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 Club duties section, between Team allocation and Match day. 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. One tap and it is 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 Anyone who was rostered on and had not withdrawn gets a line; so does anyone who withdrew in good time, but with a value of nothing.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
The section has two tabs. The first is called Standings and is the list you came for: one line per member, with their name, their team, and on the right the number of shifts done, a slash, and the norm that applies to them. 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, but by how far behind people are: whoever is furthest behind sits at the top, and whoever is comfortably ahead sinks to the bottom on their own. A committee spending five minutes in this screen therefore has nothing to search for. 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 tab is called Tick off, with the number of outstanding lines beside it. It holds the recent duties nobody has confirmed yet: name, date and the description of the duty. If there is nothing to do, it says "Nothing to tick off", with a note that duties appear here the day after they have taken place.
That second tab 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 is called "not yet confirmed", and in the standings you can see behind each member's name how many of their shifts fall into that category.
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".
Two buttons, and deliberately no third
Behind every line on the tick-off tab there are exactly two buttons: a tick for Done and a cross for Not done. That is the whole of the controls.
The temptation to add a third 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. Two buttons 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.
In short: tick off in ten-minute rounds, every Monday say. Anyone who waits for the AGM is sitting with three hundred lines, most of which they can no longer remember — and at that point ticking off becomes guessing.
A correction 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.
So you correct by ticking off again. 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. If you typed a note with it, that is there as well. The newest line goes on top; if the field ever fills up, it is the oldest that drops off and never the newest.
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.
A note like that also stays within the committee. What the admin types alongside 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.
What is not in there yet
Fair is fair: this section is not finished, and you notice straight away. The calculation is all there — norms per club, per team, per family or per person, exemptions with a factor, custom types of duty with their own weight — but there is no screen around it yet in which you fill those in. So there is a button to switch club duties on, and no button to say that a season's obligation consists of three shifts.
That has two visible consequences. As long as no norm has been set, the right-hand side of every line stays at zero and by definition nobody is behind: you can see who has done how much, but not whether that is enough. And the tick-off tab stays empty for the time being. The individual ledger lines are not yet fetched into the club screen, so until they are it says "Nothing to tick off" — the two buttons are ready, there is simply nothing to tap yet. 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 being kept from the start.
Until then the advice is relaxed: switch club duties on as soon as your club works with duty shifts, so that the counting starts running, and keep your norm to yourself a little longer. What you build up in those months is exactly what a spreadsheet could never deliver — a list about which it can still be said, afterwards, how it came about.
Frequently asked questions
I have accidentally marked somebody as not done. Can that be undone?
Yes, but not by throwing the line away: that button does not exist. You simply tick the duty off again with the right outcome, and the total is correct again immediately. The difference from a spreadsheet is that the previous value stays legible, with the date and your name beside it. Repairing a mistake is always possible; making a mistake disappear is not.
Does a member see it if I mark their duty as not done?
The member sees their own total on their own dashboard, and their children's — so a correction does show up there in the number. The note you type alongside stays within the committee and never reaches the member side. What other members have or have not done is visible to nobody but the admins.
Can somebody polish up their own total by signing up after the event?
No. A sign-up created after the date of the duty does not count as a completed shift — it is booked with a value of zero. Nor does it work the other way round: a sign-up can only be removed while the duty is still to come, so you cannot quietly write yourself out of a shift you missed.
If I delete a duty from the calendar, do I lose the record of who did it?
No. Before the duty disappears, who was on it is recorded first. If that recording fails, the duty is not deleted either and you get a message asking you to try again in a moment. So the past never quietly goes with a clear-out.
