Case study · Heritage society
Twenty years of results, handicaps and honours, in a database one member built and only that member could open. This is what we did about it, what it cost, and why an off-the-shelf app could not have touched it.
The problem
The society ran perfectly well. That was the trap. Everything worked, so nobody had to look at how fragile the setup underneath it had become.
One machine, one person who understood it.Two decades of members, scores and competitions lived in a single database, written years ago by a member now in his eighties. If the machine died, or he did, the society lost its record. Their words, not ours.
The competitions were their own.The society runs scoring formats that exist nowhere else: a season-long order of merit with carried-over penalty shots, and a second competition that hands some of those shots back under its own rule. No off-the-shelf golf app models that. A replacement had to reproduce the real rules, to the shot.
Members had no way in.Standings went out on paper or by email. A member who wanted to know where they stood had to ask the secretary, and the secretary had to go to the one machine to find out.
What we built
Four parts, all live, all specific to this society. Built on the ParClub platform, but the scoring engine and the secretary portal were shaped around what they actually do.
The whole database brought across with handicaps, history and identity intact. Every past winner searchable, from the first record to the last. The record stays the record.
Both of the society's competition formats modelled to their own rules, including the penalty carry-over and the conditional shot-back the secretary used to work out by hand. Checked against real cards before sign-off.
A control room on the web. Set the draw, enter results, watch the standings update. No spreadsheet, no re-typing, reachable from any laptop.
Every member gets the ParClub app. Standings, fixtures, their own record, on their phone. Free for the member, always.
The result
The deal was structured so they did not pay the balance until the new system ran one of their real competitions, on their real data, and produced the number their old process produced. That was the acceptance test, agreed up front.
20 yrs
of records migrated, nothing left behind on the old machine
2
bespoke competitions rebuilt to their own rules, verified against real cards
0
monthly platform fee: a fixed price, then the members' app
Why it mattered
Free golf apps will take a society's next round. None will take its last twenty years. Migrating a legacy database is slow, one-off work that does not fit a self-serve product, so the standard answer is "type your members in and start fresh". For a society whose whole point is its history, that is not an answer.
The worry was always the succession plan. If we lost that machine, we lost the society's memory with it. Now it is somewhere safe, and anyone can reach it.Society secretary · name withheld pending sign-off
What a build costs
You own it outright. The build is delivered to the society, not rented back to it, and your data is yours. The yearly figure keeps it hosted and keeps your rules working when they change, which for a real society they always do. A specialist firm charges many thousands for a build like this, and more again for the smallest change after. We are a one-person operation, so we do not.
Fifteen minutes on the phone. I'll tell you straight whether this is a build worth doing.
Tell me about your society › Or write to greg@parclub.app