One source of truth
Every officer works from the same member, duty, event, and payment record.
For commodores and chairs
SailHQ for Commodores
Oversight without the spreadsheet hunt. AGM-defensible records, governance-aware admin, and a single source of truth for every committee position.
Last updated 19 May 2026
A club-wide view
The answers behind the AGM report
The commodore does not need another admin queue. They need trusted figures, accountable access, and a clean handover from one committee to the next.
Audit-ready changes
Status changes and role assignments retain who did what and when.
AGM-ready figures
Headline counts and category breakdowns come from the live system.
Governance-aware roles
Access follows the committee position, then ends when the position changes.
Brand stewardship
Keep the club's identity in the platform, not a personal folder.
Structural handover
The next committee inherits context, history, and configuration intact.
The commodore problem
The AGM is in three weeks and there are three different membership lists
The commodore's year tends to follow a familiar shape. Spring opening, prizegiving, the autumn dinner, and the AGM. By the time the AGM is in sight, the questions arrive faster than the answers.
How many members did the club have at the start of the year? At the end? How many lapsed and how many joined? Who approved the change to family membership rates? Who reinstated the member who resigned in March? The membership secretary has a list. The treasurer has a slightly different list. The previous secretary has a third list, last touched in the summer. None of them quite agree, and the differences are exactly the figures the AGM will ask about.
Then there is the audit trail. A category change, a suspension, a reinstatement - somewhere along the way these decisions were taken, and somewhere along the way they were applied. Often the trail goes cold between the two. The committee minutes record the decision. The membership record shows the new status. Whether the two match, and whether the change was applied promptly and by the right person, is something nobody has the time or the appetite to reconstruct.
The hardest part is the handover. One secretary stands down, another steps up. The outgoing officer drops off a USB stick, a folder of email exports, and a verbal walkthrough that lasts about forty minutes. Six weeks later the new secretary is rebuilding context the old secretary held in their head. The system is institutional knowledge, and institutional knowledge is fragile when it lives on personal laptops.
The commodore is not the person doing the data entry. The commodore is the person who has to defend the figures, sign off the report, and explain to the membership how the year was run. That requires oversight, not yet another spreadsheet.
One source of truth
One platform, one membership list, one set of figures
The defining feature of SailHQ from the commodore's chair is not any single module. It is that everything sits in the same system, with the same membership list underneath.
Every active member, every paused member, every honorary member, every junior with a parent attached - all of them sit in one record. The treasurer reconciles subs against that record. The duty officer assigns the rota from that record. The sailing secretary publishes the entry list from that record. The figures the commodore presents at the AGM come from that record. There is no separate ledger, no separate spreadsheet, no parallel list maintained by a single officer who keeps it in their head.
Duties, events, race series, boat moorings, household groupings, membership categories, club settings, branding controls - they all sit in the same platform too. When the membership secretary updates a contact detail, the next email goes to the new address. When the treasurer marks a subscription paid, the member's status reflects it on the dashboard. When an admin toggles a feature on, the change is visible to every officer with the right role.
The handover benefit is the one most commodores notice first. The new committee does not inherit a folder of emails and a USB stick. They inherit the live system. Every record the previous committee built, every category they configured, every audit log they accumulated - it carries over without any export-and-reimport ritual. The first AGM the new commodore presents draws on the same data the previous commodore worked with. The continuity is not a goodwill effort. It is structural.
Audit trails
A record the committee can stand behind
Governance is not a feature you bolt on at the end. It runs through how the platform records every meaningful change. SailHQ is built so that the actions a commodore needs to defend are the actions the system already logs.
Member status changes are logged with the admin who made the change and the date it was applied. A resignation, a suspension, a reinstatement, a category change from full to family, a move from active to honorary - each one carries a record of who and when. The commodore reviewing the AGM pack can see at a glance whether the figures in the report reconcile with the actions taken across the year.
Role assignments sit in the system in the same way. When a new race officer co-ordinator picks up the role, the assignment is in the platform. When the previous holder steps down, the role is unassigned. The committee can see who held which permissions through the year, which is the question that always arrives when an AGM gets contentious.
Settings changes - branding, feature toggles, membership categories - are part of the same record. The commodore, or the commodore's successor, can answer who did what when, without rummaging through email threads or chasing the previous secretary for context. For the broader year-end picture, the sailing club off-season checklist covers the governance work that sits alongside the audit trail - AGM prep, role handovers, accounts close-down.
Member statistics
Numbers ready for the AGM report
The figures the commodore presents are the figures the system already holds. There is no end-of-year scramble to reconcile two lists into one.
Headline counts
Total members, active count, pending approvals, lapsed count and unpaid count surface on the admin dashboard at a glance.
Group by category
Break down by membership type, household and status to answer the AGM questions about category mix and household coverage.
CSV for the appendix
Export the underlying data so the AGM pack carries the supporting detail behind the headline figures, not just the headline figures.
Most commodores work the same way through the AGM cycle. Read the dashboard for the headline figures, screenshot the relevant panels for the report, export the underlying member list as CSV for the appendix, and ask the treasurer to reconcile the subscription totals against the same record. The figures match because they come from the same place.
Brand stewardship
The club's identity, protected across committees
The burgee, the colours, the typography on the public website - these are the visible expression of the club, and they outlast any single committee. The commodore's role is to protect that identity even as officers turn over each year.
Branding controls live in the platform: a light and a dark logo, primary, secondary and accent colours, the PWA icon members see when they add the portal to their home screen, and the login page background. The same settings drive the public-facing website, so a brand decision lands in one place and shows up everywhere it should. When the next committee takes office, the club's identity is part of the system they inherit, not a folder on the previous secretary's laptop.
Roles by position
Governance-aware roles, attached to the position
Permissions are assigned per committee position rather than per person. The treasurer role carries treasurer-level access. When a new treasurer takes office, they are granted the role and they get the right access from day one. When the outgoing treasurer steps down, the role is removed and their access ends with the position. The same pattern applies to the membership secretary, the sailing secretary, the cruising captain, the training principal and any other position the club's structure recognises. Roles travel with the position, not with the individual.
How it fits
How it fits with the rest of SailHQ
The commodore's view sits across the platform. The detail lives in the relevant feature pages and in the persona pages for the officers who carry the day-to-day load.
Roles and permissions
Granular per-domain access for committee positions.
Branding controls
Logo, colours and public website driven from the platform.
Yacht club software
The wider view for clubs with multiple committees.
SailHQ for club secretaries
The day-to-day admin view that pairs with the commodore's oversight.
Common questions
Commodore FAQs
Questions we hear from commodores and chairs during demo calls.
Handover happens inside the platform rather than on a USB stick. The outgoing commodore's role is unassigned, the incoming commodore is granted the same role, and every member record, duty roster, event, setting and committee position carries over untouched. There is no export-and-reimport step. The new committee inherits the live system on the day they take office, with the same member data and the same audit history visible from the first login.
Yes. The commodore is typically given an admin role, which grants visibility across members, duties, events, series, boats, settings, newsletters and reports. Visibility does not mean every action requires the commodore to perform it. Most commodores read the dashboards, watch the audit trail, and let the relevant officer carry on with the day-to-day work. Permissions can be tightened where governance demands a specific separation of duties.
SailHQ does not pretend to replace the committee. Formal decisions - membership category changes, suspensions, fee changes - are still taken at committee meetings, recorded in the minutes, and then reflected in the system by an admin. The audit log captures who made the change in the platform and when, which the minutes can reference. The platform records the action; the committee owns the decision.
Yes. The admin dashboard surfaces total members, active count, pending approvals, lapsed count and unpaid count at a glance. Members can be grouped by membership type, household and status, and exported as CSV for the AGM pack. Most commodores screenshot the dashboard for the report and lean on the CSV export for the appendix. Race results, subscription totals and renewal trends complement the headline figures without inflating the deck.
Hand over a system, not a spreadsheet
Book a demo and we will walk through the commodore's view - the AGM dashboards, the audit trail, and how the platform carries the club's identity from one committee to the next.