Going live with memberships
Move your club onto Rowbot memberships and billing without members noticing until you're ready - including carrying across existing Direct Debits.
Switching a club's membership and billing onto Rowbot means loading real people, real prices and real bank mandates. None of that is work you want members watching, and it is certainly not work you want emailing them halfway through.
So it doesn't. While your club is being set up, Rowbot runs in setup mode: membership and billing pages are hidden, no membership or billing message reaches anyone, no money is collected, and nothing is pushed to your accounting system. You load everything, check it, prove one payment works end to end, and then switch it all on in one go.
Setup mode is switched on for you by your Rowbot contact, not from club settings. It is deliberately not a self-service toggle - the holds are club-wide, and turning one off at the wrong moment is exactly the mistake worth designing out.
What setup mode holds back
| Held | What it means |
|---|---|
| Messages | Membership and billing emails and notifications are recorded but never delivered. Your Rowbot contact can show you exactly what members would have received. |
| Collections | Invoices are still raised, but nothing is taken from anyone's bank. They show as Pending submission. |
| Accounting | Nothing is pushed to Xero. The backlog syncs when you go live - nothing is lost. |
Everything else carries on as normal. Session reminders, lineups and announcements are untouched, so a club already using Rowbot for scheduling sees no disruption at all.
Before you start
Getting these together first is the difference between a one-day switchover and a three-week one.
- Your member list as a spreadsheet: name, email, role, membership number, squads.
- Your membership tiers and prices, and how often each one bills.
- Access to your GoCardless account - and crucially, whether your members' existing Direct Debits are on that account.
- Access to your Xero organisation, with a user who can post invoices.
- A decision on renewal dates: does everyone keep their existing date, or move to a common anniversary?
The single biggest question: are your members' existing Direct Debits on the same GoCardless account you're connecting? If so, they carry across and nobody re-signs. If they're with a different provider, every member has to set up a new mandate - which is a very different conversation with your club.
The process
Your club goes into setup mode
Your Rowbot contact switches it on and limits the membership pages to you and your treasurer. Everyone else sees no Memberships section and no Finances tab.
Check this yourself before going further. Ask a committee member who isn't involved to look at the app on their phone and confirm they see nothing new. Everything that follows assumes members can't see work in progress.
Connect GoCardless and Xero
Go to Club settings → Integrations and work through the setup checklist for each. It knows what's done and what's still missing, and explains why each step matters.
Two things Rowbot can't check for you, both in GoCardless:
- Your payout bank account. Collections land in your GoCardless balance and pay out to an account you nominate there. Rowbot can't see it.
- Your Direct Debit notification settings. The Direct Debit Guarantee requires members to be told before each collection, and Rowbot sends that notice itself. If GoCardless is also set to email them, members get two of everything.
For Xero, the checklist walks you through your income account, bank account, clearing accounts and fee accounts. See Xero for what each one is for.
Turning Xero's auto-sync on during setup is safe - the accounting hold means nothing is actually sent. You're configuring the mapping, not opening the tap.
Load your members
Manage → Members → Import, up to 500 people at a time. See Members & invites.
Leave send invitations switched off. Invitations aren't part of membership billing, so they aren't held back - they'd go out for real. Invite people when your club is ready to welcome them, not while you're loading a spreadsheet.
Check the count matches, and spot-check a handful of email addresses. Correcting an email later, after mandates are attached, is considerably more work.
Bring across existing Direct Debits
This is the step that decides whether your cash flow survives the move.
Go to Club settings → Integrations → GoCardless → Bring across existing mandates. Rowbot lists every Direct Debit on your GoCardless account and suggests which member each one belongs to, matching on email address first, then on a name that matches exactly one person.
- Nothing is matched automatically. Every suggestion has to be confirmed by you, and you can change or skip any of them.
- Nothing changes at GoCardless. Linking only tells Rowbot the mandate exists, so collection carries on and no member is asked to re-sign.
- A mandate already linked to someone is refused rather than moved. A mandate authorises one person's bank account, so it can never be shared.
You'll be left with a handful Rowbot couldn't match - people who've left, duplicates, business accounts. Go through that list with your treasurer before moving on.
Build your membership types and prices
Create a type for each tier you actually sell, with its price and billing interval. See Membership types & pricing.
Then set your billing settings and overdue policy - how many times a failed payment is retried, how long someone can be overdue before their membership is suspended, and whether it's ever cancelled. See Dunning & overdue.
Decide the overdue policy now rather than later. It's what suspends a member for non-payment, and it's the setting most likely to cause an awkward conversation in your first week.
Issue one membership to yourself, check the amount and dates are what you expect, then cancel it. Far cheaper than discovering a problem across two hundred people.
Issue everyone's membership
For a small club, use the issue wizard one member at a time.
For a larger one, this is done with your Rowbot contact from a spreadsheet: each row carries the member, their tier, their start date, how they pay, and any agreed discount. It runs through exactly the same process as the wizard, so proration, renewal dates and the audit trail all behave identically.
Before it's run for real, it's run against a test copy of your club, where a full billing month can be fast-forwarded in minutes to check what everyone would actually be charged.
Check the total. The sum of everyone's monthly billing should match what your treasurer expects to collect. If those two numbers disagree, stop and find out why.
Prove one real payment
Everything so far is theory. Pick one member - ideally your treasurer, who can confirm what leaves their account - and your Rowbot contact pushes a single invoice all the way through: collected by Direct Debit for real, confirmed by GoCardless, and posted into Xero.
Then open Xero and check it landed on the accounts you expect. This is the last cheap moment to find a mapping problem.
Go live
Pick a weekday morning, and tell your committee beforehand so they're ready for questions.
Your historic invoices are sent to Xero first and checked, then the holds come off and the membership pages become visible to everyone. Held invoices collect on the next nightly run with nothing further to do.
Messages that were held back are not sent retrospectively. They stay as a record of what was withheld. If there's something your members should know, send a proper announcement - that reads far better than a month of back-dated invoice emails arriving at once.
Your first week
For seven days after going live, Rowbot will not chase anyone for an overdue payment or suspend a membership. Invoices raised during setup will have aged while they sat waiting, and nobody's first ever message about billing should be a demand for money they were never told about.
Use that week:
- Watch Financials → Needs attention for failed collections and sync problems.
- Chase members with no payment method yourself. They'll enter the overdue process once the grace period ends, so a personal message now saves an automated one later.
- Check the first real collection run has gone through the morning after go-live.