Rallies, gear checks and gymkhanas — organised in one place.

What is pony club management software?

Pony club management software gathers up the jobs a riding club committee juggles every month — memberships, rally entries, duty rosters, safety paperwork and the "is the rally still on?" phone tree — into one system. In ClubHelix that means online registration with parent-and-child accounts for junior riders and consent fields for under-18s, rallies published as recurring events with entries and payment taken in the same step, volunteer rosters for canteen and arena party, an accreditations register for checks and certificates, and broadcasts that reach every family before they hitch the float. Annual membership and rally fees are paid online, with paid-until dates the committee can see at a glance.

Equestrian club software has to fit how these clubs actually work: entries arrive by text, by email and on a note handed over at the float park, while the duty roster lives in a group chat nobody can search. Moving all of it onto one platform is the difference between a committee that runs the club and one that chases it.

Rally days and gymkhanas without the paper chase

Publish the year's rallies as recurring events with exclusion dates, take entries and payment through registration forms, and sell gymkhana or open-day tickets natively on your own site. Families subscribe to a personalised calendar feed, so a cancelled rally updates their phones in seconds — and the morning-of "grounds too wet" call goes out as a push notification to families who have installed the club app, before they load the horse.

Duty works the same way. Publish canteen, gate, arena-party and gear-check shifts for each rally, let members claim them, and see who has and hasn't filled a duty before the day — instead of begging in the group chat on Friday night.

Arena hire that runs itself

Most equestrian clubs own an arena that could earn its keep when the club isn't using it — agistees wanting a flat surface after work, a coach who runs lessons on Thursday evenings, a neighbouring pony club borrowing it for a rally. Today that hire usually lives in a diary in the tack room, with the horse count and the payment cross-checked by hand. Facility booking puts the arena on your own club site as a bookable resource with weekly opening hours, a slot length and a price — and lets you set it up the way an arena actually works, not the way a tennis court does.

Set the arena to be shared, with a capacity in horses — say four at a time — and it fills the way you'd expect. Each booking takes some of the places, the public grid reads "2 of 4 left" until it reads "Full", and a rider bringing two horses for two hours takes two places in both hours. Nobody can squeeze a fifth horse into a full arena: if the last places go while someone is still choosing, they're told how many are left now and pick another time. Prefer one hirer having the whole arena to themselves? Set it to one booking at a time and still count their horses. You can run one arena each way.

Pricing is per horse, per hour. Type "horse" as the thing you count, set a maximum per booking, tick charge per horse, and the booking page asks "how many horses?" and does the arithmetic — three horses for an hour at an illustrative $15 comes to $45, shown before the rider confirms. Members and casual riders can pay different rates for the same arena, and every price shows in your club's own currency.

Add a comments box with whatever label suits — "Anything we should know?" — and riders tell you the things a form never asks: "young horse, will stay at the far end", "farrier coming for the second hour", "please leave the jump wings out". Comments are private to the club. They sit beside the booking in the admin, come out in the export, and you can search on them.

Payment can be by card at booking or at the venue, and plenty of equestrian clubs prefer the second — a hire refunded because the weather turned is a chore nobody wants. Set the arena to be paid at the venue, write your instructions ("Pay the duty member in the tack room before you ride"), and the booking confirms straight away, with the amount owed and those instructions repeated in the confirmation email. The Bookings admin carries an Owed at the venue tile totalling everything not yet collected, and Mark paid records each payment as cash, card at the venue or bank transfer, with a reference and an optional emailed receipt. Venue-settled bookings need no payment provider connected, and money the club records itself carries no platform commission, so the arena can be taking bookings the day you set it up. The cross-check is still yours — nothing matches a QR payment to a booking on its own — but it becomes a filtered list and a Download CSV instead of a diary and a bank statement.

The rest of the arena's year fits too. An admin block holds every place, or just some of them, for a clinic, a pony club rally or the monthly harrowing, and a closure takes the arena off the grid while the surface is waterlogged, with a reason riders can see. What used to need a volunteer with a phone becomes a page riders use themselves. The setup, end to end, is in the guide to hiring out a riding arena.

Safety records that survive the season

Police vetting checks, first-aid certificates and coaching accreditations are recorded against each member with expiry dates, so the register shows who is current and who lapses before the next rally. Falls, injuries and near-misses go through structured incident reporting with a permanent, auditable record — not a paper form in the clubhouse filing cabinet — and digital waivers capture rider acknowledgements at sign-up.

An equestrian club website beyond the clubhouse noticeboard

Your public site runs on the same platform as your memberships and rallies, so dates, entry forms and news are never out of date. Build pages with the page editor, publish grading-day details and photo galleries, and put the club shop — uniforms, saddle blankets, caps — one click from the homepage. Browse the template gallery or click through the live demo to see a live club site in full.

Free pony club management software to start

Every club starts on ClubHelix's free plan, with no time limit — your website and core admin cost nothing for as long as you want them. Paid plans add the bigger features, carry a 14-day free trial, bill on a 28-day cycle and can be cancelled any time; see pricing for what each tier includes. Rally fees and membership money settle directly to the club's own Stripe account — ClubHelix never holds your funds, and the platform fee is never surcharged to your members.

Ready when the committee is

ClubHelix runs equestrian and pony clubs in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland and South Africa. The typical starting point is a spreadsheet of riders, a duty group chat and a folder of forms — bring the rider list across, publish the next rally, and keep the old system alongside for a rally or two until the committee trusts the new one. Talk to us if you'd like a hand, or start with the full guide to running a pony club — rallies, gear checks, gradings and the committee year, end to end.