The True Cost of Running Your Club on Spreadsheets

Nobody puts the spreadsheet in the club accounts. It costs nothing to open, so it never appears as a line item, and because it never appears, nobody asks what it actually costs to run. At most sheet-run clubs the honest answer is: a good deal. The spreadsheet is free the way a leaky hull is free — you didn't pay for the water coming in, but you will pay to keep getting it out.

The visible cost: a person doing a machine's job

Start with the part everyone can see. On a spreadsheet, every booking is a conversation. A member texts to ask whether the Hardy is free on Saturday morning. The secretary checks the sheet, usually in the evening, replies, waits for a confirmation, then types the name into the cell. Three messages, sometimes five. Now run that across a club with, say, ten boats and forty members through a fine spell in June.

Nobody times themselves doing this. But ask any club secretary to add it up and the answer, in season, is comfortably several hours a week, taken in two-minute slices at the least convenient moments: Sunday breakfast, the school run, half past nine at night. The work is not difficult. It is simply constant, and it lands on one person.

The invisible costs

The hours are at least visible. The rest of the bill hides.

• Unbilled fuel. A member fills the tank, means to mention it, and doesn't. The treasurer ends up reconstructing May's outings from memory in October. Any club that bills fuel by the trip and tracks it on paper or a sheet leaks some of that money; the only question is how much.
• Empty boats after cancellations. A Friday-night text saying ‘can't make tomorrow’ reaches one person, who is asleep. The boat sits on its mooring all Saturday while members who would gladly have taken the slot do something else. On a fine weekend, that idle morning is the most expensive thing the club owns.
• Disputes with no record. Two members are each certain they booked the same slot. The sheet shows one name; a WhatsApp screenshot suggests the other. There are no timestamps and no history of who typed what, so the committee settles it with diplomacy instead of evidence, and somebody leaves the bar unhappy.

Whose copy of the sheet is true?

Then there is the version problem. Sheets get emailed, copied and downloaded ‘just to check something’, then edited offline. Sooner or later the club owns a file called Bookings 2026 FINAL v3, and nobody is sure whether it agrees with the copy on the commodore's laptop. A shared online sheet helps, right up until someone sorts a single column and quietly scrambles every name against every date.

The deeper trouble is that a spreadsheet has no memory. When a cell changes, the old value does not move into a history; it simply stops existing. For the document that decides who may take out tens of thousands of pounds' worth of boats, that should worry a committee more than it usually does.

The person who is the system

Every sheet-run club has one member who genuinely understands the workbook: the colour codes, the hidden columns, the conditional formatting that turns a cell red when someone has booked too far ahead. It works because they built it, and it works only while they stay.

When that person steps down, as volunteers eventually do, the handover is an afternoon of apologetic explanation followed by six months of texting them questions. The club never had a booking system. It had a person, with a spreadsheet attached.

What ‘free’ should be compared against

Put numbers on it, even rough ones. Price the admin hours at anything you like; add the leaked fuel and the boats sitting idle after unannounced cancellations. Then look at what purpose-built software actually costs. Club booking platforms generally run somewhere between £90 and £130 a month; Nauticore's entry plan, for instance, is £89. Spread across a forty-member club, that is a little over £2 per member per month — rather less than one round in the club bar.

So the fair comparison was never free versus £100 a month. It is £100 a month versus a dozen volunteer hours, a slow leak of fuel money, empty boats on the days members most wanted them, and a system that is one resignation away from collapse.

And, in fairness, sometimes the sheet wins. A syndicate of four friends sharing one boat does not need booking software. The honest criteria: everyone knows everyone, costs are split evenly regardless of use, nobody queues for sunny Saturdays, and the person keeping the sheet enjoys keeping it. If that describes your club, carry on with a clear conscience. The moment you have members rather than co-owners, a scramble for weekend slots, quotas to enforce or fuel billed by the trip, the free option has quietly become the expensive one.