HMRC introduced new rules for Community Amateur Sports Clubs on 1st April 2015.  This article outlines some examples of how you could use WebCollect to help you with the compliance of these new rules.

50% Participating Members

Records of training/courses attended

You can use WebCollect's online booking system to ask members to sign up online for training and courses.  If the activity has no charge (ie is part of the normal activities of the club), then you can set the event up as a free event.  WebCollect's multi-date functionality makes it easy to set up e.g. weekly training sessions.  

Volunteering

Participation includes volunteering to help with the running of the organisation/activities.  You can use the membership form to collect information from members as to how they could help.  This is particularly useful for clubs with social members/parents of junior members.

Recording participation

For clubs who are open all year round, to be a participating member, a member needs to have participated at least 12 times during the year.  You could include in your membership form a section for the members to record 12 occurrences that they participated at the club.  However, getting people to log in online regularly to fill this out may be quite hard, and you are probably better off having a book onsite for people to log their attendance.

Having said that, if we receive a lot of requests from clubs in relation to the recording of attendance, we would consider adding a dedicated feature for this.

Supporters Club

HMRC has suggested that some clubs may consider setting up a separate supporters club, separately constituted and affiliated with the CASC.  As it would be a separate entity, this would need to be set up as a separate organisation in WebCollect.

Supporters Groups

Another alternative is to set up a supporters group within the club itself.  The members would be non-members of the club, supporting the club by voluntary donations.  This can be achieved in WebCollect by:

• having the supporters set up with WebCollect accounts associated with your organisation. WebCollect already accommodates having "members" associated with the organisation, who are not current paid members of the organisation. 
• creating subscription products that are donations.  If we see a significant increase in the number of organisations collecting donations, we will look to introduce a donation feature where the donor can free-form enter amount that they want to donate.  
• use accounting groups to record the club's income from donations separately to subscription income.

The Income Condition

The CASC rules place an upper limit on the amount of trading income that a CASC can have in any year.  You can use WebCollect's accounting groups to record different types of income generated by the organisation.  The payment summary report will then provide you with a breakdown of income by accounting group, assisting with the reporting on this requirement.