Tracking club duties: who has actually done their shifts?

Almost every club that makes duty shifts compulsory keeps track of them in a spreadsheet. That works fine until the first disagreement: a member insists they were there last season, the cell says otherwise, and nobody can work out any more who changed that cell. From that conversation onwards the list is no longer an administration but an opinion. This article shows how to put that count into Koach instead.

The list nobody trusts any more

The trouble with the spreadsheet is not the arithmetic. Anyone can add up. It is the three things a tab does not keep: where a number came from, what has changed since yesterday, and who made that change. As long as nobody minds about anything, that goes unnoticed. The moment something hangs on the outcome — and at most clubs something does — that is precisely the question you have to be able to answer, often months later and with the member sitting opposite you.

In Koach this lives in the club environment, among the parts only club admins get to see: the Duties section, in the group Planning next to Match day and Halls. Who is allowed in there at all is a matter of your club's admin roles — see running your volleyball club.

One thing Koach does not take off your hands: the policy. The app counts; deciding what should be counted, and what follows if somebody falls behind, is for the club itself — that is policy you settle first, with the same care you use when setting membership fees. Without those agreements a counter is just a number everybody reads differently.

Switching it on: no opt-in, no administration

Club duties are off by default. Open the section at a club that does nothing with them and you get a single screen: Club duties are switched off, with the button Set up club duties underneath. That button switches it on.

That opt-in is a deliberate choice, not a formality. A club that does not make duties compulsory should not get an administration for them either — no empty list with a zero after everybody's name, no card on the dashboard of members who have nothing to comply with, and no overnight bookkeeping about shifts that were never meant as an obligation. Only once you press that button does Koach start counting along.

From then on the same thing happens every night. Koach walks through all the duties that have since taken place and were not yet booked, and enters them in the ledger. Anyone who was rostered on and had not withdrawn gets a line; so does anyone who withdrew in good time, but with a value of nothing. If the match the duty was attached to did not go ahead, there is a line for that too, with a value of zero and no blame attached. And a sign-up created only after the date of the duty does not count as work done — otherwise whoever is behind signs up tonight for three shifts from last month and wakes up tomorrow with nothing to make up.

By a duty we mean here any compulsory job around the matches: refereeing, keeping the scoresheet, supervising the hall, or standing behind the bar in the clubhouse for an evening. Where those duties come from is another story — scheduling and dividing them is covered in planning bar duties for the whole club. Club duties do nothing to the rota. They only read off what came out of it.

The standings: whoever is furthest behind sits at the top

At the top of the section sit two buttons side by side: Standing and Check off; the settings are behind the gear icon top right. Standing is the list you came for: one line per member, with their name, their team, a thin bar showing how far along they are, and on the right the number of shifts done, a slash, and the norm that applies to them. Once somebody has reached the norm, the number gets a green tick; if somebody is exempt, the word Exempt appears there instead of a number.

The order is the most important thing about that screen. It does not sort by name and it does not sort by team: the list is headed Fewest first, so whoever has done the smallest share of their norm sits at the top, whoever has already reached it sinks to the bottom on their own, and the exempt members come last. A committee spending five minutes in this screen therefore has nothing to search for. Above the list one number shows how many members have already reached the norm, and below the list is a single line with the club total: how many members are behind, and how many shifts have been done altogether.

Two things you cannot see in a list like that, but which are in there. First, one person really is counted as one person. Somebody can enter this system by two routes — as an account and as a player in a team — and without merging they would collect their shifts on two separate piles and fall behind on both. Loose names, on the other hand, are never merged with an account: a similar name is not an identity, and two people who happen to share one must not inherit each other's record.

Second, somebody from outside the club does not appear in this list. A referee who comes in from elsewhere, a parent from the opposition keeping score: their name is attached to a duty, but they are not members and so have no obligation. Rather than showing an empty norm after their name, the list leaves them out. Their completed shifts still count towards the club total at the bottom, because that work was done.

Not yet ticked off is something other than not done

The second button is called Check off, with the number of outstanding lines beside it. It holds the recent duties nobody has confirmed yet, grouped by date with the newest on top: name, type of duty and team. If there is nothing to do, it says "Nothing to check off", with a note that duties show up here the day after, and a button Open match day.

That second screen exists because there is a distinction that vanishes in a spreadsheet. Koach does not register attendance. If somebody was rostered on and did not withdraw, all the app knows is that they were rostered on — not whether they were actually there that evening. That assumption is not swept under the carpet but kept separate: such a line counts as not yet confirmed, and in the standings you can see under each member's name how many of their shifts are not confirmed yet.

By default those unconfirmed shifts simply count, and that is on purpose: doing nothing is not an offence. An admin who has not got round to it for weeks should not thereby put half the membership behind. Anyone who knows for certain that somebody was there — or was not — ticks the line off, and it then shifts from "assumed" to "established by a human being".

Check off: everybody starts ticked

On the check-off screen everybody is ticked by default. So you only untick the people who were not there; next to their name No-show appears. At the bottom there is a single button that says how many duties you are confirming (Confirm … duties), and it books everything in one go: ticked counts as done, unticked as a no-show. Note that the button only mentions the number of ticked lines, but the unticked ones are booked at the same time. If you have unticked everybody, the button reads Mark … as no-show.

The temptation to add more choices is considerable. "Partly done", "unknown", "decide later": they all sound reasonable. But this is a screen somebody works through on a Tuesday evening with fifty lines in front of them. The more choices there are per line, the longer that evening takes, and the greater the chance the admin gives up halfway. And with a half-finished list nobody's total is right any more — including the totals of the people who did every one of their shifts. One tick per line and one button at the bottom means: you get to the end.

There is one restriction. A duty still to come cannot be ticked off as done or not done. Both are observations, and an observation about next month does not exist. Withdrawing and cancelling may be done in advance, because those happen precisely before the duty starts.

A confirmation is a new line, not an eraser

This is where the real difference with the spreadsheet lies. Nothing can be thrown away in the club duties ledger. There is no delete button, not even a "just for a correction" one, and that is not an omission but the starting point.

With every confirmation Koach writes an extra line, and that line holds the date, the old value, the new value and the name of the admin who did it, along the lines of done (1) to cancelled (0), by Marieke. The newest line goes on top; if the field ever fills up, it is the oldest that drops off and never the newest. One thing the app can no longer do: a line that has been checked off disappears from Check off, and the lines in the standings cannot be tapped. So you cannot repair a mistake made while checking off yourself in Koach; check off calmly and look over the unticked names before you press the button.

That sounds laborious until the first time it matters. At a members' meeting the question is rarely "what does it say"; the question is "why does it say that, since when, and who decided it". An administration in which the previous value stays legible answers that question by itself. A spreadsheet in which somebody turned a 1 into a 0 can only say: it says 0 now.

That history also stays within the committee and never reaches the member: that is the side of the administration you handle carefully, just as you do with the rest of your member data. The member sees only their own total, and their children's, on their own dashboard; what other members have done or failed to do is visible to nobody but the committee.

The norm and the unit

Counting is one half; the other half is the agreement you count against. The club manager or a board member sets that in Duty settings, behind the gear icon top right (or through the Set standard button while there is no norm yet): the norm per member per season, meaning how many duties each member does, and the unit you count in, for example shifts, turns or points. That is also where you set below which age members are exempt, whether coaches are exempt, whether members see their own standing and how much each type of duty counts. You keep it with Save at the top. The unit then shows up in the standings.

As long as no norm has been set, by definition nobody is behind: you can see who has done how much, but not whether that is enough. Meanwhile the ledger fills up as normal: every duty that has taken place is booked with the date and the person against it. That is the expensive half of an administration like this. A season that was never recorded cannot be reconstructed afterwards, so it is kept from the start.

The advice is therefore simple: switch club duties on as soon as your club works with duty shifts, so that the counting starts running, and set the norm once the board has decided on it. What you build up that way is exactly what a spreadsheet could never deliver: a list about which it can still be said, afterwards, how it came about. How club duties relate to the rest of the club work in Koach is shown on the page for volleyball clubs.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

Adding club admins: the five roles and what each one is for How to Keep Volleyball Stats on Paper: A Simple System Volleyball club membership list: every team on one screen Volunteer hours tracker for your club: template or app? Referee scheduling app: spreadsheet, software or club app Concession stand schedule: fill every shift without chasing

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