What a Rotary club actually spends on software
The subscription is rarely the whole bill. A method for working out your real number, including the tools nobody remembers you pay for.
For club treasurers, presidents, boards approving a budget · 2 min read · updated
The number on the invoice is not the number
Most clubs can tell you what their club management system costs. Very few can tell you what the club spends on software, because the spend is spread across several people's personal cards and two years of board minutes.
The exercise below takes about twenty minutes and the answer is usually between two and four times what anyone guessed.
Count all of it
Go through the last twelve months of the club's statements and the treasurer's reimbursements, and look for:
- The club management system or website platform, and its domain name.
- Email — a bulk sending tool, or an inbox the club pays for.
- Payment processing for dues, plus any separate invoicing tool.
- Event ticketing, used a few times a year and charged per event.
- Sign-up sheets and volunteer rosters, often on somebody's personal subscription.
- Form tools, survey tools, and the one file-storage account that holds the club's photographs.
- Anything a past officer set up and still pays for personally, which the club will inherit the moment they step down.
Then count the part that isn't money
The hours matter more than the fees and are almost never counted. Re-keying the same member into three systems. Reconciling a dues spreadsheet against a bank statement. Chasing the one person who has the login.
You don't need a precise figure. You need enough of one to have an honest conversation about whether consolidating is worth the disruption, because for some clubs it genuinely isn't.
What to do with the answer
If the total is small and the club is content, stop. This is not a problem worth solving and there are better uses of a board meeting.
If the total is large, the useful question is not which system is cheapest. It is how many separate things the club would still be paying for afterwards. Replacing one $40 subscription with a different $35 subscription while keeping the other five is not a saving; it is an afternoon.
Our own pricing, and a comparison that names where the alternatives do more than we do, are on the pricing and compare pages. We would rather you did this arithmetic properly and concluded we were the wrong answer than the reverse.