Configurable types
Build the exact senior, junior, family, country, honorary, or life tiers your club uses.
Feature deep-dive: Membership module
Sailing Club Membership Software
Tiered membership types, quarterly proration, household billing, and a member self-service portal that updates the directory automatically.
Last updated 19 May 2026
The complete membership record
One module from first enquiry to renewal
This page documents how the SailHQ membership module is actually built. If you want the sales pitch on sailing club membership management, read the SailHQ membership overview. What follows is the configurable fields, the data model, and what happens at each step - so a treasurer or membership secretary can decide whether the module fits their club before booking a demo.
Quarterly proration
Show a joiner the correct fee before they confirm.
Household billing
Keep primary members, dependents, and family records connected.
Approval queue
Review public registrations before portal access is unlocked.
Payment status
Track paid, unpaid, and overdue independently from member status.
Audit trail
Record every status change, who made it, and when.
Membership types
Membership types are fully configurable
SailHQ ships with no fixed membership tiers. You build the structure your club actually uses. Most UK sailing clubs end up with a mix of Senior, Junior, Cadet, Family, Country, Honorary, and Life - but a small dinghy club might run with three tiers, and a yacht club might have a dozen. The system does not care. The whole list is editable from the admin settings screen.
Add a new type mid-season and it appears immediately on the registration form and in the admin dropdowns. Retire a type that is no longer offered and it vanishes from new registrations without breaking the records of members who joined under it. Historical fees stay attached to the member, not to the type, so deletes never rewrite history.
Name
The display label on the public registration form, the admin dropdowns, and the member portal.
Description
Free-text explainer shown on the registration form so a prospective member knows which tier they fit.
Annual fee
The full-year price in pounds. Quarterly proration applies on top if the type has it switched on.
Voting rights
Boolean flag controlling whether the tier counts at the AGM. Useful when the constitution excludes juniors or country members from votes.
Duty exemption
Boolean flag controlling whether members on this tier appear in the duty rota pool. Honorary and Life tiers are usually exempt.
Age min and max
Optional integer bounds. The registration form rejects a date of birth that falls outside the range so a 14-year-old cannot accidentally pick the senior tier.
Family flag
Marks the type as a household membership. Triggers the family billing flow on registration so the joiner can add dependents.
Sort order
Integer used to order the list. Drag-and-drop in the admin updates this; the most-used tiers sit at the top of dropdowns.
Quarterly proration
How quarterly proration is calculated
Proration is configured per membership type. When the flag is on, the system uses the calendar quarter of the join date to determine the joiner fee.
100%
Q1 · January to March
75%
Q2 · April to June
50%
Q3 · July to September
25%
Q4 · October to December
The flag sits on the membership type rather than on a global setting, so a club can run quarterly proration on adult tiers and a flat annual fee on juniors. Or the other way round. Or proration off everywhere - some clubs prefer to run a single subscription year and ask everyone for the same fee regardless of when they joined. All three work.
The calculation runs at registration time. The joiner sees the prorated figure on screen before they confirm, so there is no follow-up email correcting the amount. From the membership secretary's side the joiner record stores the actual fee charged, the proration percentage, and the join date, which means treasurer reports always reconcile.
If you handle renewals and joiners yourself, the membership officer view shows the full sign-up to renewal flow from your seat.
Households and family billing
Households, primary members, and dependents
Family memberships are modelled as a household record that links one or two primary members (typically Mum and Dad) with any number of dependents (typically the children).
Primary member
The bill-payer. The family fee invoice is generated against this member. Both parents can be ranked as primary so either of them can pay or update household details.
Dependents
Each junior in the family gets a full member record with their own login, RYA number, emergency contacts, health details, and consent flags. They are members in their own right, not line items on a parent.
Household link
The household record ties everyone together. Filter the membership list by household to pull a family up in one view. Address changes propagate to every linked member automatically.
The data model matters here. A junior who later turns 18 and shifts to senior membership keeps their record - history, RYA number, qualifications, boats, all of it. The household link can be removed cleanly when they move out, without deleting the person. For the membership secretary that means renewal time does not involve mentally untangling whose qualification is whose, and for the safeguarding lead it means consent flags for under-18s are stored against the right child rather than bolted on to a parent's profile.
Statuses and payment tracking
Member statuses, payment statuses, and audit trail
Every member carries two independent status fields: their membership status (where they sit with the club) and their payment status (where they sit with the treasurer). Both are tracked separately and both are filterable from the admin list.
Member status
active - in good standing. pending_approval - awaiting admin review. lapsed - record kept, portal access off.
Payment status
paid - date stored on record. unpaid - not yet received. overdue - past the deadline.
Public registration creates a member with status pending_approval by default. The admin queue surfaces these joiners in one filtered view. The membership secretary opens the record, sanity-checks the details (right tier picked, age in range for junior, household linked correctly), and either approves or rejects. Approval flips status to active, fires the welcome email, and unlocks the portal login.
Every status change is recorded in an audit log: timestamp, the admin user who made the change, the previous value, and the new value. If a committee member queries why somebody was marked lapsed in March, the trail is on the record. The same log captures payment status changes, so a treasurer can see when an unpaid was flipped to paid and who flipped it.
Renewal billing: what is not yet built
SailHQ tracks renewal dates and payment status today. What it does not yet do is take live card or Direct Debit payments on your behalf. GoCardless and Stripe integration for automatic renewal charging is on the roadmap, not in production.
For now, clubs collect renewals through whatever they currently use - bank transfer, standing order, an existing DD provider - and update payment status in SailHQ. The chasing, visibility, and audit-trail piece is solved. The card-charging piece is coming. We would rather flag that here than have a treasurer find out after signing up.
For the wider treasurer workflow - reconciliation, reports and what gets exported to the accounts package - the view for treasurers covers what to expect.
Admin views
What the admin sees
The membership list is the workhorse screen for the membership secretary and treasurer. Every common admin task is built around it.
Filter
By member status, membership type, payment status, or household.
Search
Free-text against name, email, RYA number, or sail number.
Sort
By name, join date, paid-up date, or membership type.
View profile
Full member record including duty history, registered boats, and audit log.
Create members
Manual creation for joiners arriving by post or in person.
Approve pending
One-click approve or reject on the registration queue.
Bulk import
Upload route exists for spreadsheet migrations and bulk additions.
Stats dashboard
Headline counts: total, active, pending, lapsed, unpaid.
How it fits
Where the membership module connects
Membership is the spine of SailHQ. A few other modules read directly from it.
Member portal
Where members see their own record, update contact details, manage consent, and view upcoming duties.
Roles and permissions
Who in the committee sees what. Membership data is access-controlled by role.
Member boats
Boats are linked to members. Sail numbers, classes, and trailer details all live on the member record.
Membership is included on every plan
The membership module is core to SailHQ, so it ships on every tier. Pricing scales with the size of your club rather than the modules you use.
See full pricing
Membership FAQ
Membership questions, answered
How the module handles the details clubs ask about most.
Members log in to the self-service portal at any time to view their membership status, paid-up date, and renewal date. They can update their own contact details, emergency contacts, health information, and registered boats without going through the secretary. Live card or Direct Debit charging is on the roadmap, so for now renewal payment itself is collected through the club's existing bank or DD provider, and the membership secretary marks the payment as received in SailHQ.
If a membership type has proration enabled, the joining fee is calculated by quarter. Joining in Q1 (Jan to Mar) pays 100% of the annual fee, Q2 (Apr to Jun) pays 75%, Q3 (Jul to Sep) pays 50%, and Q4 (Oct to Dec) pays 25%. Each membership type stores its own proration flag, so you can prorate adult tiers and bill juniors a flat annual fee, or vice versa. Switch proration off entirely on a type and the full annual fee applies regardless of join date.
Families are modelled as a household with one or two primary bill-payers and any number of dependent members. Both parents can be marked as primary on the household record. Each junior gets their own member account, login, RYA number, emergency contact list, health and medical record, and consent flags - they are stored as full member records, not as line items hanging off a parent. The family fee invoice goes to the primary member.
Yes. Send your existing Excel or Google Sheets export and the SailHQ team imports your members during onboarding, usually within 1-2 days. There is also a bulk import route in the admin dashboard for clubs that want to handle the upload themselves. Manual single-member creation is available at any point for joiners that come in by post or in person.
Core fields are name, date of birth, address, phone, email, membership type, household, member status, payment status, and join date. Optional fields cover RYA membership number and qualifications, Powerboat Level 2, First Aid, VHF, swim flag, GP and emergency contacts, registered boats, and consent flags for photography, video, and social media. Members can request a full data export or deletion through the portal at any time, in line with UK GDPR.
See the membership module in action
Twenty minutes on a screen-share, with your existing member spreadsheet open. We'll show you how the module would handle your tiers, your families, and your renewal cycle.