Committee roles and admin permissions for your club

Every club committee changes. People are elected at the AGM, co-opted halfway through the season, or step down when life gets busy. If you are the commodore or the club secretary, you are usually the one who has to make sure each new officer can do their job on the club's systems, and that the people who have left cannot. This guide covers how committee roles and permissions work in Yacht Clubs Manager: giving each role only what it needs, seeing who did what, and handing over cleanly.

Why a shared password is a problem

Plenty of clubs run on one admin login written on a card in the office. It feels simple, but it causes three problems.

• You cannot take it back. When someone leaves the committee, the only way to remove their access is to change the password and tell everyone else the new one. In practice, that rarely happens.
• Everyone can do everything. The person who posts race reports can also issue refunds and delete members, whether they meant to or not.
• Nobody can tell who did what. If an invoice is cancelled or a member's record is changed, the record says "admin". That is no help when a member asks why.

The better pattern is for every committee member to sign in with their own member account, and for you to give that account the specific admin areas their role needs. Keep the club's main administrator login for emergencies and store it somewhere safe.

Giving each role only what it needs

Permissions are set on the person's own member record. In the admin console, open Membership, find the member, choose View and then Edit. At the bottom is an Admin Permissions list of tick boxes:

• News Management: news stories on the public website.
• Events Management: the events calendar, event documents and entries.
• Duty Roster Management: creating duties and managing the roster.
• Members (View Only): seeing the membership list without changing it.
• Invoices Management: invoices, payments and invoice settings.
• Shop Management: shop products and orders.
• Settings (Payment Integrations): the club's Stripe connection and other system settings.
• Super User (Full Admin Access): everything in the admin console.

Save, and the next time that person signs in they see an admin console with only the areas you have ticked. The limits are enforced by the server, not just by hiding menu items, so nobody can get round them by guessing a web address.

A typical committee might look like this:

• Press officer: News Management.
• Sailing secretary or race officer: Events Management, perhaps Duty Roster Management.
• Duty roster coordinator: Duty Roster Management and Members (View Only), so they can see who is who.
• Treasurer: Invoices Management and Settings, which together cover invoicing, the Stripe connection and Xero.
• Shop volunteer: Shop Management.
• Commodore, secretary and membership secretary: usually Super User, and only a small number of people.

Some areas are only available with full access: the dashboard, membership changes and invitations, the newsletter and email outbox, sponsors, results, the gallery, noticeboard and forum moderation, member documents, resource booking, the committee page and the admin actions log. If someone needs one of those regularly, that is a conversation about whether they should be a super user. It is better to have a few trusted super users than to hand it to everyone for convenience.

Only people with full access can change permissions, and every grant and removal is recorded, as described below.

The admin actions log

With individual logins in place, the Admin Actions Log becomes genuinely useful. It records who did what in the admin console, with a plain-English summary of each action, for example "approved the booking of the crane on…", or "granted a member the Invoices Management permission". Open any entry for the details, including what changed.

You can narrow the log down by:

• Actor: the person who did it.
• Role: system admin, super user, admin or permissioned member.
• Category: content, finance, membership, permissions, duty, communication, system or resource bookings.
• Action, a date range, or a free-text search.
• Sensitive actions only, which picks out things like permission changes.

The log is a working record rather than a permanent archive: by default, entries are kept for 60 days and then removed. Export CSV downloads whatever you have filtered, so if the committee wants a longer record, export it regularly (monthly, or before each committee meeting) and keep the files with the club's papers. Exports are themselves recorded in the log.

You do not need to read the log every day. It is there so that when a question comes up ("who cancelled this invoice?", "who changed this member's type?") the answer takes a minute rather than an evening of emails, provided you look within the retention window. Filtering by the Finance category is a quick way to review recent refunds, recorded payments and invoice changes.

Handing over at the AGM

The AGM is the natural moment to review access. A short checklist for the secretary:

1. Make sure incoming officers have member accounts and can sign in. Most will already be members; for anyone who is not yet set up, see the membership secretary's guide.
2. Grant the new permissions on each incoming officer's record, matching their role.
3. Remove the old ones. Untick the permissions of anyone who has stepped down or changed role. A former treasurer who is now the social secretary should not keep Invoices Management.
4. Update the committee page. Under Committee Members, change names, positions, contact details and photos, and set the display order. This controls the public committee page only; it does not give anyone admin access.
5. Update role email addresses. Check where new-application and booking notifications are sent in Settings, and point them at role mailboxes rather than personal ones.
6. Filter the log by Permissions and check that the changes you made are the only ones there.

Handing over properly also means passing on how things are done. The other guides in this series are written with that in mind: for example, the treasurer's guide to Stripe and Xero and the newsletter guide.

When someone steps down mid-season

If an officer resigns but stays a member, open their record, untick their permissions and save. They keep their normal member account (invoices, bookings, duties) and lose the admin areas. Their access ends as soon as their current session refreshes, which happens within half an hour, or sooner if they sign out. Their recent actions stay in the admin actions log under their name for the usual retention period, so export it first if you may need it later.

If they are leaving the club entirely, deleting their account removes their admin permissions along with their personal details. Before a member is deleted, the platform lists anything still open against them, such as unpaid invoices, upcoming bookings or shop orders, so you can decide what happens to each first. The data protection side is covered in GDPR for sailing club committees.

If the person who left knew the club's main administrator password, change it. It is one more reason to keep that login for emergencies only.

Where to go next

Permissions live on each member's record, alongside everything else described on the member management page. If you are comparing platforms and wondering how others handle committee access, see yacht club software.