Five years, 458 events, 1,134 payments: what one club's move off spreadsheets actually looked like
A walking club has been running on ClubCP since November 2021. Here is exactly what it uses, exactly how big it is, and exactly what breaks. All the numbers are counted the boring way.
Most software case studies are written to make a product look inevitable. This one is written because a committee asked a fair question that nothing on this site answered: has a club like mine actually done this, or am I the experiment?
One club has been running on ClubCP since November 2021. It is a walking club in Australia. It has not been named here because nobody has asked its committee for permission to name it, and asking after the fact is not how you treat the club that carried you.
What it runs, counted the boring way
Read from the live database on 11 August 2026.
Distinct people, not the 1,673 membership rows
Not expired as at the reading date
172 of them in the last twelve months
Where money actually moved, of 2,179 attempts
There have also been 6,866 event sign-ups, and the first completed payment was on 18 November 2021.
Those are deliberately awkward numbers, and it is worth saying why. The membership table has 1,673 rows in it, because a renewal writes a new row: quoting 1,673 as “members” would overstate the club by more than half. The transactions table has 2,179 rows, but 1,045 of those are checkouts that were started and never finished. 1,134 is the number where money actually moved.
If a vendor quotes you a member count, ask whether it counts people or rows. It is the easiest number in this industry to inflate by accident.
It is smaller than it sounds
The median event has nine people signed up to it.
Not nine hundred. Nine. The club's very first event had eight. What the four-digit totals describe is not a large organisation, it is a small one that has been going for five years and runs three or four walks a week. Five years of Saturdays adds up faster than anyone expects.
This is worth being blunt about, because the most common reason a club has told us no is that they are too small. One president wrote that the platform looked like it was built for “mid to large” clubs, from a club of 25 members. The unit of work here is a walk with nine people on it. The totals are just what happens when you keep doing that.
What they actually use
Events with sign-ups
A leader posts a walk, sets a cap, and people sign up. Sign-ups close themselves, a waiting list fills the gaps, and the leader gets a list on their phone.
Memberships that renew
Free and paid plans, with expiry dates the platform tracks so the secretary does not have to.
Payments that go to the club
Membership fees and event tickets, through the club's own Stripe or PayPal account. The money goes to the club's account, not to ours.
Sign-up rules
Members pay a different price to guests, and some events are members-only.
Thirty-seven different people have created an event on this club. That is the finding that surprised us most, because it is the opposite of what a spreadsheet does. A spreadsheet has an owner, and when the owner goes on holiday the club stops. Here, the admin is spread across three dozen walk leaders, and none of them had to be trained by anybody.
What we are not claiming
We have not measured the hours it saved them
Nobody timed the before. Inventing a “saves 10 hours a week” figure would be exactly the kind of number this page exists to avoid.
There is no quote from the club here
We have not sat down and asked them properly yet. When we do, it goes here, in their words.
This is one club
Anyone telling you a platform is proven on a sample of one is selling.
The question underneath the question
The real question a committee asks is not about features. It is “who do we call when this breaks in 2028?”
The honest answer has not changed: ClubCP is built and maintained by one person. There is no SLA and no support contract, and if your club needs 24/7 enterprise on-call, this is the wrong tool and we would rather you knew that now than in year three.
What we can point at instead is a five-year record. The platform has taken payments continuously since November 2021 for a club that would notice within hours if it stopped. It has broken: there was a payment outage in July 2026 that took two days to find, which is why nothing on the payment path now ships on a Friday. Your data is yours and exportable, so the exit is real rather than theoretical.
That is a weaker promise than a company with a support line, and it is a true one. A committee can weigh a true weak promise. It cannot weigh a false strong one.
If you want to look
Start a club, put one event on it, and see whether nine people sign up. That is the whole test, it takes an afternoon, and it costs nothing. If it does not fit your club, you have lost an afternoon and no data has moved anywhere.