Tracking membership fees at a volleyball club, without accounting software
Halfway through the season comes the question no treasurer can dodge: who still has to pay? The answer sits in a spreadsheet that was right in September, next to a member list that has moved on since. This is about making those two lists one again.
Why the spreadsheet is always behind
The problem with a separate file is not that it is a spreadsheet. The problem is that it is a second member list. The day you make it, it is right. After that ordinary club life happens: somebody quits, somebody moves up to another team mid-season, a fifteen-year-old joins, a family moves away. Those changes go to the membership records, because that is where the teams and the sessions hang. They do not go to the treasurer's file, because that lives on a different computer.
Two months later one list is still right and the other is not, and the difference only shows up when somebody gets a reminder for a child who stopped playing six months ago. That costs you credibility: after one wrong reminder, the next round gets you a reply from everybody except the people who actually still owe you money.
The answer is not a bigger package. For most clubs the answer is that the payment list lives in the same place as the member list, and that you never have to type it over. That is what the Contributions tab in Koach is for. You reach it through your settings, under Club dashboard — the same screen that holds the members, the venues and the club administrators.
An item is the unit, not a column
In a spreadsheet every payment is a column next to the name: fees, kit, tournament, camp. Here you turn that around. You create an item and hang people on it. Tap Add contribution and you fill in four things:
- What is it for? — the name the member will see. Be specific: "Membership fee 2026/27" is clear, "Membership fee" will not be in two seasons' time.
- Amount — the default amount for this item. A comma or a full stop makes no difference; both are read correctly.
- Due date — the date you want the money in by. It ends up on the member's screen too, so you don't have to communicate it separately.
- Payment link — optional, and below is why this field matters more than it looks. The link has to start with http:// or https://; anything else is refused, precisely because somebody is going to tap it.
One item per thing you want to track separately. This season's membership fee is an item. Team kit is an item. The tournament fee and the camp money are one each. A buy-out for a volunteer duty belongs here too, if your club has one — how you set up an arrangement like that and what it may cost is in doing your duty or buying it off.
If rates differ, that is a second item and not a note next to a name. A club with a lower rate for players under twelve therefore creates two items, each with its own amount, and puts the teams that belong in each one. How you arrive at those amounts is a different conversation altogether, and we have that one in working out the fee: per team or per member.
Who goes on it: a whole team or individual names
Open an item and there are two buttons: Add a whole team and Add someone. The first one is the reason you came. A picker opens with the club's teams, and at the top the option to take everybody at once. You choose, and everyone marked active in that selection lands on the list as a separate line. Players you set to inactive earlier stay out — they owe no fee and so they shouldn't end up in the reminders either.
The button is deliberately boring in the awkward case: anybody already on the list is not added twice. Add a team where half of them were already on it and the app tells you how many lines were added, and if nobody new was in there it simply says everybody was on it already. So after every new sign-up you can safely press the button again without charging anyone twice. At a large club you may need two taps: a maximum of five hundred go through at a time.
With Add someone you put individual names on it. You pick from the club's member list, with the team behind each name, and that is exactly the list you want: a member who only owes one of two items, somebody who joined later, one player going to the tournament on their own. Anyone without a Koach account of their own is simply in there too — a member does not have to be able to log in to appear on the payment list.
In short: only add a team once it is fully picked. Everything that changes after that you fix by pressing the button again and occasionally removing one line — not with a new item.
Three states, and that is all
Behind every name sits a selector with three states: Open, Paid and Waived. That is the whole administration. You set somebody to paid when you see it on the bank statement, and the counter above the item — this many open, this many paid — moves along straight away. Those two numbers are what you need in a board meeting, and they are there without you adding anything up.
The third state is the most important one, and it is the one most spreadsheets lack. There are always cases where you decide nothing has to be paid: a family having a hard time, a player who joined halfway through, somebody who worked their duty instead of buying it off. Delete a line like that and three months later nobody can tell it was a decision rather than a mistake. Set it to waived and the name stays, it no longer counts as outstanding, and the next treasurer can see it is meant to be that way.
Set a line to paid by accident and you simply turn it back to open; the date the app recorded when you ticked it disappears with it. What you don't do is delete a line to tidy things up. The cross next to it is there for the real mistake — somebody who should never have been on the list.
Koach never touches the money
This is the most important sentence in the article, and it also sits above the screen itself: nothing is collected here. Koach does not process payments, does not hold money and does not send anything to your account. What you keep here is a record — exactly what you would keep on paper, except next to the right member list.
Paying itself is arranged by the club the way it already was. In the Payment link field you put the link that goes with it: a payment request from your bank, the club's own payment page, whatever is normal in your country. If that link is there, the member sees a Pay button that takes them straight to it. If it isn't, they only see what they owe and hear from you how to settle it.
That distinction is deliberate. What does help is that the amount, the date and the link sit in one place, so nobody has to dig for an account number in an old email. If you want to tell the whole club at once that the round has started, use a club announcement for that and not fifteen separate messages.
What the member sees — and what they don't
Anyone with an open line sees a To pay block on their own home screen: the total, and under it per item the name, the amount, the due date and the Pay button if there is a link. A parent also sees their children's lines there, with who each one is for. As soon as everything is ticked off the block disappears by itself — no empty box with a zero in it.
Just as important is what is not there. A member sees only their own outstanding lines and those of their children, never a club mate's. They also can't set themselves to paid; that stays the treasurer's job, because otherwise the record turns into a wish list. And the state you give a line is on your side: set somebody to waived and the line simply disappears from their list, with no message saying it was waived. You have that conversation yourself, not through a screen.
That is not a detail. An unpaid fee says something about a family's situation at home, and that is exactly the kind of information a club falls out over when it ends up in the wrong place. Which member data you should be keeping at all, and for how long, is in which member data you keep.
The books stay put when the member list changes
At the end of the season comes the clear-out: teams are picked again, players who stopped come off. In a spreadsheet built on names, that is the moment last year's records quietly develop holes. Not here. If a player disappears from the member list, their line in the item simply stays, with the name as it stood and the state you gave it. So you can clear out in peace without first making a copy of what was still outstanding.
One thing does work the other way round, and that is deliberate: delete a whole item and every line hanging off it goes with it. The app asks you again first. Without its item a line is meaningless — you would know somebody still owed something, but not what for. If you want to keep a finished round, leave the item standing; the list runs by due date, so you always know where it is, and it costs you nothing.
That way you build a history in a few seasons: which items there were, how quickly people paid and where the waivers sat. That is the material for the conversation about next season's rates — see also what volleyball costs per month.
The Contributions tab belongs to the club dashboard and sits in the Club subscription of 9.99 euros a month for the whole club. Who gets to see it is up to the club: an administrator can appoint a treasurer who opens only this part and not the rest of the dashboard. For a treasurer the gain is not that it is cheaper than an accounting package. The gain is that the list of names they work with is the same list as the membership records, and that they have to do nothing at all to keep it that way.
Frequently asked questions
Does somebody get a message automatically when I put them on the list?
No. No email and no notification go out when you add a team or a name to an item. The line appears quietly on the member's home screen, and that is all. If you want people to know the round has started, send a club announcement yourself — that also saves you the question of where to pay.
A member without an account of their own is on my list. Do they see their line?
No. Somebody only sees what is outstanding for them if the line is attached to their account, to their player row, or to their child. A line with just a name on it is there for your records and never appears on anyone's screen. That is deliberate: the same name is not the same person, and accidentally showing somebody else's debt is worse than a line nobody sees.
I deleted a whole item by accident. Can I get it back?
No, which is why the app asks you first. The names hanging off it go with the item, including everyone who had already paid; there is no bin to fish them out of. If you want a finished round out of the way, just leave the item standing. It sinks to the bottom of the list by itself and costs you nothing.
Does Koach take a cut of the membership fee?
No. Not a cent runs through Koach: the payment link is your own link and the money goes straight to the club's account. So there is no percentage, no transaction fee and no payout to wait for. What you pay for is the Club subscription, and the whole club dashboard is in it.
