Tiered types with age gates
Model every AGM-approved tier and prevent the wrong selection at registration.
For membership officers and membership secretaries
SailHQ for Membership Officers
Renewals tracked, families billed once, lapsed members surfaced before they slip away. Membership management for the secretary who lives in the data.
Last updated 19 May 2026
Built for the membership desk
People, households, renewals, and history in one place
SailHQ gives the membership officer a structured record for the details that make ordinary spreadsheets collapse during renewal season.
Quarterly proration
Calculate a fair mid-season joiner fee before confirmation.
Household billing
Bill the household once while each child remains a real member.
Lapsed-member visibility
Find unpaid and lapsed members while there is still time to act.
Status audit log
Keep the reason, timing, and owner of each status change.
Member self-service
Let members keep addresses, boats, and emergency details current.
The membership officer problem
You live in member data. The data does not live in one place.
The treasurer worries about the bank. The club secretary worries about minutes and constitutions. You worry about people. Specifically, who is in, who is out, who is paid, who has lapsed, whose child just turned 14 and needs to move from Cadet to Junior, and which household actually owns that Topper sitting in the dinghy park.
Season starts in March. The joining forms began arriving in February. Some came by email, some through the clubhouse letterbox, a couple as Facebook messages, and one was filled out on paper at a winter quiz and quietly forgotten until the chair handed it to you in April. None of them used the same template. Two were illegible. One had a phone number with eleven digits and one with nine.
Then the membership types do not behave themselves. Junior fees need to be different from senior fees. Cadets pay less than juniors. Country members get a discount because they only sail twice a year. Honorary members pay nothing but still vote at the AGM. Family memberships should bill one person and cover four, but each child still needs their own RYA number, their own emergency contact, and their own consent flag for photos in the newsletter.
Somebody asks "is the Mitchell family paid up, can their daughter enter the open meeting?" and you spend twenty minutes hunting through bank statements and cross-referencing two spreadsheets. By June, three members have quietly lapsed and nobody noticed until the regatta. By August, you are doing membership admin instead of sailing.
SailHQ is built for the membership officer specifically. The other personas - treasurer, race officer, club secretary - get their own modules. This page is about yours: the structures, the proration, the households, the statuses, and the audit log that keeps the committee off your back.
Coming off a spreadsheet is its own project. Our guide on how to migrate a sailing club from spreadsheets covers the cleanup, the column mapping, and the order to do things in so nothing breaks mid-season.
Tiered membership types
Every tier your AGM has ever voted in
Senior, Junior, Cadet, Family, Country, Honorary, Life. Add a Student tier when the AGM decides students need their own band. Retire a tier nobody uses any more. The list is yours, sortable, and editable mid-season without breaking historic records.
Each type carries a precise set of rules, so the system knows what to do when a joiner picks it. The age gates are the bit most clubs underestimate. Without them, a 14-year-old shows up as an adult, lands in the senior duty rota, and the membership officer spends an evening unwinding it. With them, the registration form will not let it happen in the first place.
Annual fee
The full-year price. Prorated automatically on joins where proration is enabled.
Voting rights flag
Whether the tier counts at the AGM. Keeps juniors and country members out of the count when your constitution says so.
Duty exemption flag
Whether the tier sits in the duty rota or outside it. Honorary and Life are usually off.
Min and max age
Stops a 13-year-old accidentally signing up for senior fees, and stops a 30-year-old paying junior rates.
Family flag
Marks the type as a household membership so it links to the family billing flow.
Sort order
Drag the most-used types to the top of the registration dropdown. New tiers appear immediately.
Prorated joins
The "what do I charge if they join in July?" question, solved
Mid-season joiners are an awkward conversation. Charge a full annual fee in late August and they walk away. Quote a number off the top of your head and the treasurer chases you for a paper trail. SailHQ does the calculation for you, on the registration form, before the new joiner reaches the payment screen.
100%
Joins in Q1 (Jan-Mar) · Full year ahead.
75%
Joins in Q2 (Apr-Jun) · Three quarters left.
50%
Joins in Q3 (Jul-Sep) · Half the season left.
25%
Joins in Q4 (Oct-Dec) · One quarter left.
Proration sits on the membership type, not on a global setting. Switch it on for adults and off for juniors, or the other way around, or off entirely. Whatever your AGM has decided. The flag is editable, so if next year the committee votes for monthly proration on adults and a flat junior fee, you change the type and it applies to next season's joiners without touching this season's records.
Household billing
Families billed the way families actually work
Family memberships are where most spreadsheets fall apart. The bill needs to go to one person. The members are several people. Each child needs their own record. SailHQ models the household as a first-class object, not as a workaround.
One bill, two parents
Mark Mum and Dad both as primary on the household and either of them can manage settings. The family fee invoice still goes out once.
Each junior is a member
Every child gets their own profile, RYA number, qualifications, emergency contacts, and consent flags. Not line items on a parent record.
Filter by household
Pull the whole family up in one view. Change an address once, it updates everywhere. Whose Topper is that? Filter by household and find out.
The practical effect at renewal time: instead of mentally untangling whose RYA number is whose, you see one household line with a single fee and a clear list of dependents. When the 12-year-old turns 18 and needs to leave the family membership, you detach them, assign them their own type, and their record continues unbroken. Their boats, qualifications, and event history come with them.
For race admin (which is your colleague's problem, not yours, but you will be asked about it), a junior entering a youth series shows up correctly as a junior, not as a footnote on Mum's account. For safeguarding, photo consent flags are stored against the right child, not bolted onto an adult profile.
Renewal tracking and lapsed members
Catch lapsed members in March, not November
Members who quietly drift off cost the club real money. The November discovery is the worst kind. SailHQ tracks status and payment state separately so you can spot a lapse the moment it happens.
Member status
active - in good standing. pending_approval - waiting on you. lapsed - record kept, access off.
Payment status
paid - payment date recorded. unpaid - waiting on payment. overdue - past the deadline.
Filter the membership directory by status, type, payment state, household, or joined date. Spot the seven unpaid renewals in week one of the season, not after Easter. Send a nudge before somebody flips from active to lapsed. Every status change is recorded in an audit log: who changed what, when, from what to what. When the chair queries why somebody is marked lapsed, you can show the trail rather than rely on memory.
Worth being straight about one thing: SailHQ does not yet automatically charge cards or pull Direct Debits. Renewal tracking is in - statuses, payment dates, dashboard counts, lapsed visibility, audit log. Renewal charging via GoCardless and Stripe is on the roadmap. For now, clubs collect renewals through whatever they currently use and update payment status in SailHQ. The chasing and visibility piece is solved; the live charging piece is coming.
Member self-service
Stop being a typing service for change-of-address notes
Every member gets a portal login. From there they edit the things you used to receive as an email asking you to update something on their behalf - new postcode, new mobile, new boat, new emergency contact for the season.
Members own their record. You stop owning their inbox. The data quality goes up because the person closest to it is the person editing it. The hours you used to spend retyping addresses go back to the things only you can do.
How it fits
How the membership module fits the rest of SailHQ
Membership is the spine. The treasurer reads its payment data, the secretary reads its directory, and the duty rota reads its exemption flags. Pick the angle that matters to you.
Membership pillar
The full membership management overview.
Membership feature page
Feature-level deep dive on tiers and households.
Member portal
What members see and edit themselves.
SailHQ for treasurers
The financial side of the same data.
SailHQ for club secretaries
The broader admin view across the club.
Full feature list
Everything SailHQ does, in one map.
Common questions
Membership officer FAQs
What membership secretaries ask before replacing the spreadsheet.
Each membership type stores its own proration flag and annual fee. When proration is on, joiners in Q1 (January to March) pay 100% of the fee, Q2 joiners pay 75%, Q3 joiners pay 50%, and Q4 joiners pay 25%. The figure shown to the new joiner during registration is already prorated, so there is no follow-up adjustment. Switch proration off on a type and the full annual fee applies regardless of join date - useful when juniors are billed flat and adults are billed quarterly, or vice versa.
Set up a Family membership type with the family flag enabled. Create a household record, mark one or both parents as primary, and link the children as dependents. The family fee goes to the primary member as a single bill, but each child gets their own member account with their own RYA number, emergency contact list, health record, and consent flags. The membership directory shows everyone individually and you can pull the full family up by filtering the list by household.
Yes. There is a bulk import route in the admin dashboard for clubs that want to handle the upload themselves. Most clubs prefer to send their Excel or Google Sheets export to the SailHQ team during onboarding and have us import it for them - this is included in every plan and usually completes within 1-2 days. After the initial migration, single-member creation from the admin dashboard handles any joiners who come in by post or in person.
Lapsed members keep their full record - they are not deleted - so reactivation is a one-click status change from lapsed to active. Their boats, household links, RYA number, qualifications, and historical entries are all preserved. Every status change is recorded in an audit log, so you can see exactly when somebody dropped off and when they came back. If someone has been gone for years and is effectively a new joiner, you can also create a fresh record.
Members log in to the self-service portal at any time to view their status, paid-up date, and renewal date, and to update contact details, household links, boats, emergency contacts, and consent flags. Live card and Direct Debit charging is on the roadmap, not in production yet, so renewal payment itself is still collected through whatever the club currently uses (bank transfer, standing order, existing DD provider). The membership officer marks payment as received in SailHQ. Once Stripe and GoCardless ship, the same record will handle automated charging.
Get the membership data off the spreadsheet
We will migrate your existing list, set up your tiers and proration the way the AGM voted, and have you running before the next renewal cycle. The chasing stops, the audit log starts.