Continuity
The club owns the club.
A golf club outlives its software. Your members, your bookings, your competition history and your ledger should never be something a supplier holds on your behalf — least of all at renewal time. Here is exactly what that means at GolfTap, including the parts that are awkward to admit.
You have heard the promise before
Most clubs we speak to are not nervous about features. They are nervous about the last migration: the reports that could not be extracted, the member history that arrived as a PDF, the quote that went up because there was nowhere else to go.
“You own your data” is on every vendor's website. It usually means a spreadsheet of names and email addresses. It rarely means the ledger, the attachments, the booking references or the twelve years of competition results.
So rather than repeat the promise, this page describes the mechanism.
What it means in practice
Three things, and they are testable
Your data leaves whole
Not a contact list. Every table your club touches — bookings, memberships, invoices, ledger entries, competitions, events, uploaded files — in plain JSON that opens in any text editor.
Your backups are yours
On a club-dedicated installation, a full database dump is written nightly to storage the club controls, and kept for thirty days. You do not have to ask us for it. It is already there.
It runs without us
A published, versioned build of GolfTap, a single configuration file and your database dump. Someone competent brings your club back up with one command, with no help from us and no code to compile.
Portability
An export you could actually use
Ask and we produce a complete export of your club: one folder, one file per table, one JSON object per line. A manifest lists every table and its row count so you can check nothing was quietly left behind.
Uploaded files come too — club logos, hero images, product photos, documents, member avatars — as real files, not references to a bucket you cannot reach.
Record identifiers are preserved exactly. Your invoice numbers, booking references and QR codes still mean what they meant, so the links in every email you have ever sent keep pointing at the right thing.
What the folder holds
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manifest.json
Every table, in load order, with its row count and integrity checks.
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tables/
Bookings, tee times, members, memberships, renewals, invoices, ledger entries, orders, competitions, events — one readable line per row.
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blobs/
The file bodies themselves, exactly as uploaded.
The same tool moves a club into a dedicated installation and back out again. It is not a one-way exit hatch we built to look good on a website — it is how we move clubs, so it stays working.
The uncomfortable question
What if GolfTap stops existing?
It is a fair thing to ask any supplier, and a particularly fair thing to ask a young one. The answer is a handover package with three parts, and deliberately not a pile of source code.
A published, versioned build
Nobody has to compile anything. The application is published as a finished, versioned image.
One configuration file
The whole installation described in a single file: the app, its database, its storage. Four settings to fill in.
Your database, as of last night
The nightly dump already sitting in the club's own storage, plus the one secret value needed to read it back.
Why a build and not the source code
Because source code is a promise that quietly depends on someone being able to build it. Building is where every sharp edge lives — matching language versions, compiling assets, four separate database connections, secrets that behave differently at build time. A club left holding a source archive is a club holding a project, not a system.
A finished build has none of that. It starts with one command, creates its own databases on first boot, and serves your club behind whatever web server the club's IT provider already knows how to run.
Rehearsed, not assumed
A backup nobody has restored is not a backup
So we restore ours on a schedule. A drill takes the most recent stored backup, rebuilds the club into a scratch database, then counts every single table in both copies and fails loudly if even one number differs.
Comparing 128 tables…
128 tables, 66 with rows, 11,026 rows in total.
PASS — the restored database matches the live one, table for table.
The most recent drill restored a club's full working database — members, bookings, invoices, ledger entries and recorded renewals — and every table matched. We then read the club, its members and an individual booking with its players and totals back out of the restored copy, because a row count on its own only proves the rows arrived.
The honest part
What stops working without us
A continuity package keeps a club operating. It does not reproduce everything GolfTap does for you as a live supplier, and no arrangement from any vendor could. Rather than leave you to discover the gaps at the worst possible moment, here they are.
Card payments stop
This is the big one and it deserves a straight answer. Card payments run through GolfTap's payment platform, with your club's own account connected to it. An installation with no relationship to GolfTap cannot use that route. Cash, bank transfer, and card-machine takings recorded at the till all still work, invoices can still be raised and marked paid, and the tee sheet does not care — but taking cards online again means whoever holds the handover connecting the club's own payment account directly. That is a day of work for a competent developer, not a setting.
Email needs re-connecting
Confirmations, renewal notices and password resets stop until a mail provider is configured. One setting, then they resume.
Cross-club features are gone
Anything that exists between clubs — the visitor marketplace, universal gift cards, the public club directory — only makes sense on a shared platform. They are not part of a single-club installation by design.
Accounting integrations need re-registering
The Xero and QuickBooks connections are registered to GolfTap. An independent club registers its own, which is free and takes an afternoon. Access-control credentials are simply re-entered in Settings.
Everything else — the tee sheet, bookings, members and memberships, renewals, competitions, events, facilities, the public booking portal, the member area, your branding, the till, invoices, the finance ledger, VAT and reporting — carries on.
For clubs that need more separation
Your own installation, still run by us
Most clubs are well served by our shared platform: it is the same software, kept up to date for everyone at once, at the lowest cost. Some clubs — usually larger ones, or those with a board that has been burned before — want their club's data on infrastructure of its own.
We can do that: the same GolfTap, deployed for your club alone with its own database, its own backups going to your own storage, and its own address. We still operate and upgrade it, so nothing lands on your manager's desk. There is one codebase and one release for every club, and there always will be — a club-specific fork is how software gets abandoned.
Whether that is right for your club depends on its size, its board and what it is moving from. It is a conversation, not a checkbox.
Talk to us
Bring your hardest question
If your committee has a concern about lock-in, continuity or where the club's data physically sits, put it to us directly. We would rather answer it now than have it surface in year three.
- We'll show you a real export, not a screenshot of one
- Happy to talk your board or IT provider through the detail
- 20 minutes, no obligation, no pressure