Ninety clubs, one set of questions, and a return you can actually file.

What governing body software has to get right

A governing body's hardest job is not running a competition. It is getting consistent numbers out of clubs that all count differently, then standing behind the total. Ninety affiliates, ninety spreadsheets, three formats back and two of them scanned — and a funding return assembled over a weekend from last year's file and a lot of assumptions.

ClubHelix models the structure you actually have: a federation, region and club hierarchy where every organisation has its own public site and its own admin, with theme and terms inherited down the tree. The affiliation lifecycle is real rather than an inbox — clubs apply, and approvals, departures and removals keep a history — and your directory of affiliated organisations is public and searchable, so "is this club affiliated?" has one answer everybody can see.

Defining the count before collecting it

The single highest-leverage thing a governing body can do costs nothing and takes an afternoon: pin down what each number means before asking for it. A total assembled from four different definitions is a guess with a decimal point.

The last row is the one that decides whether an auditor accepts your return. A nought says nobody in that band played; "not recorded" says the field was not captured. Reporting them as the same thing is how a return stops being defensible. Affiliation reporting for governing bodies works through all six definitions and the collection calendar around them.

One form, every affiliate

A standard registration form published as a document on your website is a form no club has ever used. The version that works is one your affiliates adopt rather than retype: publish the questions every affiliated organisation must ask, and each club adds its own questions after yours and cannot edit or remove one of yours. You see the answers to your questions added up across the group — and never theirs, which is the part that makes clubs willing to adopt it at all.

That capability is on the plans that include the HQ tools. The discipline it needs is editorial rather than technical: one thing per question, a closed list wherever a number will be counted, the same wording every year, and a rule that a new mandatory question has to displace an old one. Standardising registration across affiliates covers writing a question that survives ninety clubs, and one canonical set of forms is where it lives.

What rolls up, and what deliberately does not

Membership, revenue, participation and compliance roll up across every affiliated organisation, and only ever across your own descendants — a region sees its clubs and never a sibling region's numbers. The funding body return is the specific report a government funder asks for: participants, new participants, age bands, gender split and fees, club by club, with the honest "not recorded" column. Roll-up reporting sits on the higher plans and the funding return on Enterprise, because they are the tools a body with affiliates needs and a single club does not.

What deliberately does not happen is the thing every affiliated club worries about: being a club's parent in the hierarchy does not hand you its operational data. Inheritance covers configuration such as theme and terms; access to a club's members needs a role that somebody grants. The one deliberate exception is the conduct register described below, and it is one you configure in the open rather than one that happens quietly. Say that out loud in an affiliation conversation — it is usually the sentence that gets a sceptical club over the line, and it is the reason the roles and permissions model is worth reading before you roll anything out.

Standards, positions and the record that outlives the board

Define a position once at the governing body and every affiliate appoints its own people to it, so "registrar" means the same thing in all ninety clubs and your circulars reach the right person. Publish news and events to every affiliate, and share one canonical venue list so a ground has a single spelling across the competition.

For conduct, a permanent register holds category, severity, who handled it and the outcome, open to administrators only. How much of it you see is a policy you publish rather than a default: choose no visibility, a summary, or full visibility over the organisations directly beneath you. A summary is counts by category and status per club — never a name, a subject or an outcome. Your affiliates can read the policy that governs them, which is the part that makes it defensible, and separately a club can refer a single matter upward as a deliberate act. Visibility reaches one level only: in a federation, region and club chain the region sees its clubs and the federation does not reach past the region. Governance and meetings covers agendas, recorded motions and minutes, and an append-only audit log records every admin action. Handling complaints at a governing body is the process guide that sits beside the register, and the club-side process is the one to send your affiliates.

Questions governing bodies ask

Can each club keep its own website? Yes, and most should. Every organisation in the hierarchy gets its own site with its own domain, branding and content, while the directory, network news and shared venue list hold the network together.

Can we exchange registration data with our clubs' other systems? Yes, by file rather than by API — which is an honest description of what this field actually runs on. A club exports the members it wants registered as a CSV; you send back your file carrying each person's registration number, whether it took and how long it lasts; and the import matches those rows onto the club's own roster, so a roster screen finally shows who is genuinely registered to play. Where the body is itself on the platform, that position rolls up across its clubs as aggregates and never as a list of named members. Registers and reports export as CSV too, and a club can display your ladder and fixtures on its own site from a feed. We do not publish an outbound federation feed, and a vendor promising a live two-way sync is worth asking to demonstrate on your data.

Does it file our return? It produces the return. Submitting it, and standing behind the numbers, stays with you — which is why the definitions above matter more than the software does.

What does it cost? See pricing for what each plan includes, including which tier carries the HQ tools and the funding return.