Give your clubs a budget to draw on
Set aside money for club events — so much an event, so many a month, first come first served — and let clubs claim it themselves without asking you each time.
Start from the money you already have
Club funding hangs off one of your budgets, because that budget is already the two things a funding program needs: the pot (its amount) and the cycle (its dates). Open the budget you want to fund clubs from and set it up there. When the year turns over you create next year's budget and open funding on that one, which is also how you change the terms between years without rewriting what happened last year.
No budget yet? Create one first — Budgets → New budget. The funding option appears on its page.
Decide the offer
Two numbers do the work: how much a club gets per event, and how many events a month it can fund. "$50 an event, one event a month" is a good starting point and reads clearly to a club organizer. Unused months don't carry over — a club that skips March can't spend double in April — which keeps the arithmetic honest and stops one club banking a large pot.
The math that decides how many clubs fit: per-event amount × events a month × months left in the budget. At $50 a month with six months to run, each club commits $300.
Clubs claim it themselves — first come, first served
You don't hand this out. Every affiliated club sees the offer on its own Budgets page and takes a place when it wants one; petitions can reserve a place too, so a proposal can honestly tell the people it's asking to sign that the club will start with money behind it. Enrollment closes on its own when the pool is committed. A neighbor can still start a club after that — there just isn't funding for it until you open the next budget.
A club joining in July commits less than one joining in January, because there are fewer months left. That's deliberate: more clubs fit as the year runs down.
Committed is not the same as spent
The card shows both, side by side, and the difference matters. Committed is what you've promised clubs whether or not they've spent it — that's the number that decides whether another club can join. Spent is what has actually left through approved reimbursements. Early in a cycle you'll see a large committed figure against almost nothing spent; that's correct, not a bug. Offering the committed money to someone else would be promising it twice.
Money a club claims but doesn't fully spend stays committed for that month. So a pool can finish the year with some unspent — watch the gap between the two numbers if that matters to you.
Nothing is paid out from here
A claim is a promise, not a payment. The club spends its own money, submits receipts through the same reimbursement portal you already run, and you approve as usual — the request just arrives marked as already funded, so the decision is about the receipts rather than about whether to fund it at all. A request for more than the claim covers still approves fine; the excess simply shows as overspend on that event.
This is why the money path doesn't change. No new account, no transfers, and the receipt trail is exactly what it was before.
Slots come back when they're not used
A club that claims a place and never uses it would otherwise freeze the pool for the whole year. So a club with no claims for a few months is emailed a warning, and a month later its remaining allowance returns to the pool for someone else. Claiming anything at all resets the clock. You can also end a club's place yourself from the budget page — and a club that knows it won't need the money can give the slot back.
Whatever a club already claimed always stays with it. Ending a place only returns the part it hadn't used.
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