Nobody starts coaching to become a debt collector. But a month into the season, every treasurer and volunteer coach hits the same moment: three families have not paid, you are not completely sure it is only three, and someone has to send the message. So it gets left another week, the list in your head gets fuzzier, and by half term you are funding match balls out of your own pocket.
Here is the thing the app adverts do not tell you: the hard part of subs was never moving the money. A bank transfer takes a parent thirty seconds. The hard part is the ledger and the chase. Knowing exactly who has paid, and having something other than you send the reminder.
How grassroots teams actually collect, and what each way costs
Cash on the touchline. Free, instant, and a nightmare to track. It works for match fees on adult teams where everyone pays every week. It falls apart for monthly subs, because the record lives in a coat pocket.
Bank transfer. Free for everyone, and these days every parent can do it from their phone in the time it takes to read your message. The weakness has never been the transfer. It is matching what lands in the account to the right child, and noticing who has not paid at all.
Direct debit. Works well for bigger clubs with a hundred-plus members and someone to administer it. The platforms that run it charge a percentage plus pence on every collection, and for a single team it is usually more machinery than the job needs.
Card payments through a team app. Convenient, but the fee comes out of club money. Collection platforms typically take somewhere between one and five percent plus a fixed fee per payment. On a squad of fourteen paying £20 a month, the middle of that range costs the club roughly £90 across a season, and it comes out of the club's side by default. And the part you would most want automated often is not: on the biggest name in this space, payment reminders are a button an admin has to press, not something that happens by itself.
If you collected through Teamer, there is a date to know about: Teamer closes on 5 October 2026, and its payment records go with it. Screenshot your paid and unpaid lists this week. I wrote a full guide to moving your team off Teamer before the deadline.
The fix is a ledger that chases for you
This is the way Squadd approaches money, and it is deliberately different from the platforms above. Squadd is a record-keeper, not a payment processor. The money moves the way it always has, straight from the parent to the club account with no fee taken by anyone. What Squadd does is everything around it:
You set it up once. Monthly subs with an amount and a due day, or a one-off charge for sign-on, kit or a tournament. It applies to your current squad, and only your current squad, so a player who leaves in November stops appearing on the list.
Every family sees what they owe. No more "sorry, how much was it again?". The amount, what it is for, and when it was due, in the same app they already use for availability.
Each payment gets a reference code. The parent copies it into their banking app as the payment reference, and whoever checks the club statement can match every transfer to the right child in seconds. This is the boring detail that fixes bank transfer's one real weakness.
The chasing is automatic. Squadd reminds the families who have not paid, and only those families, and stops the moment you mark them paid. Nobody who has paid ever gets nagged, and you never have to compose that message again. There is a nudge button for when you want to give one family a gentle extra push, but the routine chasing simply happens.
You mark payments off as they land. Tap a name when the transfer arrives, or mark the whole list when you have reconciled the statement. The paid and unpaid list your treasurer used to keep in a spreadsheet, or in their head, is just there, all season.
All of this is in Squadd's free tier. No adverts, no percentage, no pence per payment.
The honest gap
Squadd does not collect card payments inside the app today. Parents pay by bank transfer or cash, and you mark it paid. Most teams collected that way long before apps existed, and it is the only route where the club keeps one hundred percent of the money. A real payment integration is being looked at for after the public launch, and I would rather ship it properly than promise a date.
If in-app card collection is genuinely the deciding feature for you, a platform like Spond has it and takes its cut. If what actually wears you down is the ledger and the chasing, that is the part Squadd already does, for nothing.
The short version
Subs go wrong in the record-keeping, not the bank transfer. Put the season's charges into something that shows every family what they owe, gives each payment a reference so the statement matches itself, and chases the unpaid automatically so you never have to. That is Squadd's payments tracker, free, with the money going straight to the club and staying there.