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Each of those officers has their own folder of documents, their own spreadsheet, and their own version of the member list. The membership secretary has the master list. The treasurer has a different list with bank reference numbers. The sailing secretary has a third list with PY ratings and sail numbers. None of the three are quite in sync.
Then there is the legacy of accumulated tools. A booking system that was state of the art in 2011. A members-only website that runs on a CMS no one wants to update. An email list managed by whoever held the membership job last. A WhatsApp group for the sailing committee, another for cruising, a third for the bar staff. Information is everywhere and nowhere.
The visible failure mode is the visiting yacht. They turn up on a Saturday afternoon expecting their pre-booked overnight mooring. The duty officer cannot find the booking. They phone the moorings officer, who is on the water. They phone the secretary, who is at home. By the time someone confirms the mooring is paid, the visitor has formed an opinion about the club. That opinion is rarely flattering.
Yacht clubs do not need software that pretends they are start-ups. They need software that understands committees, governance, and the careful choreography of running a club with a few hundred members and a building older than most of them. That is what SailHQ is built for.
Most club software gives you two roles - admin and member - and calls it done. Fine for a 40-member dinghy club. Useless for a yacht club with a sailing committee, a cruising section, a training school, and a membership secretary who needs to see contact details but not bank references.
SailHQ ships with two system roles - admin and sailor - and lets you build as many custom roles as your club's structure demands. Roles like Sailing Committee, Cruising Committee, House Committee, Training Principal, and Bar Manager are common. Each one carries its own permission set.
Permissions are granular per domain. Members, duties, events, series, boats, settings, newsletters, reports - each domain has its own view, create, edit, and delete flags. The training principal might have full control over events and members but no access to boats or settings. The treasurer might have read-only access to the member list but full control over subscription records. User-level overrides handle the cases where one person genuinely needs an exception.
Every change to a member's status - resignation, suspension, restoration, change of membership category - is recorded with the user who made the change and the date. If the committee needs to review who reinstated a lapsed member, or which officer approved a category change, the record is there. This is the kind of audit trail a yacht club needs at AGM and during any dispute that escalates beyond a quiet word in the bar.
The notice board in the porch is a wonderful tradition. It is also unread by anyone under fifty and almost everyone who keeps their boat in the marina rather than the dinghy park. The member portal is not a replacement for the notice board, it is a parallel one that follows members onto their phone.
On their first login, a member sees a clean dashboard. Their next duty. The events they have signed up to. Their boat list with mooring status, paid-until dates, and insurance expiry. Any renewals they need to pay. The current weather pulled live from the club's coordinates, so a visiting yacht can check whether it is worth the trip into the bar for lunch.
For a club where members range from teenage cadets to retired commodores, the dashboard has to make sense to all of them. SailHQ is designed to read clearly without training. Members do not need a crib sheet. They open the page, they see what is theirs, they get on with it.
Sail number, boat name, class, hull colour, year built, and Portsmouth rating. Everything needed to identify a boat at a glance.
Compound, marina, trailer, or none. Specific location, paid status, and paid-until date so the moorings team can see what is current.
Insurance company, policy number, and expiry date. Admin can flag boats whose cover is about to lapse before they go on the water.
Admin can browse the full boat list grouped by owner, by class, or by storage location. Filter by paid-until date to find moorings due for renewal. Filter by insurance expiry to chase certificates. Members see their own boats on their dashboard with renewal reminders.
A note on scope. This is a registry, not a full mooring-allocation booking system. SailHQ tracks what is allocated and whether it is paid. It does not yet handle visitor mooring booking, swing-mooring allocations with priority lists, or seasonal-versus-annual rate calculations. Clubs that need that level of moorings management currently pair SailHQ with a dedicated moorings tool. Direct mooring allocation is on the roadmap.
A yacht club's burgee, blazer badge, and house colours are not a logo refresh from 2019. They are part of a tradition that members care about and visiting clubs notice. Software with a flat blue header and a generic sans-serif font does not represent that.
SailHQ gives admins control over the things that matter. Upload a light and a dark logo so the club's mark looks right on every background. Set primary, secondary and accent colours in the colour picker so buttons, links and highlights match the club's house style. Configure the PWA icon members see when they add the portal to their home screen. Pick the login page background - the harbour at high water, the Saturday racing fleet, whatever the club wants visiting members to see first.
Modules are toggled on and off per club preference. A club that does not run formal training can hide the training module. A club that does all its racing through Sailwave can hide the in-app event module if the duplication is unhelpful. The portal a member sees is the portal the club has chosen to show them.
Current conditions pulled straight from your club's coordinates via Open-Meteo, cached for 15 minutes so the API stays kind. Wind is classified into bands sailors recognise: Light under 5 knots, Ideal 5 to 12, Fresh 12 to 18, Strong 18 to 25, Storm over 25. The classification sits next to the raw figure so a glance tells the duty officer what kind of day they are looking at.
Worth flagging: tidal data settings are in place but the live tidal feed integration is on the roadmap, not yet wired in. Clubs that need tidal data alongside conditions are currently pulling that from their existing source. We will not pretend otherwise.
Club
Smaller yacht clubs and sailing centres still finding their feet on dedicated software.
Performance
The typical mid-sized yacht club with multiple committees and active racing and cruising sections.
Most yacht clubs
Elite
Flagship yacht clubs with full training schools, large cruising fleets, and historic premises.
More questions? See the full FAQ or drop us a line.