you already run and does one job well. Nothing to migrate, so the risk of trying it is small and the cost of stopping is smaller.

Work out which one you are shopping for before you take a single demo. Half the frustration in this category comes from evaluating an add-on as though it were a replacement, or being sold a replacement when the actual problem was one unfilled hour on a Tuesday.

Be honest about what "all in one" costs

One system for everything is genuinely simpler to run, when it fits. The catch is that it only arrives as a migration, and it is only simpler if every part of it is good enough that you would have chosen it on its own. A strong calendar bundled with mediocre member messaging is not one good product, it is one good product and one you now have to live with.

Ask what happens to the parts you do not want. If the answer is "you use ours anyway", price that in.

Ask what it does when nothing is happening

Anyone can show you a booking screen. The value is in what runs when nobody on your staff is looking: the reminder before a session, the message when a court comes free, the nudge to the member who has quietly stopped coming.

Ask the vendor to show these firing on real data, not listed on a feature page. Ask specifically who each message goes to - "everyone" is not targeting, and members mute clubs that treat it as such.

Member communication where players already are

Email gets ignored. In most markets the channel members actually read is WhatsApp, so ask how the software handles it - and ask the awkward questions, because this is where vendors are vaguest:

• Does it message members one to one, or does it need a group everyone can post in?
• Do members have to opt in first, and where is that consent recorded?
• What happens when someone replies STOP?

A club's member list is a real asset and messaging it carelessly is how you lose it.

Questions to ask any vendor

• Am I replacing my booking system or adding to it - and what exactly gets migrated?
• If we stop after three months, what do we lose and what do we keep?
• Which messages send themselves, and who does each one go to?
• How is member consent collected and recorded, and how does someone opt out?
• What does onboarding actually cost in our staff's hours, not just in fees?
• What does it read from our current system, and what does it write back?

That last one separates the two kinds of software faster than any feature list.

kortbase is the second kind. It reads the bookings your club already takes and messages the right member at the right moment on WhatsApp - a freed court, a match a player short, a reminder, a member who stopped coming. Your club keeps the software it runs on, and there is nothing to migrate.