How to move your club off spreadsheets

In this guide

1. What you are moving
2. What to gather
3. What you rebuild
4. Families and children
5. Invoices and payments
6. A first week
7. What to keep in parallel
8. Questions

Decide what you are actually moving

A club spreadsheet usually holds five different things at once: a roster of families, a list of classes with times, attendance marks, who has paid, and a column of notes only one person understands. They do not all move the same way, and some should not move at all. Before you touch the software, label each tab or column as one of three things: setup you will rebuild, people you will invite, or history you will leave behind.

We should be plain about the boundary. Gympillar does not offer a bulk upload of families, athletes, classes or invoices from a spreadsheet. The migration is part rebuild and part invitation. For a club with a few hundred families that is usually less painful than it sounds, because most of the work is deciding things you have never written down.

What to gather first

• Classes: name, programme, building, floor area, coach, days, times, season dates, capacity and price. The product refuses a class that double-books a coach or floor area, so conflicts hiding in the sheet surface straight away.
• Prices and terms: what is charged monthly, what by the term, any registration fee, sibling rate and how long a family has to pay.
• Families: one clean contact per household, with the email they actually read. The email becomes their sign-in, so a typo creates a household that is billed and can never get in. Check addresses before inviting anyone.
• Children: dates of birth, allergies, medical notes and emergency contacts. Most of this is better re-collected from the parent than typed in by you.
• Paperwork: the waiver your insurer supplied, plus your terms and privacy policy.
• Levels: if you grade children, your ladder, whether numbered levels, belts or badges. Starter ladders exist for each kind of club, and you edit them.
• Money owed and owing: a short list of households with a balance or credit at the cut-over date.

What you rebuild by hand, once

Classes are built once and generate their own sessions, so rebuilding a timetable means creating each class a single time rather than filling a calendar. A class can be copied to start the next one, and a season can be rolled forward later, which is where the effort pays back. Start with the scheduling and capacity tools and enter one class from each programme before doing the rest, so you find your own naming problems early.

Prices are set per class and per option. If you are unsure whether to charge by the month or by the term, settle that first with the term or monthly pricing guide, because it changes how classes are set up.

How families and children come across

Three routes exist, and they suit different families:

1. Invite them. Paste a list of emails (one household per line, optionally with a phone number) into the invitation screen. It shows who it found, which you already hold, which already have a live link, and which lines turned into nobody, before anything is sent. The invitation can name a class so the link lands on that class's registration form with choices ticked. Each household registers themselves, which creates their account, their children and the consent record. Texted invitations need a consent tick for the numbers, and one tick on a batch is weaker than one per household, so be honest with yourself about it.
2. Type them in. For the grandparent on the phone or the family with no smartphone, staff can add a family and enrol it from the class page. This is the slow route; keep it for exceptions.
3. A QR code at the desk. An invitation can be shown as a code on screen for a parent standing in front of you.

The consequence is that the parent's own typing becomes the record, which usually corrects the sheet's old errors. The cost is that you need parents to act, and some will not for a while. That is the main reason the timeline below keeps the old system open.

If you hold a mailing list outside the product, importing contacts for email marketing is a different feature with its own consent rules. CASL and privacy for clubs covers the principles; it is not legal advice.

Invoices, balances and payments

There is no import of old invoices. For a clean start, finish collecting on the spreadsheet's invoices there and issue new ones from the cut-over date. If a household genuinely owes you from before, raise one invoice with a typed line for the carried balance, and if somebody has paid ahead, record it as credit on their account. A cohort charge, such as a competition fee for forty families, can be raised in one action as separate invoices.

If many of your families pay by Interac e-Transfer, read the e-Transfer page before switching: nothing can pull a transfer, so monthly bills go out automatically but collection is still the family's action, and deposit notifications are matched by reference code. Card payments are built on Stripe but have not yet been used for a live production payment, so keep a fallback until you have tested one yourself.

A realistic first week

1. Day 1: sign up, set the club's details, buildings and timezone. Write your classes and prices on one page.
2. Day 2: add your coaches and programmes, then build one class per programme.
3. Day 3: finish the timetable, set the season dates and booking window, and write your terms and privacy policy.
4. Day 4: register yourself as a test family, pay a test invoice, run a register for one session.
5. Day 5: clean the family list. Fix addresses, merge duplicates, decide which households are active.
6. Day 6: invite one class's worth of families, such as the Tuesday group, and watch what confuses them.
7. Day 7: fix what the first batch showed, then queue the next groups.

Most of the following fortnight is parents responding. Expect stragglers, and phone the ones who matter before a term starts.

What to keep running in parallel

• Attendance history stays in the sheet. A new register starts on the first session you run in the new system.
• Old receipts and balances stay where they are until each is settled or written off.
• Your current registration method stays open for one overlap at most. Two live front doors mean double bookings.
• Notes you trust about a child, such as a past injury, should be re-entered on the child's record rather than left behind.

Pick one cut-over date and say it to families. After it, new registrations and payments happen only in the new system. See class registration and waitlists for the rules to set before families arrive. The registration, invoicing and family portal sections list what each screen does. Whichever kind of club you run, the pages for gymnastics, martial arts, dance, cheer, swimming and ninja and parkour describe the setup. US clubs: see card and ACH payments for US clubs. Current prices are on the pricing page.