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Renting out your clubhouse: usage fee, deposit, cleaning charge, and how to actually get paid
Dispoly Team
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The event goes well. A member booked the clubhouse for their father's 60th birthday, 40 guests, no problems. Three weeks later the treasurer is going through the receipts and asks the question nobody in a volunteer organisation enjoys asking: "So did the 80 euros for that ever actually turn up?"
Nobody knows. The key was handed over on Friday evening, money never came up, and afterwards nobody dared to ask.
Renting out club rooms rarely falls apart over whether you are allowed to charge. It falls apart because collecting the money is socially awkward when everyone knows each other. Nobody wants to look petty, and the club ends up paying the heating bill.
A rental is rarely a single number. Splitting it into four items works well.
The usage fee is the core, tiered by member and non-member. Tiering is fair and doubles as an argument for joining. Many clubs charge members considerably less, or nothing at all for small occasions.
The cleaning charge heads off most of the friction. Either the space comes back clean or it costs. That is more honest than the usual arrangement, where the groundskeeper mops the floor in silence on Sunday morning and quietly resents it.
The deposit covers damage and the return of the key. What matters is less the amount than the clarity: when is it paid back, who decides on deductions, and by when does the key have to be back.
Running costs are the ones almost everyone forgets. A party in January with the heating on costs you several times what the same party costs in June. Either build that into the price or tier it by season.
The most common mistake is to copy what the club down the road charges. Work up from your real costs instead.
Take the annual running costs of the clubhouse: heating, electricity, water, insurance, cleaning, maintenance, and a share of the depreciation on the furnishings. Divide that by the number of days you can realistically rent out in a year. That is not 365, it is closer to the weekends that are not already taken by club activity. The result is your floor. Below it, the club loses money on every rental.
Whatever you charge above that is a decision rather than a calculation, and it belongs to the members' meeting, not the committee alone. Write the result into a set of usage rules and publish them. Once the prices are public and the same for everyone, nobody has to negotiate and most of the arguments settle themselves.
Cash at key handover. Works as long as everyone remembers. There is no receipt, no record of who paid how much, and the money sits in somebody's jacket pocket until the next committee meeting. For the treasurer this is the worst option.
Invoice and bank transfer. Properly documented, but somebody has to write the invoice and somebody has to follow up when nothing arrives after four weeks. Nobody enjoys sending reminders to fellow members, which is exactly why the money sits there.
Payment at booking. Whoever books, pays, in the same step, before the date is even confirmed. There is then nothing left to track: no follow-up, no awkward conversation, and the treasurer can see at any time what has come in.
Since the August release you can attach prices to your resources and collect the money at booking.
You set prices per resource, as a fixed price, per hour, or per day. The price appears on the booking page, and the running total updates live while somebody picks their time slot. Nobody books without knowing what it costs.
How you collect is set per booking page. With payment on site or by invoice, the guest sees the price and pays as before, in cash at handover or by transfer. No setup is required and it costs you nothing. The difference from today: the amount is fixed in the booking, and you tick cash payments off as received with one click.
With card payment, the guest pays while booking. The money goes straight to your club's account, Dispoly never holds it, and your club's name appears on your guests' card statements rather than ours. For that you need a Stripe account once. The setup walks you through it in three steps and tells you what is still missing.
Clubhouse bookings usually need committee approval first. For bookings that require approval you can defer the payment: the guest only gets the payment link after you approve. That way nobody pays for a date you end up turning down.
For the treasurer there is a Revenue section with amounts paid, outstanding items, and refunds, plus monthly figures, filters, and export to CSV or Excel. The rental lands in the club's books without anyone retyping it.
If a booking paid online is cancelled or rejected, Dispoly initiates a full refund of the card payment. We refund our share too; your organization bears Stripe's original processing fee. Guests can cancel a paid booking themselves if you allow it on the booking page. The post on cancelling a booking without calling explains how to set the deadline and refunds.
Payment on site and by invoice is free. On card payments we keep 4% per transaction, or 1.5% from the Business plan, plus Stripe's own fees. There is no base fee and no minimum. If you rent the place out three times a year, that is all you pay for. The full numbers are on the pricing page.
Prices are only half the job. Getting the occupancy itself under control is covered in organizing clubhouse bookings, and why double bookings can be ruled out technically is in 5 rules for shared resources. If you collect guest data, which is unavoidable when renting to outsiders, it is worth reading GDPR and booking data first.
You can try Dispoly free for 30 days without payment details. Setting up prices and switching the booking page on takes less than half an hour, and at the next 60th birthday nobody has to work out whether the 80 euros arrived. More on the page for clubs.