Dues, concessions and spirit wear — without five separate tools.

What is booster club software?

Booster club software is the system a parent-run 501(c)(3) uses to collect membership dues, staff the concession stand, sell spirit wear, run the season's fundraisers and hand the whole operation to next year's board without losing the records. In ClubHelix that means membership dues and booster levels collected online, volunteer shift sign-ups for concessions and every other game-night job, a spirit wear store with sizes, stock and pickup at the next home game, donations taken one-off or monthly, sponsor packages and banner deals tracked as the revenue line they actually are, ticketed events for the banquet and the golf outing, and minutes, motions and a document library that survives June turnover — all on the booster club's own site, with the money landing in the booster club's own Stripe account.

Booster clubs need something different from team software for a legal reason, not a cosmetic one. The coach runs the team; the booster club is a separate organization with its own EIN, bylaws, bank account, insurance and a school district that wants an annual financial report signed by an officer. Software built to publish a schedule and a roster touches none of that. A board needs one place where money in, volunteer hours and the paper trail live together.

Membership drives, booster levels and fair-share fees

Booster memberships are never one price. There is a patron ladder — Bronze, Silver, Gold, whatever your program calls it — plus a family tier, a business membership for the local dealership, and an honorary tier for the alumni parents who never leave. Each is its own membership type with its own price and duration: public ones appear on the join page automatically, honorary and life tiers stay admin-only so nobody buys their way in.

Alongside the patron ladder sits the per-athlete participation or fair-share fee — what the program needs from each family to cover uniforms, tournament entries, buses and officials. That fee hurts most in August, when the school is also asking for supply money, so registration forms split it into 2–12 installments and price a mid-season joiner pro rata. An early-bird cut-off applies its discount with no code at all, and discount codes cover multi-athlete families and the scholarship places your board quietly holds each year. However your organization treats individual fundraising credit — a question for your accountant — the record is the same: per family, what was owed, what was paid, what is outstanding.

The concession stand, and the shifts nobody wants to call about

Friday night is six people in the stand across two shifts, two on the grill, two at the gate, someone restocking between quarters, a spirit wear table and a cleanup crew that has to be named before it exists. That is twenty slots for one home game, and most booster clubs still fill them by group text.

Set your duty types up once — concessions, grill, gate, setup, spirit table, cleanup — then publish slots with times, where to report and how many people each needs, tied to the game they belong to. Parents sign in and claim their own spots from the volunteer page on your site; taking a shift needs a member account at the booster club, so every name on the roster is already someone you have on file. Slots are capacity-checked, so a shift needing four never ends up with six because two people tapped at once, and a parent can un-volunteer instead of ghosting. Everyone gets a reminder the day before, and afterwards each person is marked completed or no-show.

Completion rolls up into volunteer hours per person — the number your bylaws mean when they ask eight hours of every family, and the one that decides the volunteer award at the banquet. Where your district requires a background check before anyone works a stand or rides a bus, track those as accreditations with expiry dates, so a check lapsing in March surfaces in February rather than at the gate.

Spirit wear, sponsor banners and the fundraisers in between

Spirit wear is the fundraiser every booster club runs and every booster club dreads: hoodies, car magnets, stadium blankets, senior yard signs. Run it as a real store — size and color variants, real stock counts or unlimited for made-to-order runs, shipping or pickup at the next home game. Orders move through Received, Processing and Sent, parents track their own, and whoever runs the store hands the screen printer one paid order list instead of reconstructing forty sizes from a text thread and covering the shortfall from the general fund.

Sponsorship deserves the same discipline. The fence banner, the program ad and the golf outing hole sponsor are packages with an asking price and a list of what the sponsor gets; when a deal lands, that list becomes a delivery checklist, so nobody discovers in November that the banner was never hung. Renewal reminders nudge the board 30 and 7 days out, sponsor money keeps its own ledger, and logos group into tiers on your site with expiry dates that retire them automatically.

For the direct ask — where you skip the catalog and simply request what the catalog would have netted — donations run one-off or monthly, donors can cover the processing fee so the club keeps the full gift, and each lands in its own ledger with an automatic receipt. For the rest of the calendar, see the guide to club fundraising ideas.

The treasurer's year, and the 990-N question

Treasurer is the hardest unpaid job in a booster club and the one with real consequences attached. Most booster clubs are small enough to file the 990-N e-Postcard, which comes down to a question the treasurer must answer honestly each year: were gross receipts normally $50,000 or less? Miss the filing three years running and the organization's tax-exempt status lapses automatically — reinstatement costs money and months.

ClubHelix does not file anything with the IRS for you, and no software should claim to. What it does is stop the number being a reconstruction. Dues, store orders, ticket sales, sponsor payments and donations each keep their own ledger; cash and check are recorded alongside the online payments so the books are complete rather than merely digital; and reports turn all of it into income by source, a bank-reconcilable transaction register, outstanding balances with aging, refunds and fees, exported as CSV your bookkeeper can import. Group the ones your board reads into a report pack — the same reports, in the same order, every month — and the meeting stops opening with three officers and three different numbers. On the Pro plan and above, that pack can be scheduled to email itself to the board as CSV or PDF before the meeting, rather than being run by hand the night before.

Board turnover, and the login that walks out the door

Every booster club has the same June: the president's senior graduates, four of seven seats change, and what leaves the building is the login, the spreadsheet and eleven months of context.

Half the fix is access that belongs to a role, not a person. Roles and permissions give the incoming treasurer the money reports without member medical notes, the concessions chair rostering and nothing else, and the spirit wear chair the store without the keys to everything. The audit log records every admin action, so "who refunded that order" is a lookup rather than an argument.

The other half is a record that outlives the board. Minutes lock once adopted, motions carry their mover, seconder and outcome, and motion search pulls every resolution the club ever passed about dues or uniforms. Action items assigned to a position rather than a name follow the position, so at the annual meeting the open items simply become the new secretary's. The document library holds the bylaws, the determination letter, the certificate of insurance and the district's booster policy — exactly the folder an incoming officer asks for first.

A booster club website families can actually find

Parents look you up on a phone in a parking lot, and what they land on decides whether they join. Build the site with the page editor in your school's colors and crest, on your own domain: how to join, what dues cover, the concession schedule, the sponsor wall, and a join button that works with one thumb. Routine news goes out as an email broadcast from your own address; the "gate opens at five and we are two short in the stand" message goes by SMS, a Pro-plan channel with a metered allowance that only ever texts parents who opted in to texts from their own account page. Push through the phone app carries the automatic notices — an event you follow being rescheduled, the day-before reminder for the shift you took — while anything the board writes itself goes out by email or text. Start from the template gallery, or walk the live demo.

Free booster club software to start

Every ClubHelix organization starts on the free plan — no time limit, no expiry. For the paid pieces, such as online dues, the spirit wear store or ticketed events, paid plans carry a 14-day free trial, bill on a 28-day cycle and can be canceled at any time; current tiers are on the pricing page. Money settles directly into the booster club's own Stripe account — ClubHelix never holds your funds, and the platform fee is never surcharged to your families.

Most boards arrive with the membership list in a spreadsheet, the concession roster on a clipboard and the money in an account only the treasurer can see. Move one thing first — usually the concession roster, because it is the piece the whole board complains about — then bring the membership drive across before fall kickoff. If you would like a hand, talk to us.

ClubHelix runs booster clubs and school support organizations across the US, and the same platform serves programs in Canada, the UK and Australia. Browse every organization type, or the full feature list.

What to compare before you commit

Booster clubs are unusual: the board turns over every year or two, the money is other people's money held in trust, and the IRS has an opinion about how it is tracked. Test any platform against those three realities, not the feature grid.

Common questions from booster boards

Our treasurer changes every year. What actually transfers? Everything, because nothing lives in a personal account. Roles are reassigned and the records stay put — which is the single biggest structural improvement over a shared spreadsheet.

Can we track restricted funds separately? Track them as separate revenue lines so the report shows what was raised for what. For formal fund accounting, most boosters still work with their accountant at year end.

Do families need accounts to buy spirit wear? No. Anyone can purchase without joining.

Can we take donations as well as dues? Yes — see donations, tracked alongside everything else.

What about the concession stand cash? Run sales through the shop so takings reconcile against one ledger rather than being counted twice and remembered once.