Club Manager 4.0 is here

Hi there,

Today we are releasing the biggest update to Club Manager since launch. Version 4.0.0 is shaped almost entirely by what clubs have asked us for: a faster way to get students onto the system, attendance that finally adds up the way it should, a proper home for your policies and waivers, and far less repetitive admin for the families you look after.

Here is everything that is new, what it does, and why it matters to your club.

Faster, simpler student onboarding

Email is now optional. You can create a student record with nothing more than a name and a date of birth. For the many juniors who do not have an email address, you no longer have to invent one or skip the record entirely. If there is no genuine email to enter, you simply leave it blank.

Add the next of kin in the same flow. When you create a student, the system now prompts you to add their next of kin straight away, with the option to skip if you would rather come back to it. No more creating the student and then hunting for a separate step.

Link to an existing parent. Where a parent or guardian is already on the system with another child, you can link the new student to that existing next of kin record without re-entering any of their details. For clubs with lots of siblings, this alone saves a great deal of typing.

Attendance that actually adds up

Set a default attendance status per class. Each class can now default to present, absent, or blank. Once the session time passes, attendance is marked automatically against that default, so regular classes no longer need marking by hand every single week.

Attendance follows the student. If a student trains in two classes that share the same belt group, their attendance now combines into a single total rather than being split across each lesson. And when you move a student from one class to another, their attended-day count moves with them, with a logged history of where they have trained. Progression now reflects the true, combined picture.

Set a starting count. Clubs coming across from paper registers or another system can now enter an opening attendance figure for a student in a class, rather than starting everyone back at zero. Your members keep the progress they have already earned.

A progression fix. We have corrected an issue where a student's progression page showed the same attendance figure against every belt. Each belt now shows its own correct attended-day count, and all of it feeds progression properly.

A proper home for your documents

A brand new documents area. You can now upload your policies, handbooks, codes of conduct and waivers as PDFs into a dedicated space within Club Manager. Look for the new label in your sidebar.

Shared securely with members and families. Documents are made available to your students and their next of kin through their own portal, and you control who sees what, with access passwords and controls available.

Acknowledgement tracking. Each document can carry a simple "I have read and understood this" acknowledgement, and you can see at a glance who has acknowledged it. For safeguarding and good governance, that record of who has read your policies is invaluable, and it is captured automatically.

Less admin, more control over your lists

Choose your own columns. Student lists and registers can now be tailored to show the columns that matter to your club, from a wide range of available fields.

Sort and export anything. Any list can be sorted by any visible column, and exported to CSV with your current search, filters and sort order preserved. What you see is what you get in the file.

A spreadsheet-style bulk editor. One of the standout additions: a bulk editor that lets you add and edit many students at once in a familiar grid, rather than one record at a time. For larger clubs in particular, this turns an afternoon's work into a few minutes.

Keep your place. When you finish viewing a student, membership or progression record, the system now returns you to where you were in the list, not back to the top.

Smarter next-of-kin access

One account, every child. A parent or guardian can now manage all of their children from a single next-of-kin account, including creating several students in one go, with the option to copy their own contact details across to save re-typing.

You decide what families can change. Clubs now have controls over what a next of kin can and cannot edit on a student's profile, so you can allow contact details to be updated while keeping medical information or belt records under club control.

Lockable forms and consents. Custom fields such as liability waivers and consent forms can now be locked. You can set a field so it can be completed only once, or so that any change a family makes requires club approval before it takes effect. Once something is agreed, it stays agreed unless you say otherwise.

Self-service memberships

Let members choose, if you want them to. Clubs can now mark a membership package as public, so students and families can select and subscribe to it themselves from their portal, following the same process as an admin-assigned membership. This stays entirely under your control through a simple toggle, so if you would rather assign every membership yourself, nothing changes.

Reliability and fixes

We have also closed off a number of issues carried over from earlier versions. Most notably, you can no longer accidentally trap yourself by deleting a belt group that still has classes or students attached to it: the system now protects those belt groups and tells you why, so a club can never be left unable to reassign progression.

Coming next: a payments overhaul

Alongside this release, we are already two weeks into building the next major piece of work, focused entirely on payments.

That includes a brand new Direct Debit integration through GoCardless, giving clubs a proper, low-cost way to collect recurring membership fees by Direct Debit, and a complete face-lift and simplification of our Stripe payments, making card payments and memberships cleaner, clearer and easier to manage day to day.

This work is well underway and we will be bringing it to you as soon as it is ready. We will share more as it takes shape.

As ever, thank you to every club that took the time to tell us what was slowing you down. Almost everything in this release came directly from that feedback, and it is exactly how we want to keep building.