The Challenge
We were approached by Sevenoaks Town Football Club, based in Kent, due to the significant administrative overhead involved in managing such a large club, and were commissioned to develop a bespoke web application designed to substantially alleviate this burden
Using our in-house web application environment, Jolojo Hex built purely in Go and using SQLite for data storage, we already had the fundamentals essential for a web application available out of the box, namely:
User registration
Password resetting
User role-based access control (RBAC)
User management
Progressive Web Application (PWA) environment
Using Sevenoaks Town Football Club’s knowledge of their own existing processes we broke the functionality down into the following major tasks:
Parental Registration
Adding siblings, including proof of age (one time only) and an annual photograph for Football Association requirements.
Player Registration
For adult players, including proof of age and photograph as above.
Gift Aid
Crucially important to the club is the ability to accurately record Gift Aid registrations, this is handled seamlessly by the application including a data export for HMRC.
Player Medical Records & Recent Injuries
All players records have the ability to add additional medical records and recent injuries; these can be used to record anything that maybe of importance in the case that medical attention is required (as an example an allergy for antibiotics or an injury that may re-occur).
Player medical records and recent injuries are available to any Manager via the application. If a player’s medical record is viewed by a Manager this is recorded by the system to ensure that medical records are not accessed unless strictly necessary.
Player Emergency Contacts
Junior players have to have emergency contacts added to their data, multiple contacts can be added and this is reviewed by the parent each season.
Emergency contact data for a player is available to all managers as per the player medical records.
Team management
Teams are created, named and are assigned an age range, fees and a Kit charge.
Manager Registration
Managers run the Teams in the club and add Players (Junior or Adult) to their teams via the Application.
Fees generation
The application generates the required fees for either a Parent (with one of more juniors) or Adult Players. Fees are generated when all players have been assigned a team. In-built is the ability to add a sibling discount (for more than one junior players from the same Parents in the club), a manual discount that can be discretionary and an additional charge for Kit that is Team dependent and can vary if a team has sponsorship.
Payment Gateway (Stripe)
Once the fees have been generated the option to pay the whole season in one payment or pay in instalments (broken down into the number of months in the season, or if a player joins mid-season, the number of months left in their season) is available.
Expiring cards and failed payments is all handled by the application.
Management reports are available to audit payments due and made at any stage of the season.
Season Rollover
Moving from one season to the next is also handled by the system, we also included ‘dummy’ roll over so the rollover can be tested and rolled back if need be.
All season data required, such as photo ID, is re-set during roll-over.
Conclusion
It is likely that this web application is saving Sevenoaks Town Football Club many months of labour. Managing payments was a manual task previously and with over 800 players with approximately 4,000 separate payments over the course of a year, not only managing this but having a clear record of what has and what has not been paid will be a massive time saving for the club.
Utilising a web application framework that is bang up to date and fully optimised means that any future enhancements will be practical, possible and economical.
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