A sign-up system for events, teams and activities

Sign-up is rarely just a button

Most associations start with a form service and an email address. It works for the first event. It stops working once the team fills up, once somebody cancels the day before, once half have paid and the rest have not, and once the person with access to the form is on holiday.

The problem is not the sign-up itself. It is that a sign-up creates a set of questions afterwards that the form cannot answer: who is actually coming, have they paid, is there room for one more, and is the person who just signed up even a member?

A sign-up system is the tool that knows the members, so it can answer all four without anyone opening a spreadsheet.

The five kinds of sign-up an association needs

The single event: a general assembly, a summer party, a working day. One date, one place, a deadline, often free.

The team across a season: training every Tuesday from August to May. Here you are not signing up for a date but for an affiliation, and it has to be visible on the member's record for the rest of the season.

The individual slot: a court, a room, a time with the instructor. Here it is not places that are limited but times.

The trip with a fee: a weekend away where the amount has to be collected, and where a cancellation has a financial consequence.

And the open event, where non-members may sign up too, and where the association still wants to know who came.

Waiting lists, cancellations, and what happens after

The part a form never handles is the part that comes after. A team has a cap, and once it is reached the next person should not be turned away but put on a waiting list, and move up by themselves when somebody cancels. Otherwise it becomes a manual list one person maintains alongside.

Members have to be able to cancel themselves. Not for their sake, but for the list's: a cancellation that arrives as a text message to the team leader is a cancellation the attendance list knows nothing about.

And the deadline has to close itself. A deadline somebody has to remember to close is not a deadline.

Payment belongs in the same flow

When a sign-up costs money it is not finished until the money has been paid. That sounds obvious and is still nearly always split in two: you sign up in one place and pay in another, and then the treasurer sits matching deposits to names.

Payment belongs in the same flow as the sign-up, so an unpaid sign-up is visibly unpaid, and so the amount reaches the accounts on the right ledger without manual work. For a trip with a fee, that is the difference between an overview and a set of accounts.

The attendance list is what has to work on the day

Everything above exists to produce one thing: a list that is correct when somebody is holding it. It has to open on a phone in a sports hall with poor signal, it has to show cancellations, and it has to be tickable.

That is also where an association's needs differ from a general ticketing system. A ticketing system is finished once the ticket is sold. An association needs the list afterwards, for attendance, for dues, and to know who actually turns up.

What this looks like with us

Activities, teams and slot booking sit in the same system as the member register, so a sign-up knows who is signing up, what they are entitled to, and whether they have paid. Waiting lists, cancellations, deadlines and attendance lists come with it, and payment for a sign-up becomes an entry in the accounts rather than a line in an overview.

Open events can accept sign-ups from non-members without creating them as members. It is a distinction that sounds small and becomes large the first time somebody has to tidy up the register.