When the chairman of Tauranga City AFC, Brendon McHugh, first heard about the new club management platform Friendly Manager, he initially dismissed it as being just one more piece of software.
“I didn’t think our club needed yet another piece of software,” he remembers. “We were already using so many platforms and one more was not going to help us with the large volume of administration we were facing.”
With nearly 60 teams to manage, Brendon and his team were spending huge amounts of time on administration, notably tracking member and supporter data, and managing fees and payments.
But when Brendon saw Friendly Manager in action, all thoughts about this being just another piece of software disappeared.
“I quickly realised that this one platform could replace multiple existing systems and, even better, it could integrate with all our other essential tools like Comet, Xero and our credit card payment gateway,” Brendon says.
The creation of a single pool of data that was able to be accessed in each of the connected systems made an attractive proposal for Brendon, as it would give him the ability to work with real time data - creating opportunities Tauranga City AFC had never had before.
Coaches and managers could access their team data in a simple dashboard that allowed them to communicate from the club-branded account, track attendance, manage uniforms, create events with online RSVP and display training times. All of this activity could be overseen by administrators in real time so that if there were any issues, they were able to quickly identify and fix them.
Once Brendon showed his admin team how much Friendly Manager could streamline their operations and enhance other essential tools, they were keen to utilise it too.
Tauranga City AFC introduced Friendly Manager in January 2020 and it has proven to be a powerful tool that has reduced administration time considerably. Now Brendon says he couldn’t do his job without it.
