Overall, the sailing side of Brixham Yacht Club runs solely on Sailing Club Manager. All of our events, storage, resources etc. are done through SCM. The social side is still very much scraps of paper and bookings at the bar. This split seems to work for our club at the moment. Where we do use the system, the relevant people can access the relevant data and it enables us to work well as a team. We no longer need to employ an Admin person to deal with invoicing, bookings etc. as the system does it all for us. We have a fairly old school set of directors and members. It has been a struggle trying to sell the benefits to them and also getting some to accept improvements that the change can introduce. Slowly however the benefits are being realised by all (or most anyway).

Firstly, the support from the team during the initial configuration. We were up and running within days, taking online payments etc. Issues with the software are fixed immediately, the steady stream of improvements that come through also re-enforce the decision to use a SaaS based product. As with most clubs, we rely on lots of different volunteers each with different IT skill levels. We can control to a very granular level, who has access to what and can create roles to suit each of the individual skill levels and also tasks associated with their roles. The solution is so feature rich that we do not use all of the licensed features. At Brixham the areas that we use most are around membership, resource booking for club dinghies and bookable for most sailing events. All user communications are sent out via SCM too and the mailing list features work really well. We split mailings into 2 categories "Sailing" and "Social" and therefor we do not see members opting out of all mails, just the ones they are not interested in. Integration with online payment providers is seamless and invoicing and reporting just work. It is very easy for example to advertise a sailing event including tickets for a BBQ, share the link and take payment online. We have the money in the bank and our only involvement from the creation of the event is printing the Chef a list of who has paid the day of the event.

On the basis that a lot of the roles at the club change on a yearly basis, a more wizard driven approach to some of the admin tasks would be beneficial to new users. Ie the yearly membership processes especially take a bit of getting used to and we are not fully understanding them yet. As such we end up with a mess around invoices etc. This is more an issue with our internal processes rather than the solution itself. Initially some of our members struggled with online payments etc. A number of improvements around these processes have been implemented over the past few years and we now get very few issues. Licensing - it would be good to adjust our licensing based on the modules we use. Ie we do not use the forum, shop etc. but still pay for them as we need to use Resource Booking. As clubs and small businesses are all struggling, it would be good to reduce costs where possible. The results module when we tried to use it did not support dual scoring as easily as SailWave. Unfortunately this resulted in our results team rejecting it. It would be good at some point to re-present it as a solution for them when some of the gaps are resolved.

The software does what we want and the support has been exceptional: instant access to technical expertise without a switchboard.

This software combines membership database, site access (gate control), website & mailings, event & resource bookings, invoicing and collection of payments, plus several other benefits we haven't yet implemented.

As a sophisticated package it takes a considerable amount of time to setup and implement - but it's worth the effort. Whilst the finance links automatically with some accounting packages, it doesn't link with Sage so we currently export a CSV at each month end for import to Sage (the appropriate nominal codes are included in the CSV).

Our sailing club has benefitted significantly from using Sailing Club Manager. As the product has been developed by people with real-life experience of being members of their their won clubs and sailors in their own right, they understand and meet the needs of the customer very precisely. Using Sailing Club Manager has taken the headache out of managing the club's business across multiple spreadsheets and databases by bring all of the relevant information into a single application.

The software application offers a modular but highly integrated means for our sailing club to effectively and efficiently manage our club business. It consists of a suite of highly relevant modules including management of membership applications and subscriptions, the club duty roster, invoicing of membership fees and an integrated WYSIWIG website content editor. We also use the in-built email functionality to communicate with our members and the trophy tracker to keep track of our trophies! The support service is both responsive and tailored to the specific needs of the client.

As with any complex application, the initial setup and configuration takes a little time and there is quite a lot to learn in order to make best use of the facilities that it has to offer. However, once the inital hurdles have been crossed, the day to day maintenance needed is minimal.

The package has a high impact on our management functionality of the club. It is quick to set up and easy to get to grips with the basic features and layout.

Some of the more complex actions such as membership renewals can be harder to navigate, esspecially if you only do them once each year.

On the whole this product is great at allowing easy management of both our clubs data and also the website. There is a great range of functionality from online membership through to managing the yearly prizes.

I would appreciate a direct integration to Sailwave for uploading results. Currently we have to create a results page then upload the html of the Sailwave report.