Committee Handover Toolkit for Irish Rowing Clubs | Row HQ

Why handovers fail

The standard handover at an Irish club: outgoing chair, treasurer, captain and welfare officer in the back of the pub after AGM for an evening of war stories, followed by an email the next morning with a Google Drive link to a folder of attachments. Three weeks later the new committee discovers that the boatman cannot get into the maintenance log because nobody has the password, the Rowing Ireland affiliation renewal is due on Friday and was meant to be in the previous secretary's outbox, and the bank mandate still names someone who stepped off the committee eight months earlier.

None of that is because the outgoing committee was careless. It is because nobody gave the handover a structure. People hand over what they remember to hand over. What they remember to hand over is never the same as what needs to be handed over. I have watched a club lose its Rowing Ireland regatta entry deadline because the new secretary did not realise the entry portal was a separate account from the general club email. I have watched another club spend two months chasing the boatman's photographs of a damaged Empacher because the maintenance log lived in his personal Dropbox. The toolkit below replaces memory with a list.

What goes in an Irish club role inventory?

Each role at the club drags a long tail of logins, documents, keys and physical assets behind it. The job is to write that tail down on one page. Chair: bank signatory, Rowing Ireland affiliation login, CRA registered charity number where applicable, insurance documents from the Rowing Ireland block policy. Treasurer: bank account list, SEPA Direct Debit mandates, Revolut Business account if used, Sport Ireland grant references. Captain: club management system login, squad rosters, Rowing Ireland regatta entry account, fleet status, boathouse and pontoon keys. If the page overflows, the inventory is too soft.

The five-step handover process

Step 1 - Inventory what you actually own

Every role inherits a tail. Write it down. One page per role. Treat anything that does not fit on the page as evidence that the inventory has not been disciplined enough. The new chair, the new treasurer and the new captain all need to be able to read their inventory between the AGM finishing and the first committee meeting two weeks later.

A typical chair inventory at an Irish club: chair email account, banking signatory status across AIB, Bank of Ireland or PTSB, Rowing Ireland affiliation portal login, CRA registered charity record where applicable, insurance policy documents from the Rowing Ireland block scheme, AGM templates, signed copies of the constitution and any rule changes the previous EGM passed.

A typical treasurer inventory: bank account details and signatory list, credit union account if the club still uses one, accounting software login (TaxAssist, Sage, Xero), SEPA Direct Debit mandate file for member subs, Revolut Business account where used for petty cash, Sport Ireland and Healthy Ireland grant reference numbers, three years of audited accounts, the welfare-payment log if any junior coaches are paid.

A typical captain inventory: club management system login, training schedule, current squad rosters, Rowing Ireland online regatta entry portal account, coach agreements and Garda vetting paperwork, boat allocation policy, fleet status, key holder list for the boathouse and the slip.

Welfare officer, junior coordinator, safeguarding officer, social secretary, ergo officer - every role has its own list. The point is that the list exists. A blank inventory takes thirty minutes to fill in and saves the incoming committee months of guesswork on the Lee, the Liffey, the Erne or the Bann.

Step 2 - Document the recurring rhythm

The inventory tells the new role-holder what they own. The rhythm document tells them what they have to do with it across a year. Most committee work is metronomic - monthly, termly, annually - and the metronome is completely invisible to a newcomer who has just walked into the role.

For each role, list the recurring tasks with their cadence and trigger. Monthly: review the bank statement and the accounts, post the monthly update to the membership. Termly: review the boat fleet condition, plan the next training camp, refresh the safeguarding rota. Annually: file accounts with CRO if the club is incorporated as a CLG, renew the Rowing Ireland affiliation, run the AGM, prepare the insurance renewal under the Rowing Ireland block scheme, file the CRA annual report by 31 October for most clubs, review the constitution if changes are pending.

Each task needs four fields: trigger, deadline, deliverable, location of last year's version. That is the document the incoming role-holder reaches for first when something lands in their inbox they have never seen before.

Step 3 - Move credentials through a vault

Where most Irish handovers break is the moment passwords change hands. They get emailed. Sticky notes appear in the chair email account. The previous chair forgets to revoke their own access for three months. None of that is appropriate, even at a small rowing club, and the DPC has been clear that informal sharing of credentials is a control failure.

The right pattern: the club runs a shared password manager. 1Password Teams, Bitwarden Business or Dashlane Business all sit at a few euro a month and remove an entire category of failure. New committee members are added to the club vault on the day of AGM. Outgoing ones are revoked the same day. Credentials never live in personal notebooks, browser autofill or chat threads.

Two-factor authentication is non-negotiable on the bank, the Rowing Ireland portal, and the chair email. The second factor needs to be cleanly transferable - hardware keys like YubiKey are the cleanest, app-based TOTP (1Password, Authy) is fine, SMS-based 2FA is brittle and should be retired before AGM season because it ties the second factor to a personal phone number.

Step 4 - One hour per outgoing-incoming pair

The handover meeting is one hour, one pair. Not a group session with the full committee. The chair hands over to the chair, the treasurer to the treasurer, the captain to the captain, the welfare officer to the welfare officer. Walk the inventory and the rhythm document together while the outgoing memory is still fresh. The pair meeting catches the things the documents missed.

What comes up in those meetings is the corporate folklore that never made it onto paper. The incoming captain asks who actually pays the Waterways Ireland licence for the pontoon or does the club have a deal with Skibbereen RC for storage at Inniscarra during championships week, and the outgoing one remembers a five-year-old arrangement they would never have thought to write down. Add it to the documents on the spot. Every single time.

Step 5 - Stay reachable for a quarter, then exit

The outgoing committee should not vanish the day after AGM. Three months is the right window. The new committee will hit unexpected things in that period - a query about a fifteen-year-old grant from Cork City Council, a reference to an agreement made before the new captain joined the club - and the previous holders are the only people who can answer.

The boundary, though, is hard. The outgoing committee answers questions but does not act. If the previous treasurer is still approving the Stripe payout three months in because they still hold the login, the handover has failed regardless of paperwork. Real exit means the access is gone. The handover is real or it is not.

A handover-friendly system

The single biggest determinant of a clean handover at an Irish club is whether the operational data sits in one system or in fifteen Google Sheets and seven WhatsApp threads. If the new captain inherits a folder of spreadsheets, the handover is fragile by construction. If they inherit a login to a system that already holds the squad roster, the fleet status, the outing schedule and the booking history, the handover is solid because the data is structured and the access is portable.

This is one of the underrated benefits of moving the club from spreadsheets to a purpose-built club management system. The folder gets replaced by an account. The account survives the handover because it is not tied to one person's laptop or one person's personal Google Drive. The incoming committee inherits a working system with a year of clean history attached.

A short pre-AGM checklist

• Inventory drafted for every role at least one month before AGM.
• Rhythm-of-year document drafted alongside - including the CRA filing date, Rowing Ireland affiliation renewal, CRO annual return if incorporated, and SEPA mandate refresh.
• Password manager vault audited - revoke anyone no longer on the committee, prepare slots for new members.
• Bank mandate paperwork pre-completed at AIB, BOI or PTSB so it can be filed the day after AGM, not three weeks later.
• Rowing Ireland portal access plan agreed - who is the new club contact, what email goes on the record.
• Pair handover meetings booked in advance, not improvised in the days after AGM.

A note for incoming committees

If you are reading this because you have just inherited a role and the outgoing person handed you nothing but a hopeful smile, run the toolkit for the people who come after you. Inventory what you find. Document what you discover. Build the handover process you wish you had been given. The next AGM is twelve months out, and twelve months is far less time than it looks once the Irish Champs build, the winter erg block and the head-race calendar are all running through the same diary.

For a related piece on getting the operational side under control before the handover hits, see rowing club spreadsheet alternatives.