Five Questions Your Booking Data Can Answer Before Your Next Committee Meeting

Most committee arguments I have sat through were really arguments about missing evidence. Someone is sure the old RIB is barely used. Someone else swears it is out every weekend. Both are guessing, and the loudest guess usually wins. The frustrating part is that the club already holds the answer. It is sitting in the booking history, waiting for anyone to ask.

Here are five questions clubs debate again and again, and how each one is really a report you can run before the meeting rather than a fight you have during it.

Which boat should we sell?

Nobody wants to be sentimental about a hull, but committees are, and it costs money. The honest way to settle it is to put two numbers side by side for every vessel: how often it was actually booked over the last year, and how many issues it has thrown up in the same period.

A boat that sits at the bottom of the utilisation table and the top of the fault log is not a hard decision. It is an expensive one you keep postponing. Sometimes the surprise runs the other way. A boat you assumed was dead weight turns out to be a quiet workhorse, and the real candidate for sale is the shiny one everyone likes the look of but nobody books. Utilisation by boat, read next to the issues-by-boat breakdown, tells you which is which in about a minute.

Do we need evening or Sunday sessions?

New sessions cost volunteer hours, so the fair test is whether existing demand is already hitting a ceiling. You are not looking for a hunch about what members might like. You are looking for the slots that fill first and the days where members repeatedly bump into the quota or the fully-booked wall.

Look at the day-of-week pattern and the morning-versus-afternoon split. If Saturday afternoons are solid every week and the waitlist keeps forming there, you have a genuine case for opening more capacity. If the quieter days barely move, you have just saved the club from rostering duty officers for sessions three people wanted. Demand that repeatedly hits the ceiling is the signal; a vague sense that it would be nice is not.

Who actually keeps this club running?

Every club has members who never miss an AGM and members who quietly do the work. The volunteer award tends to go to the former. Your booking data knows the latter.

The most-active-members view surfaces the people who turn up week after week, launch, log their fuel, and report the snagging faults that keep the fleet safe. These are rarely the noisiest names in the room. When you are choosing who to thank, or who to sound out for a committee role, a ranked list of genuine engagement beats a show of hands every time. It also catches the member drifting quietly towards the exit, which is a far cheaper conversation to have early.

Where did the fuel money go, and is the cancellation rule working?

These are the two the treasurer and the sailing secretary raise, and they answer the same way. Take fuel first. It gets bought, boats get used, and the money billed back to members somehow never matches the money that left the account. The gap is rarely fraud. It is unlogged litres, sessions that were never invoiced, and a spreadsheet that fell behind in April.

The way to see it clearly is month by month: fuel logged against sessions, set against fuel actually recovered from members. Once the two lines are next to each other, the leak announces itself. You can filter the unbilled sessions, chase them, and stop the same hole opening next season. A club losing even a few pounds a session across a busy summer is quietly funding somebody's boating, and it is usually nobody's fault and everybody's problem.

The cancellation rule works the same way. Most clubs have a notice period and a dim sense that some members abuse it. Data turns the sense into a fact. Track late cancellations and no-shows over a season and you learn two things: whether the problem is getting worse, and whether it is spread across the membership or concentrated in a handful of repeat offenders. That distinction matters. A club-wide upward trend means the rule needs teeth. A short list of the same three names means a quiet word, not a rule change that penalises everyone. Either way, you walk into the meeting with the no-show rate in front of you instead of an anecdote about last Tuesday.

Ask the question the way you would say it

The old objection to all of this was that pulling the numbers meant wrestling a spreadsheet, so nobody bothered until the row had already started. That has changed. Modern club software will take the question roughly as you would ask it aloud. Type fuel cost by boat this year, or no-show rate by member since January, and the report builds itself from the bookings, cancellations, issues and fuel logs the club already holds.

Nauticore's report builder does exactly that, and it will email the chart to the committee or send it on a schedule so the evidence lands before anyone opens their mouth. The point is not the tool, though. It is that the answers to your longest-running arguments are already recorded. You just have to ask before the meeting instead of shouting during it.