Organiser guide

You have the organiser code. Sign in at the site's front door and you land on your event list. Inside an event you get a tab nobody else sees: Event admin — entries, packs, sponsors, the desk, results and settings all live there. Scoring itself lives under Record scores, along with the switch that opens it on the morning. Everything below happens under Event admin unless it says otherwise. The order of this guide is the order of a real event.

📅 Months before

1. 🗺️ Set up the course

Organiser → Courses. Import the course from the course database (search the club's name) or type the card in by hand. Either way:

⚠️ Check every par and stroke index against the club's own scorecard. A wrong stroke index doesn't look wrong — it just quietly gives shots on the wrong holes.

2. 🆕 Create the event

Organiser → New event. Name, date, venue, charity, format. (The charity's logo is added afterwards in Event settings — upload the file or paste a link — and then appears in the event header and on the clubhouse screen.) Three settings matter more than the rest:

• ⚖️ Allowances must match whatever the club sets for the competition, or the live board will disagree with the official result at the presentation.
• 🔫 Shotgun or tee times — this one quietly decides how big your event can be. See below.
• 🕘 9 or 18 holes — a 9-hole comp scores only the nine you pick (front or back). Every Course Handicap halves automatically, so keep entering the club's normal 18-hole figure; that nine's stroke indexes are re-ranked 1–9, and ties are split on the last 6, last 3, then the last hole.
• 🧪 Sample data — tick it while you're testing. Nothing can ever be emailed from an event flagged as sample data, so you can experiment freely. Untick it when the real field starts arriving.

🔫 A shotgun start caps you at 18 teams. Every group goes out at once, one to a tee, so a shotgun has room for exactly as many teams as the course has holes. Countback enforces it: the 19th team is refused, whether you add it by hand or accept it from the entry form. Selling more than 18 teams? Choose tee times instead — they have no limit. You can switch in Event settings at any point, but it is a much calmer decision made in January than in May.

⛳ Each team's start hole is picked from the holes still free, so two teams can never be sent to the same tee. Individual events work differently — there a whole group shares a tee, and there is no 18 limit.

3. 🤝 Add the sponsors

Event admin → Sponsors. The sponsors fund the day, and this page is where they get what they paid for.

• 🎯 Pick the tier: headline, team & brand, halfway house, competition, or a hole.
• ⛳ A hole sponsor takes one of the 18. The hole list only offers holes nobody has yet, so a hole cannot be sold twice.
• 🖼️ Upload their logo — PNG, JPG or SVG, up to 512 KB — or paste a link to one already hosted. With a logo set they appear on the course card, beside their hole on the scoring screen, and in the clubhouse TV rotation. Without one, their name carries all of it.
• 💬 The tagline is their line, in their own words, on their hole's card.

Sponsors can be added or changed right up to the day — every surface updates as soon as you save. The results announcement names all of them.

4. 📨 Connect the entry form

Event settings → Entry form → Connect. Copy the webhook address and signing secret into your Tally form (Integrations → Webhooks). Submissions then appear under Entries — nothing becomes a team by itself.

📥 As entries come in

5. 👀 Review each entry

Entries. Open one, check the guess against "What they submitted", correct anything, and press Accept and add the team.

• ✅ Accepting creates the team, its scoring code, and — if email is set up and the event isn't sample data — sends the captain their confirmation email automatically.
• 🗑️ Duplicates and withdrawals: Set aside.
• 🔫 On a shotgun, the 19th acceptance is refused — there is no tee left for them. The entry stays in the queue rather than being lost, so switch the event to tee times and come back to it.
• 🔢 Handicaps: enter the index and Countback converts it for the player's tee — or type the club's own course handicap in the last box. The club's number always wins.

📬 The week before

6. ✉️ Send the team packs

Team packs. Each captain gets their tee time or start hole, the players' playing handicaps to check, their scoring code, and the links.

👀 Preview before sending — the preview is the exact email.

Either press Send N team packs, or arm Automatic sending with a date (it suggests a week before). From then, a daily job sends anything outstanding — which also covers captains you accept late. 🔒 Nothing sends unless you armed it.

7. 🙋 Turn on the registration desk (optional)

Event settings → Registration desk. Generates a desk code and link for whoever staffs the desk. It can check teams in and fix a substitute's handicap — and can't see anything else. See the registration desk guide.

🌅 On the morning

8. 🟢 Open scoring

Record scores → the Scoring switch. Teams cannot record until you open it — codes went out days ago, and this is what stops someone entering nonsense the Tuesday before.

• ✅ If a desk is running, each team must also be checked in before their card unlocks.
• 🗝️ You can always record yourself, open or closed.

9. ⛳ Run the day

• 🙋 The desk checks teams in and fixes substitutions — ⚠️ a substitute's handicap must be right before they tee off; it can't be corrected fairly afterwards.
• 🏆 Everyone watches Leaderboard; put Clubhouse screen on the TV.
• ✏️ You can enter or fix any team's scores from Record scores.

🌇 After the last putt

10. 🔴 Settle, then close

Individual events: playing groups hand cards in and approve each other's. Deal with any queried groups — you can force-close a group that will never finish, or reopen one to fix a genuine error.

When you're satisfied, close scoring.

⚠️ Closing can't reach a phone that's still offline with unsynced holes — so close once everyone's in, not the second the last group holes out.

11. 🏆 Results

• 📄 Results & export — the announcement text (it names every sponsor) and the full workbook (.xlsx).
• 🏁 Mark the event complete (Record scores → Finish the event). The leaderboard changes from a live board to a final result and stops refreshing itself, scoring closes, and the event drops below your upcoming ones. ↩️ Found a wrong score at the bar? Reopen is one click.
• ✉️ Team packs → Send results packs — every captain gets their finish, the final standings and their full card. Or tick "Email every captain their results the morning after" beforehand and it happens by itself next morning — leaving the evening free for settling queries.

🚨 If something goes wrong

• 🔧 Wrong score after sign-off — reopen the group (Record scores → Playing groups), fix it, close again.
• 🔑 A code leaks — every code can be rotated: team codes on Teams & players, the desk code and webhook secret in Event settings. Rotation kills the old code instantly.
• 📭 Email failures — they're named on the packs page, and failed teams stay "unsent" so nothing is silently missed. Sent teams are never re-sent.