Five things from your club. The rest is ours.
There’s no questionnaire, and nothing to buy or maintain. Everything else is worked out from the data, or confirmed in one conversation with a list in hand.
What we ask for
| What | From whom |
|---|---|
| Read-only access to your ERP. This is the one hard dependency. | Whoever administers it, or their support rep |
| One report you already run, such as A/R aging or member spending, with its date range. It’s how we prove the data was read correctly. | Controller |
| Bylaws, house rules, and the standing dues and delinquency policy, as files, so rules get cited rather than paraphrased. | General manager or club office |
| The current dues schedule, initiation and capital assessment, with effective dates. | General manager |
| Any data-residency requirement, and who signs off on it. | General manager, early on |
We supply the small machine that sits on your network and reads your systems each night. You plug it in. There’s nothing to buy, specify or maintain, and that is the whole of the club’s part.
How it goes
- Connect. Read-only access to your systems, usually granted by whoever administers your ERP or their support rep. Nothing is replaced and nothing is written to.
- Learn the club. Not just the tables but the rules: membership caps and the bylaw passages that set them, what each category is called, how the fiscal year runs. It’s a guided process, and no stage is done until its checks pass. The whole setup usually takes a few days.
- Prove it against your own reports. Results are compared with the reports your controller already trusts, and differences are run down before anyone relies on the numbers.
- Rebuild every night. The picture of the club is rebuilt from scratch and has to pass its checks before it goes live. A rebuild that fails doesn’t ship, and you keep yesterday’s copy.
- Ask. Mostly through chat, with AI-assisted dashboards for the numbers people look at every week, pre-generated committee reports, and PDF or Excel when someone needs a file.
Your next board meeting
Setup usually takes a few days, and by the end of it the first committee report is ready, checked against a report your controller already runs. You can take the board answers from the club’s own records, not a plan to get them.
- The question the board keeps asking. Ask it in plain language and get the answer from the data, whichever system it came from. Then “run the same summary and export to PDF,” and it’s ready for the board packet.
- Committee reports, already written. They come pre-generated, so nobody has to build one from a pivot table first.
- The club’s history, even if you weren’t there for it. Where a club has kept its billing history, it can read nearly three decades of it. “Has this happened before?” and “What did the last dues increase actually do?” become questions anyone can ask, however long they’ve been at the club.
- Numbers you can stand behind. Every answer says which figures are confirmed against the books and which are its best computation, so you know which ones to put in front of the board. Budget against actual is a match on your own budget labels for now, and answers say so.
- Follow-ups in the room. When a board member asks the next question, you can ask it there rather than promise another round of reports.
Which systems it works with
Smarter Club isn’t tied to any ERP, tee sheet or vendor.
We set up each club with the systems it actually runs: the ERP and point of sale, golf, tennis and other recreational bookings, member event bookings, surveys, access control, and time and attendance. What gets connected is configured club by club, so no two setups are the same.
If we haven’t connected a system before, a connector has to be built first. There’s a documented way to do that, and we’ll tell you up front what it takes.
The cost and the work
Two charges, and a quote that sets out the work.
There’s a one-time implementation fee and an annual subscription, and the on-site hardware is included. The price depends on which systems your club connects, so ask for a quote that sets out the systems included, any connector work, and the terms.
Setup usually takes a few days once we have read-only access to your systems. A system we haven’t connected before needs its connector built first, and we tell you up front what that takes.
Questions clubs ask
- What does it cost?
- There’s a one-time implementation fee and an annual subscription, and the on-site hardware is included. Pricing depends on which systems your club would like connected, and we’re happy to put together a quote for you.
- Does it replace our ERP?
- No. Smarter Club reads what your systems record. Staff keep working as they do now, and corrections still happen at the source.
- How long does an answer take?
- A typical answer takes under a minute. A harder one can take a couple of minutes, because it is running real queries and checking them.
- Who would we work with?
- Smarter Club is a small company. Each club works directly with the people who build it.
- Can we talk to a club that uses it?
- Yes. Smarter Club runs today at several member-owned clubs, on different ERPs. We don’t name them, but we’ll put you in touch with a general manager at one.
Start with a club that doesn’t exist.
We’ll show you Smarter Club on Dunross Valley, so nothing of yours is involved. Bring the question your board keeps asking.