Members, renewals, communications: the association that lives on Excel and loses dues every year

The treasurer with the spreadsheet

In thousands of associations — sports clubs, cultural groups, volunteer organisations, professional bodies — one person holds everything up: the treasurer. Often a volunteer, doing this work in the evening after their real job, for passion. And they have one tool: an Excel file. Inside it are the members, join dates, who paid the dues and who didn’t, the contacts. That file is the association’s memory, and it lives on the treasurer’s computer — sometimes in one version, sometimes in three different versions on three USB sticks.

While the association is small, it works. The treasurer knows everyone, remembers who needs to renew, sends a message in the group chat. But as soon as members hit a few hundred, the spreadsheet starts to creak. Renewals get forgotten: nobody notices that member Rossi didn’t pay this year until it’s too late, and Rossi — who might have renewed with a reminder — has simply vanished. Communications become a nightmare: sending the AGM notice means copying three hundred addresses, and half bounce because the sheet has old emails. And when the treasurer changes — because volunteers change — the new one inherits a file they don’t understand, and half the association’s history is lost.

The cost of all this is not theoretical: it is lost dues. Every year, a chunk of members don’t renew not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody reminded them at the right moment, or because paying was too inconvenient. For an association that lives on dues, with a small but real budget, those lost dues are the difference between running activities and cutting them. This article is for whoever runs an association, a sports club, a non-profit and feels that Excel is no longer enough. Let’s see how you manage members, renewals and communications so you stop losing dues — and, with maximum honesty, when an off-the-shelf tool for a few euros a month is enough and when you actually need something custom. Because here, more than elsewhere, the right answer is often the cheapest one.

Let’s start with honesty: almost always an off-the-shelf tool is enough

I’ll say it immediately, before everything else, because it’s the most important thing and because I build custom software and have no interest in selling you what you don’t need: for the vast majority of associations, ready-made association management software is the right choice. There are tools built specifically for sports clubs and non-profits, costing a few euros a month (sometimes free under a certain member threshold), that do perfectly well everything you need: member registry, registration, renewals with reminders, collecting dues, communications, sometimes even the membership register and statutory filings.

If your association has a few hundred members, a normal structure (join, annual dues, a few events), and no particularly weird requirement, one of these tools will sort your life out at a cost that fits comfortably even in a small association’s budget. It would be not only useless but harmful to spend thousands of euros having someone build from scratch what a €10/month tool already does well. An association’s time and money are precious and should go to activities, not to reinventing software that already exists.

So, before you read the rest: evaluate two or three ready-made association management tools. Look for ones designed for your type of association (sports clubs have specific tools with sporting compliance, non-profits have others), try them, and in all likelihood you are done here — with my blessing. The rest of this article does two things: understand what a good system must do (so you pick the ready-made well), and recognise the few cases where ready-made isn’t enough and custom is needed. If after reading you think “ready-made is enough for me”, that’s the right answer and I’m happy with that.

What a good system must do (ready-made or custom)

Whether you pick a ready-made tool or, in the right cases, something custom, the yardstick is the same. A good member management system does five things well. Keep them in mind when you evaluate software and you’ll choose well.

A single registry. One place where the member list lives, with their data, up to date, accessible to whoever needs it and not on one person’s USB stick. When a member changes email, it updates there, once, and it counts for everything. This is the foundation: as long as the registry is a personal Excel, everything else is fragile.

Registration and renewals. Enrolling a new member simply, and — above all — handling renewals automatically: knowing who expires and when, and reminding them before they expire. Renewal is the heart of economic survival, and I’ll come back to it because that’s where dues are lost or saved.

Collecting dues. Making it easy to pay: online, by card, without having to meet the treasurer in person with cash. If paying is inconvenient, members put it off, and putting it off is the first step toward not paying at all.

Communications. Sending email or messages to members, to everyone or to a group (members of that section, volunteers, those who haven’t renewed yet), without copying addresses by hand and without landing in spam.

Compliance. Depending on the type of association: the membership register, the logbook, the mandatory notices. A good system keeps them in order, so the association is in the clear without the treasurer going mad.

A system that does these five things well — ready-made or custom — takes the chaos and the lost dues out of the association. The rest is “nice to have”. Note that it’s the same discipline of identity, renewals and communication that holds up membership customer areas where renewal is everything: an association is, from a software point of view, a membership with a mission instead of a business.

Renewals: human reminders, not spam

If one function saves more dues than any other, it’s renewal management. And here the keyword is human, not cold-automatic. An association member is not just any customer: they are someone who believes in a cause, a sport, a community. Treating them like a subscription to renew with a robotic email is the best way to make them feel like a number — and to push them away.

A good renewal process warns the member before they expire, with a message that recalls the meaning (“we’re about to start the season, here’s what we’ll do this year, renew your dues”), not a cold “your membership has expired”. It distinguishes those who forgot (and should be reminded with care) from those who chose not to renew (who maybe should be listened to: why are you leaving?). And above all it doesn’t become spam: the reminder that works is one, well written, at the right moment, maybe followed by a second gentle nudge — not five identical emails that annoy people and make them unsubscribe from the mailing list.

The difference between a well-managed renewal and one managed from memory (or not managed) is enormous in dues. A member who receives a warm reminder at the right time, with an easy way to pay immediately, renews in the large majority of cases. The same member, with no reminder, “thinks about it” and forgets. This is the theme of renewal as a human process that I also cover for whoever runs subscriptions and memberships: keeping who is already there costs infinitely less than finding new members, and the right reminder is the cheapest and most effective tool you have.

The numbers: how many dues you are losing

Let’s do the lost-dues sum, because it’s the number that justifies any investment — even just the few euros of the ready-made tool. It’s an estimate, but you can redo it on your association.

Say an association with 400 members and average dues of €50 a year: a “revenue” of €20,000 in dues. Now, how many members don’t renew each year not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody reminded them or because paying was inconvenient? It’s hard to see precisely, but in associations run on Excel this “inertia dropout” is often 10–15% of members. Let’s say, prudently, 10%: 40 members, €2,000 of lost dues every year. Just for lack of a reminder and an easy way to pay.

Item	Estimate
Members	400
Average annual dues	€50
Dues “revenue”	€20,000
Inertia dropout (forgotten, inconvenient payment)	~10% = 40 members
Lost dues per year	~€2,000
Cost of a ready-made member management tool	~€120–300/year

Look at the last row. A ready-made tool that recovers even half of those members pays for itself ten times over. For an association with a small but real budget, recovering €1,000–2,000 of dues a year means running one more activity, buying equipment, keeping dues low for everyone. Lost dues are not an accounting detail: they are the activities you don’t run. And the nice part is that recovering them costs very little — the ready-made tool — because the bulk of the value is simply reminding the member to renew and making it easy to pay. Two things Excel doesn’t do and any decent system does automatically.

Payments: if it’s a mess, they don’t renew

I insist on payments because this is where the most dues are lost, and where moving from Excel to a system makes the most immediate difference. The rule is simple: if paying is inconvenient, members put it off; if they put it off, many don’t pay at all.

Think about how payment works today in many associations: a bank transfer (which the member has to remember to make, with the IBAN to hunt down, the right payment reference), cash to the treasurer (whom you have to meet), or a cheque. Every bit of friction is a reason to delay. The member has all the good intentions, but “I’ll do it tonight” becomes “I’ll do it tomorrow” becomes “I forgot”. It isn’t bad will: it’s friction.

A good system removes the friction: the member gets the renewal reminder with a link to pay now, by card, from the phone, in thirty seconds, without hunting for an IBAN or meeting anyone. They pay while they’re thinking about it, while they’re still motivated. This single change — from “remember to make the transfer” to “click and pay now” — recovers a huge slice of dues, because it catches the member in the moment they’re willing to pay, before friction makes them postpone. It’s the same principle as self-service that generates revenue: make the action that brings you money easy, instead of putting steps in the way that slow it down. For an association, “easy to pay” is literally “more dues collected”.

Registry, privacy and consents

A topic associations underestimate but that matters: member data should be kept with a minimum of order and respect, and an Excel on a USB stick is not the best. I don’t want to give you a lawyer lecture — that’s not the point — but two practical things.

First, the registry should live in a safe place accessible to whoever needs it, not on a volunteer’s personal laptop who tomorrow leaves the role. When member data lives in a system (ready-made or custom), it is protected from unauthorised access, safe if the treasurer’s computer dies, and it passes in an orderly way to the next treasurer. In personal Excel, one crash or one volunteer change is enough to lose everything.

Second, consents. An association collects data and sends communications, and you need to keep track of who consented to what (institutional communications, the newsletter, event photos). A good system keeps the member and their consents together, so when you send a communication you send it to people who said yes, without risking embarrassment or trouble. Again, this is something ready-made tools handle and Excel doesn’t. It isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake: it’s respect for members and peace of mind for the board, who are responsible for that data.

Segmented communications and events

An association lives on communication: AGM notices, events, initiatives, updates. And communicating well doesn’t mean sending everything to everyone — it means sending the right thing to the right group. The AGM notice goes to all members; tournament organisation goes to members of that section; the volunteer shift goes to volunteers; the renewal reminder goes to those who haven’t paid yet. Sending everything to everyone tires members and drops attention exactly when you need it.

A good system lets you segment: you pick the group (by section, by renewal status, by role) and send only to them, without copying addresses by hand. And it handles events: sign-ups, who is coming, any extra fees. For an active association, having segmented communications and events integrated with the registry means stopping running everything on WhatsApp groups and email lists copied by hand — which is where half the volunteers’ time is lost today and where important messages disappear into the noise.

UX for volunteers: dead simple or they won’t use it

Here is the most delicate point of all, and the one that decides whether a system (ready-made or custom) will actually be used: the person using it is a volunteer, not an employee paid to learn software. The treasurer, the secretary, the board member who manages members do it in their spare time, for passion, often without much fluency with technology. If the software is complicated, they won’t use it: they’ll go back to Excel, which at least they know.

This has a huge practical consequence when choosing: ease of use is worth more than a rich feature list. A tool with a thousand functions but complicated is worse, for an association, than a tool with few functions that a sixty-year-old volunteer can use without calling their grandchild. When you evaluate association management software, the question isn’t “how many things does it do?”, it’s “will our volunteer treasurer manage to use it alone?”. Try it with the person who will actually use it, not with the most tech-savvy person on the board.

It’s the same principle that applies to every internal tool people have to adopt: if it’s more inconvenient than the current method, it gets abandoned. Only here the bar for simplicity is even lower, because the person using it isn’t paid to be patient. A system for an association, if it’s custom, must be designed obsessively simple — few screens, clear words, no jargon. And if it’s ready-made, pick the simplest one, even if it has a few functions less.

When custom work is actually needed

So, after all this honesty about “ready-made is enough”, when does custom make sense for an association? In a few precise cases, and it’s worth knowing them so you don’t spend when you shouldn’t and don’t suffer when you should.

When you are large and complex. An association with thousands of members, many territorial sections, hierarchies (a federation with affiliates), articulated registration flows, can outgrow what ready-made tools handle well. At a certain scale, ready-made gets tight and custom that models your structure is justified.

When you have your own rules that no ready-made covers. Dues calculated in a particular way, member categories with different rights, registration tied to specific activities, integrations with your other systems. When the heart of how you work sits off the rails of standard tools, fighting the ready-made costs more than custom.

When the association IS the service. If member management isn’t an administrative sidecar but the heart of what you offer — think of an organisation delivering services to members, where the member experience is the product — then it’s worth building that experience custom, as you would for a customer portal. The association becomes, in effect, a membership to design properly.

Outside these cases, I repeat: take the ready-made tool and use the money you save on your activities. Custom for a normal association is almost always a waste, and whoever proposes it to you without one of these reasons is not looking after your interest.

A typical case: from the treasurer’s spreadsheet to a system

A typical architectural profile, no names. Association with several hundred members and a few sections, run by volunteers. The treasurer kept everything on a personal Excel; renewals were remembered by heart and in the WhatsApp group; dues were paid by transfer or cash; communications were emails with hundreds of addresses copied by hand. Every year a chunk of members vanished without anyone noticing in time, and at a treasurer change you risked losing pieces of history.

What was done — and here the honest thing is that we started by evaluating ready-made tools. For registry, renewals and payments, a good association management product covered the need perfectly, at a tiny cost. That was adopted, configured simply, and the treasurer was trained. Immediate result: automatic renewal reminders with a payment link, and dues lost to forgetfulness collapsed. Custom came in only on a specific piece the ready-made didn’t do — an integration with another system of the association and a particular logic of member categories — built on top of the ready-made tool, not instead of it.

At steady state: the registry lived in a safe place instead of on a USB stick, renewals ran themselves, members paid from the phone in thirty seconds, and communications went out segmented without copying addresses. Recovered dues paid for everything many times over. The honest note, and an important one: the value came from the ready-made tool, not from custom. Custom was a targeted tweak on a specific need, not the solution. For most associations, the custom tweak isn’t even needed: the ready-made, chosen well and used well, is enough.

It’s for you if / it’s not for you if

It’s for you if (custom, on top of ready-made): you are a large, complex association, with thousands of members, many sections or hierarchies that ready-made tools handle badly; you have particular registration rules or member categories that no standard software covers; the member experience is the heart of what you offer and you want to design it properly; you need to integrate member management with your other systems.

It’s not for you (custom) if: you are a normal-sized association with a standard structure — in that case a ready-made tool for a few euros a month gives you everything you need, and custom would be a waste of money that should go to activities. That’s the most common case, and that’s right: the intelligent thing is to pick the ready-made well and use it, not to build.

Frequently asked questions

Do I really only need a €10/month tool? For most associations, yes. Ready-made association management software covers registry, renewals, payments and communications at a tiny cost, and some are free under a certain member threshold. Custom is needed only if you are large, complex, or have particular rules. Evaluate two or three ready-made tools before thinking about anything else: in all likelihood you are done there.

How do I pick the right ready-made tool? Look for ones designed for your type of association (sports clubs have tools with sporting compliance, non-profits have others). Check that it does the five things that matter well — registry, renewals with reminders, easy payments, segmented communications, compliance — and above all try it with the volunteer who will use it: if they find it simple, it’s the right one, even if it has a few functions less than another.

How much does the renewal reminder actually matter? A lot. Most members who don’t renew didn’t decide to leave: they forgot, or paying was inconvenient. A warm reminder at the right moment, with a link to pay now, recovers most of them. It’s the function that, on its own, pays for any tool.

Our volunteers aren’t very technical: will they manage? It depends how simple the software is, and that’s why simplicity has to come first in the choice. A good tool designed for associations is made to be used by volunteers, not by IT people. Try it with the least technical person on the board: if they can do it, everyone can.

What about privacy of member data? A system (ready-made or custom) keeps data in a safe place instead of on the treasurer’s USB stick, protected from unauthorised access and safe from crashes, and manages consents (who said yes to which communications). It isn’t bureaucracy: it’s respect for members and peace of mind for the board, who are responsible for that data.

Can we take dues online? Yes, and it’s one of the things that recovers the most dues. The member gets the reminder with a link and pays by card from the phone in thirty seconds, no transfers, no cash. Removing payment friction is the most direct way to collect more dues, because it catches the member while they’re still motivated.

When does it make sense to spend on custom? Only in precise cases: a large, complex association (thousands of members, many sections, hierarchies), particular registration rules that ready-mades don’t cover, or when the member experience is the heart of the service and needs to be designed. Outside those cases, ready-made is the right choice and custom is a waste.

We already have an Excel with years of history: do we lose it? No: the Excel data is imported into the new system (ready-made or custom). In fact, it’s often the occasion to tidy up — remove duplicates, update contacts, fix dates. The history isn’t lost, it moves to a safer, more useful place than the file on the USB stick.

In one line

If your association lives on Excel and the treasurer’s memory, every year you lose dues not because members leave, but because nobody reminds them to renew and paying is inconvenient — and for a small but real budget those dues are the activities you don’t run. The good news is that recovering them costs very little: for almost all associations ready-made association management software for a few euros a month is enough, covering registry, renewals with reminders, easy payments and segmented communications. Custom is needed only if you are large, complex or have your own rules — and telling you that is part of the job. In any case, the yardstick is the same: simple enough for a volunteer to use, and good at not losing a due to forgetfulness.

If you are in the few cases where ready-made isn’t enough and you want to understand whether and what to build custom (maybe on top of an existing tool), look at the projects I’ve built or drop me a couple of lines: we start from what the ready-made already does well and where it really gets tight — without selling you what you don’t need.