The shed shouldn’t stop working when one person does.
Members, fees, the shed captain roster and the equipment register, in one place, and built so that handing the job on takes an afternoon rather than a year.
One shed is running on it now. Open to others shortly.
Every shed already has a system. It works until the person who built it steps down.
Somebody with the time and the knack joins, and within a year the shed has a spreadsheet that calculates fees, a form that emails the membership officer, a folder on Google Drive that everything is saved to, and a CRM set up over a summer. All of it works. All of it works because they are there.
Then they move, or they get ill, or they simply do their three years and stand down, and none of it was ever written down, because it never had to be. It sat in one person’s head, under one person’s login, wired together in an account nobody else can open. The forms keep arriving and there is no way to see where they go. Within six months the shed is back to a paper book, and the six months in between were miserable for everybody.
This was built after watching exactly that happen. The people who took it on were not short of ability. Between them they had run businesses, workshops and job sites for forty years. What they were short of was the half of it that had never been written down, and no amount of competence recovers that. So this is not a cleverer version of the clever person’s system. It is one that does not depend on any particular person being there.
The things a shed actually keeps track of.
Members
Current, prospective and past, with next of kin, and the dates that matter. Somebody enquires, applies and joins without anybody re-typing them.
Fees
Who has paid for the year and who has not. Memberships lapse on the rules the committee agreed, on the date they agreed, without anybody remembering to.
The shed captain roster
Who is responsible for everyone’s safety on the floor, on each session, with the reminders going out on their own and the swaps handled in the open.
Equipment
Every machine, with its photographs, its receipt, its warranty and its service history. The answer to “when did we buy the thicknesser” stops being a guess.
Email that goes out
All current members, or any list somebody builds and saves. From the shed’s own address, properly, so it lands rather than going to junk.
Applications
The forms on your website land here as records, not as PDFs in a folder somebody has to notice.
Built to be handed over, which is a different thing from being easy.
Nobody has a password
Signing in is a link sent to your email. There is nothing to forget, nothing to write on a card in the office drawer, and nothing anybody has to reset for you. It assumes no particular provider either: almost half the members of the shed this was built for use an address a “sign in with Google” button would have shut out.
More than one person can always get in
Access comes from being on the committee, not from having set the thing up. There is no owner and no single account that everything hangs off. When the secretary changes at the AGM, one person adds another and the first steps back, with no handover of credentials and no missing key.
Nothing happens invisibly
Every automatic action and every edit is written on the record it happened to, in a sentence. If a membership lapsed, the record says when and why. A system nobody can explain is a system the next committee turns off.
Your records leave with you
Export everything, any time, on any plan — members, attendance, assets, the lot, as ordinary spreadsheets. A shed’s own records are never held hostage: nothing is ever deleted over a bill, and a paused account comes back exactly as it was.
Nothing, at the moment, and that is written down rather than implied.
This is early. It runs one shed properly and is being handed to a second, and charging for something at that stage would be charging for a promise.
When there is a price it will be a small one, the smallest sheds will stay free, and a shed that plainly cannot pay will be told so in writing rather than quietly carried. Men’s sheds run on raffle money and sausage sizzles; anybody who has forgotten that should not be selling to them.
Who is behind this?
It was built by a member of a Victorian men’s shed, past secretary and past president, after the systems he set up while he was on the committee turned out to be too hard for anybody else to keep running once he wasn’t. It is not a start-up looking for a market.
What happens to our data?
It stays yours, and you can take a copy of all of it whenever you like. Each shed’s records are separated from every other shed’s by the database itself, not only by the software, which matters, because a shed’s records include next of kin and notes that members have given the shed in confidence.
Does everybody have to use it?
No. Most members never sign in and have no reason to. The people who sign in are the handful on the committee who keep the records. Everybody else gets an email when there is something to tell them, and answers it by clicking one thing.
Anything that can be done online can also be done by somebody on the committee entering it for a member who would rather ring up or say so on the day. It is recorded honestly as that, rather than as though they did it themselves.
Can we keep our own website?
Yes, and you should. This replaces the record-keeping behind it, not the shed’s own site. The forms on your website can feed straight into it.
Somebody in a shed has my details and I want them removed.
You do not need an account and you do not need to know which shed. Tell us here and a person will read it.
Coming soon for other sheds
One shed is running on it while the rough edges come off. If yours would like to be among the first asked, say so and you will be.