Approval queue for joiners
Review every public registration and approve it without retyping a form.
For club secretaries
SailHQ for Club Secretaries
Member registration runs itself. The directory updates itself. The committee delegates without dropping the ball.
Last updated 19 May 2026
A secretary's working system
Move the repeat admin to the people who own it
SailHQ is built so the secretary stops being the bottleneck. New joiners enter their own details, existing members maintain their own records, and committee work goes to the right role.
Self-updating directory
Members keep addresses, phones, boats, and qualifications current.
Delegated permissions
Give each committee role the access it needs and nothing more.
Audit trail
See who changed a member status, when, and from what.
GDPR-friendly handling
Support access, export, deletion, and consent workflows cleanly.
One season setup
Set dates and thresholds once for every module to use.
The club secretary problem
The role nobody quite signed up for
There is a stack of paper joining forms in the corner of your kitchen. Some posted, some handed across the bar at the winter dinner, one or two scribbled at a regatta and forwarded by a flag officer. They have been waiting for somebody to type them up. That somebody is you.
The inbox is worse. New joiner enquiries, change-of-address notes, "can you send me Jane's phone number please", a forwarded email from the duty officer asking who is qualified for safety boat, two parents asking why their daughter still cannot log in to enter the cadet series, and the treasurer wanting to know who is paid up before he does the AGM accounts. None of those are the secretary's job, exactly. They all end up on the secretary's desk anyway.
The master list lives in a spreadsheet. There is a copy on your laptop, a different copy on the membership officer's, and an older one that was emailed to half the committee in February which nobody has had the heart to delete. The sail numbers tab does not match the boats tab, the emergency contacts column was last updated by somebody who is no longer on the committee, and the question "is so-and-so paid up?" still takes twenty minutes to answer because the bank reconciliation lives somewhere else entirely.
Then renewal season hits. November and December are quiet. January is panic. By April the new committee is already querying the figures in your AGM report and three members have quietly drifted off because their renewal email was filtered to spam. By June you are doing membership admin on a sunny Saturday instead of sailing.
SailHQ is built so the secretary stops being the bottleneck. The next sections walk through the bits that actually take work off your hands: an approval queue for new joiners, a directory members maintain themselves, role-based delegation so the committee can pull their weight, and GDPR-friendly handling so you can defend any data question on the floor of the AGM.
New joiners and approval
New members register themselves. You approve them in one click.
Public registration is built in. Anyone interested in joining the club lands on a form on the club site, picks the relevant membership type, fills in their details, and lands in a pending queue on your dashboard. No paper form, no PDF download, no envelope, no chasing.
Pending queue
Every public registration lands here. Review, approve, reject. The welcome email goes out automatically.
One-click approval
No printing, no filing. The new joiner gets a portal login the moment you approve.
Manual entry still works
Create members by hand for postal joiners and walk-ins. Same dashboard, same record.
The secretary opens the dashboard and sees a list of pending members. Each entry shows what they filled in - membership type, age, household, any boat they registered, the consent flags they ticked - and gives you two buttons. Approve or reject. Approving sends the welcome email automatically and gives the new member a portal login. Rejecting fires off a polite no with a reason. No printing, no filing, no separate "have I emailed them yet" checklist on a Post-it note.
Members carry a status from the moment they register: pending_approval until you approve them, active once you do, lapsed when their year is up and they have not renewed. The dashboard shows counts of each at the top of the page, so you walk in to a clear picture without running a query.
Postal joiners, walk-ins, and the usual handful who will not touch a website are handled too. Create the member by hand from the admin dashboard, set their status to active, and they sit in the same list alongside everyone else. The secretary keeps the manual lever, the system handles everyone else.
The directory updates itself
Members maintain their own record. You stop being the data entry clerk.
Every member has a portal login. From their portal they can edit everything you used to receive as an email asking you to update something on their behalf. The change-of-address note, the new mobile number, the updated emergency contact, the new sail number on the recently bought Laser, the RYA renewal that came through last week - all of it is theirs to keep current.
That single shift is the one most secretaries notice first. The trickle of "can you change my address" emails dries up in a few weeks. Sail numbers stop being out of date. Emergency contacts stop being a guess. Photo consent gets recorded once, with a timestamp, against the right member, instead of being assumed because somebody once said it was fine.
The admin directory is fully searchable. Filter by status, type, payment state or household. Sort by name, joined date, or paid-up date. Pull a filtered CSV for the AGM, the RYA affiliation return, or a one-off email to a specific cohort. The list is always live and always current because the members themselves keep it that way.
Contact details
Address, postcode, phone, email. One record, propagated everywhere.
Emergency contacts
Held with stricter visibility than ordinary contact details.
Registered boats
Sail numbers, classes, storage, paid status. Members add and retire their own.
RYA and qualifications
RYA number, Powerboat L2, First Aid, VHF, sailing instructor tickets.
Consent flags
Social media, video, photo. Per member, with a timestamp.
Role-based delegation
The committee can pull their weight without you sharing a password
Most clubs have a delegation problem rather than a workload problem. The treasurer needs to see who is paid up. The race officer co-ordinator needs to manage duties. The membership officer needs to handle approvals. None of them need full admin access, and none of them want it.
Roles are configurable. The defaults cover most clubs straight out of the box, but you can build custom roles for the way your committee actually splits the work. Permissions are granular per domain - membership, duties, finance, events, settings - so a "junior co-ordinator" role might get junior member edit rights and event management without seeing the senior fee report.
Membership officer
Approves new joiners, edits member records, manages renewals and statuses. Cannot see the duty rota config.
Treasurer
Sees payment status, marks payments received, exports the unpaid list. Cannot edit personal data or duty config.
Race officer co-ordinator
Manages duty rota, approves swaps, configures duty types. Cannot touch the membership list.
Safety officer
Reads medical and emergency contact data for race entries. Cannot edit other personal fields.
Commodore
Read-only across the board. Sees the whole picture without changing anything by accident.
GDPR-friendly data handling
Defend any data question at the AGM
The secretary is usually the de facto data controller for the club. When a member asks "what data do you hold on me?" or "please delete my record", you are the one who has to answer. SailHQ gives you the tools to do that without spending a Sunday going through inboxes.
Data export on demand
Members can request a full export of their personal data through the portal. The secretary can also pull a per-member export from the admin side for subject access requests.
Deletion handled cleanly
Deletion requests run through a clean flow that removes personal data while keeping the legitimate-interest records (race results, duty history) the club is allowed to retain.
Audit trail of changes
Every status change is logged - who changed what, when, from what to what. If a committee member queries why somebody is lapsed or pending, you can show them the trail.
UK servers, encrypted
Data sits on UK-based servers with HTTPS in transit, hashed passwords, and role-based access controls. Aligns with UK GDPR expectations.
Full breakdown on the GDPR page and the security page.
Season setup
Set the year up once. Used everywhere.
Sailing season start and end dates, the membership year, the junior age threshold. Configure it once at the start of the year and every other module reads from the same setting. Junior age cut-offs apply automatically. Renewal dates line up. The duty calendar respects the off-season. The secretary is not retyping the same dates into five different places.
Mid-season changes are honoured. If the AGM votes to push the junior threshold from 18 to 21, you change the number once and the system recalculates who counts as a junior on the next render. No spreadsheet pivot needed.
Pairing the platform with a structured handover helps too. The sailing club off-season checklist walks through the October to March prep work most secretaries are juggling alongside new-season settings.
The secretary's view of a wider system
The pieces on this page sit alongside the rest of SailHQ. Membership tiers, household billing and renewal tracking are documented under membership. The pillar overview lives at membership management. The granular permissions side is on roles and permissions. If your club splits the secretary role from the membership officer role, see SailHQ for membership officers for the day-to-day membership desk view.
Common questions
Questions club secretaries ask
What to expect before moving the member list and admin workflow into SailHQ.
Most of it. Once members have a portal login, they can update their own contact details, emergency contacts, registered boats, RYA number and qualifications, and consent flags. The secretary still does the things only an admin can do - approving new joiners, marking someone as lapsed, recording a payment, configuring membership types - but the data-entry burden shifts off the inbox. Clubs that have run SailHQ for a season report the change-of-address email almost disappears.
You can still create and edit any member record from the admin dashboard yourself. SailHQ does not force every member into the portal. For the older members who want to send a postal renewal or hand a paper form across the bar, the secretary types it in once and the system handles the rest. The portal is the default for new joiners, not a hard requirement for everyone.
Members do not have to register through the public form. From the admin side you can manually create a member, set their type, mark them as paid, and skip the email invite if you do not want one. The same record sits alongside the digital joiners in the same dashboard. If the member ever wants portal access later, you can send them a login from the same screen.
Yes. The full membership list exports to CSV from the admin dashboard, with the columns the secretary actually needs - name, status, type, join date, paid-up date, contact details, household. That is useful for the AGM membership report, for the RYA affiliation return, and for sharing a filtered list with the treasurer or commodore. Per-member data exports for GDPR subject access requests are also available.
SailHQ is built with UK GDPR in mind. Data sits on UK-based servers with HTTPS and hashed passwords. Members can request a data export or deletion through the portal. Consent flags for marketing, photos and video are stored per member with timestamps. Status changes are recorded in an audit log so you can show who changed what and when. You remain the data controller for your club - SailHQ is the processor - and the tooling is there to back you up at the AGM or in front of an RYA visitor.
Get the secretary's evenings back
Stop being the inbox. Let members register, renew, and update their own details. Delegate the rest of the committee in. We will help you migrate your existing list and have you running by next season.