Running the club on Excel, Google Sheets and WhatsApp, or on Row HQ?
By the time the shed door opens on a Saturday, three things need settling: the crews, the boats and the subs. A workbook, a shared spreadsheet and a group chat can each settle them, and each one puts the work on whoever volunteered last. Row HQ suits the club that has run out of volunteer.
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Which should an Australian club use?
Keep the spreadsheet and the chat while one person still knows the whole club off the top of their head. Row HQ makes sense once a few coaches are booking boats, members want to sign on from a phone in the car park, and somebody new has to pick the job up after the AGM.
The weekly jobs, four ways
The rows below are the jobs a club does most weeks of the season. Whether a tool can technically do the job is rarely the question. The question is how many places the volunteer has to go, and what breaks when two people touch one thing at once. The WhatsApp column is really club communication, which Row HQ divides into notifications, news, member mail and chat.
| The job | Excel workbook | Google Sheet | WhatsApp group | Row HQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Is that boat free | A tab for each boat, kept honest by hand. Put the workbook on OneDrive or SharePoint and two people can be in it together, which a workbook sent as an attachment can never manage. | One tab, shared, and live to anybody with the link. It remains a grid, so the answer is whatever date somebody typed in the right square. | The most recent message wins. Anybody who was asleep for it goes back up the thread looking. | A fleet behaves like a record, not like a grid. Switch booking on and a member takes a slot, and from then on the slot shows as taken. |
| Double bookings | Two people save that same slot within a minute of each other. Version History has the change, though restoring an older one waits until everybody has stopped co-authoring. | Every change is named in version history and an older version can be brought back. What version history will not do is stop the second booking landing. | Two members put their hand up for the same boat and the same morning. Someone has to catch it later. | Either the booking is there or it is not. The whole day sits on the shared bookings board, coaching launches and all. |
| Late changes | A member lets the captain know, the captain opens the workbook, the captain edits the row. | Give a member edit access and they can change their own row from a phone, once they have worked out which row is theirs. | "Can't make Saturday" lands among forty other messages in the thread. | One tap does attend, decline or withdraw, from the app or from a browser. It sits against the member rather than in a cell. |
| Sorting the crews | Take last week's crew list, copy it down, type over the names that have changed. | That same copying and pasting, only shared. Two coaches in the same crew will overwrite one another. | Someone pastes the crew in as a message, so the crew is whichever message came last. | Crew templates, crew assignments kept on the session, and a boat lineup diagram. Skill level filters the boat set picker. |
| Access and permissions | Having the file means having the whole file. Share a copy from the cloud and you have shared read or edit rights over all of it. | There are Editor, Commenter and Viewer roles, and protected sheets and ranges behind them. Someone still has to build that, sheet by sheet, and rebuild it next season. | Whatever anybody posts, everybody in the group reads. | Owner, admin, coach and member are how it arrives. From the permissions page the owner cuts back what admins and coaches can get to. |
| Committee changeover | The file sits on the laptop of the captain who just stood down, or somewhere in their inbox. | File ownership can be passed on, assuming anybody thinks to pass it on. | One group admin promotes the next. Every phone keeps its own copy of the history. | Committees come and go; the account does not. Ownership hands over and the records stay put. |
| Keeping track of subs | A subs tab, matched by hand to the bank statement. | The same tab with more people in it. Edit rights over one part are edit rights over the lot. | "Paid it last night" as a message, and nothing on the spreadsheet. | Membership, session and event fees all run down one ledger. Card or bank transfer, then ticked off against the member. |
A pull-out before an early session
This is made up rather than a real morning. The quad is booked for 5.30am, a rower messages at 5.05am, and learn to row has the same quad down for 7am. Two problems, twenty-five minutes, and a shed that is already warm. The difference between the four is who hears about it.
Excel workbook
Open it up. Edit the member, edit the crew tab, edit the boat tab. Then write the message. Editing a cell announces nothing to anyone. Where the workbook has been emailed about, some people are still on an older copy.
Google Sheet
The same edits, only live to whoever has the tab open. Emailing your collaborators is in the File menu, and a comment that names somebody emails them as well. What that misses is the rower already on the road.
WhatsApp group
Put it in the group and all twenty members read it, rowing or not. Tuesday's message about the 7am learn to row is a long way up the thread by now, and the crew on the spreadsheet has not moved.
Row HQ
A tap on the phone withdraws the rower. That seat frees up on the session, the coach pulls somebody in off the crew list, and the clash is visible on the bookings board while there is still time. Call the session off instead and every one of the crew gets a notification on the phone and an email, without a word being typed.
When a spreadsheet is plenty
Loads of clubs stay there. Two boats, one squad, and a captain who can name everybody. Where the club is twenty people and one volunteer runs it right through the season, a spreadsheet is quicker to open than any login and costs nothing beyond the volunteer hours it eats. Row HQ is free for clubs up to 20 active members, with paid bands above that, and the pricing page gives the figure for a club that size.
- Two boats, so nobody has to look up whether one is free.
- A squad that fits one chat, where every message gets read.
- The same volunteer on the admin, all season, no gaps.
- Subs that turn up once a year rather than in dribs and drabs.
What changes on Row HQ
Everything shifts once the club is bigger than one person can carry. Coaches outnumber the boats. Juniors need a parent on the account. Subs come in thirty payments. The committee turns over at the AGM. Volunteer hours start going on keeping four sets of records saying the same thing, rather than on the water. Six features take that over.
Sessions the squad signs on to
The week ahead comes out of recurring templates. A single tap is enough to attend, decline or withdraw, both the App Store and Google Play carry the Row HQ app, and session management keeps who actually turned up.
A boat rack that keeps its own bookings
Club boats, member-owned boats and coaching launches all sit in the same fleet. Turning member booking on is a club decision, and the club also names the skill levels allowed each boat.
One email a week, sent without asking
Wednesdays, a single email goes out per member. It lists sessions falling within five days that the member can see and has not yet put their name against.
Everyone with their own view
A member opens the member portal and sees their sessions, their details and their payments. Nobody is sitting in a row above somebody else's.
Subs and fees in the one ledger
Everything owed shows up in the same place: membership fees, session fees and event entries. Card or bank transfer, cash written in by hand, and the treasurer ticks off what has come in.
Nothing leaves with the outgoing captain
Whoever takes the role next gets handed the club account. Records belong to the club, and any admin can pull them down as CSV.
Hours back at one club
These come from Oundle Town Rowing Club, an English club that switched across in 2025. They are that one club's own estimate and nobody's average. Admin there ran at something like ten hours a week before the move and roughly one after it. Below is where the club thinks the difference sat.
Weekly attendance
Members tap. The volunteer reads. No names typed into a grid.
Crew planning
Out goes copy and paste, in come crew templates and crew assignments kept on the session.
Total
What that one club reckons it got back, every week.
Migration, handover and the records
Once the files are with us, moving the data is a one or two day job. Oundle Town Rowing Club in England had sessions running on Row HQ a week from its start in 2025, and the whole membership across in a fortnight. Importing from a spreadsheet are the membership list and the fleet. Old attendance history is not part of the deal.
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Members and boats import
Hand over the spreadsheet. One CSV import takes the member list and another takes the fleet. Boats are matched on their name, so running the import again updates a boat instead of creating a second one.
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The spreadsheet can keep going
No cut-over date is forced on anybody. Run the spreadsheet alongside for as long as the club wants.
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The roles already exist
Owner, admin, coach and member are there from day one, and the owner can trim where admins and coaches get to. Nothing like a protected range to rebuild each season.
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Handover means the account moves
The club account changes hands to the incoming captain. Nothing stays behind on the laptop of whoever is stepping down.
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The records are the club's
While the account is open, the attendance and the money stay put. An admin pulls session attendance, event RSVPs, members and payments down in CSV, while JSON gets the owner the club entire. Shut the account and there is a window to reopen it or take a copy before the data goes for good. The terms give the length of that window.
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Data protection once you are on it
The club is the controller of that data, not us. Each club puts out its own versioned terms and privacy notice, with a record of who agreed to which version, and member consent is tracked alongside it. The owner sets what admins and coaches reach, feature by feature. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and encrypted backups go off-site daily. Any support access Row HQ makes into a club is audited, and member reports and an access log both sit inside club chat. Members download their own data or delete the account outright, and the owner can export the club entire.
How a switch usually runs
Day 1: the files come over
Email us whatever Excel and Google Sheets files the club is running on.
Day 2-3: the import
Members and fleet get mapped across, then we tell you what would not go.
Day 4: your check
You read the data back to us, and the admins get trained on a call.
Day 5: members invited
Out go the invites or the join code, and the club is on it.
More on how it works
Separate feature pages cover training sessions, boat booking and the member portal. Underneath the lot is rowing club management software for Australian clubs, and how member data is held is set out on the security page.
Club size decides the bill. The pricing page lays that out, and the FAQ answers what clubs ask halfway through a switch.
What clubs ask before switching
These are the questions that come up on the call before a club commits. Every answer here is the short version of something further up the page, or on the pricing page. Ask anything that is missing on a demo, and if a spreadsheet is still the right tool for your club we will tell you that instead.
What software should a rowing club use instead of a spreadsheet?
Club management software that holds the weekly jobs together: session sign-on, the fleet, member records and subs. Row HQ is built for rowing, so boats, crews and skill levels belong to the record rather than being columns somebody bolted onto a grid.
Can a shared Google Sheet run a rowing club?
A small one, yes. A shared sheet gives the whole club one live grid, with Editor, Commenter and Viewer access on it. The strain shows when two coaches edit one crew, when a member ought to see only their own row, and when the file has to change hands.
How long does migration off a spreadsheet take?
One to two days for the data, from the moment the files reach us. The member list and the fleet come in by CSV. Oundle Town Rowing Club in England had sessions running a week after starting in 2025, and the whole membership across in a fortnight.
What happens to the data if a club stops using Row HQ?
It belongs to the club. An admin pulls members, payments, session attendance and event RSVPs down as CSV, and the owner takes the club entire as JSON. Close the account and the data is held 30 days to reopen or copy, then deleted, as the terms say.
Does Row HQ import attendance history?
No. Members and the fleet come across and nothing else does. Old attendance stays in the spreadsheet, which most clubs keep as an archive. Attendance on Row HQ starts at the first session the club runs on it.
Try it against your spreadsheet
Demos happen on a video call. Have the club's own spreadsheet in front of you and we will work down the jobs listed above, job by job. Where the spreadsheet is still doing the better job, that is what you will hear.