Subs without the chasing

Ask any club treasurer what the worst part of the job is and you'll get the same answer. It isn't the accounts. It's the chasing. Half the squad has paid, a few are a month behind, two have paid the wrong amount, and somebody's dad says he sent it last week, honest. All of that lands on one person, and it lands at the side of a pitch in the rain, where nobody wants to talk about money.

The strange thing is that almost nobody minds paying. Parents know the club needs the subs. What they mind is being asked in front of other parents, and what the treasurer minds is having to ask. So the money comes in late, the awkwardness builds up, and every few seasons the person doing the chasing has had enough and steps down. Then the club looks for a new treasurer and wonders why nobody wants the job.

What chasing actually costs

It's easy to think of unpaid subs as a small problem, because each one is a tenner. Add them up over a season and a club of ten teams can easily be owed a few thousand pounds by the spring, most of which it will never fully collect. That's the pitch hire for a term, or a set of goals. And that's before the time. The reconciling, the reminders, the messages that start "sorry to ask again" are a few hours a month for somebody who's already giving up their Saturdays.

There's a quieter cost too. Cash handed over at training has to get to the bank. Bank transfers arrive with a reference of "football" and no name. The spreadsheet that tracks it all is only right on the day it was last updated. When the treasurer changes, the new one inherits a set of numbers they can't check and a list of people who owe money that nobody can prove.

Split the money into the three things it is

Most of the mess comes from treating all club money as one pot. It's three separate things, and they behave differently.

• A registration fee. Paid once, at sign-on. It should be tied to the registration itself, so a player isn't registered until it's paid. No chasing at all.
• Subs. A fixed amount on a fixed schedule, weekly, monthly or for the season. This is the one that should collect itself.
• Match fees. Only owed for games actually played. This is the one that gets counted in a car park and goes wrong.

Once they're separate, the treasurer's question stops being "who owes us money" and becomes three small questions with clear answers.

What a sane setup looks like

Whatever you use, aim for these four things.

• The subs are set once, at the start of the season, and come in on their schedule without anyone sending a message.
• Reminders go out on their own, from the club rather than from a person, so nobody has to be the one who asked.
• Match fees are charged for the games a player actually turned up to, worked out from who played rather than from a memory of who played.
• The money lands in the club's own bank account, and the treasurer can see who has paid and who hasn't without opening a spreadsheet.

If cards are involved there's a cost to collecting, and it's worth knowing it in pence before you sign anything. Ask what a £30 monthly sub and a £3 match fee actually cost the club to collect, with every fee included. A flat, published rate is the one you can plan around.

Three things to agree, whatever you use

• Write down what the subs are and what they pay for, and put it where parents can see it. People pay faster when they know the money is the pitch hire and the referee, not a mystery.
• Decide, quietly and in advance, what happens when a family can't pay. Every club has one or two, and a policy agreed in September is far kinder than a conversation in February.
• Give the money one owner and one deputy, the same as registration. Two people who can both see the numbers, so the club is never one resignation away from not knowing what it's owed.