Almost every shul runs its membership on a spreadsheet, and almost every shul knows the spreadsheet is wrong. Not catastrophically, just steadily. A family moved two years ago. A member died and the record is still active because nobody wanted to be the one to change it. Three standing orders are still coming in at the 2019 rate. Someone's son has his own household now but is still counted under his father.
None of this is negligence. It is what happens when the membership list, the bank statement and the person's actual circumstances are three separate things that only meet when somebody sits down and makes them meet.
The three problems, named
1. The list and the money are separate
Membership lives in a spreadsheet. Payment lives in the bank statement as standing orders with references like “COHEN SUB” and “M COHEN” and, memorably, “SHUL”. Reconciling one to the other is manual, so it happens rarely, so arrears are discovered late and awkwardly.
2. Standing orders never change
A standing order is instructed by the member, not by the shul. When subscription rates go up, the shul writes to everyone and asks them to amend it. Some do. The ones who do not are now paying last year's rate indefinitely, and the only way to find out is to check every line by hand.
This is the single largest quiet revenue leak in UK shul finance. A rate rise that 30% of members never action is a rate rise you largely did not have.
3. Chasing is personal, so it does not happen
Arrears chasing at a shul is not a credit control function. It is one member asking another member, someone they daven next to, for money. So it gets deferred, and deferred, and eventually written off or absorbed into an awkward conversation nobody wanted.
What a working process looks like
Set tiers that describe reality
Most shuls need fewer tiers than they have and more flexibility within them. A workable structure is usually:
- A full household rate.
- A single-member rate.
- A reduced rate for young members or students, with an age at which it ends automatically.
- A senior or pensioner rate.
- A discretionary rate, handled privately by the treasurer or rabbi, that looks identical to every other rate from the outside.
That last one matters more than any other line in this guide. Communities lose members over money, quietly and permanently, when the only options are pay the full rate or have a conversation. A discretionary rate that is administratively invisible removes the shame from the transaction.
Add whatever separate contributions your shul runs, such as burial society or building fund, as their own lines rather than folding them into the headline rate, so a member can see what they are paying for and so the accounts can too.
Collect by card and Direct Debit, not standing order
The difference is who controls the instruction. With a standing order, the member does, so a rate change requires every member to act. With a Direct Debit or a card subscription, the shul does, within the mandate the member has given, so a rate change is applied once and takes effect for everyone.
That single change removes the rate-rise leak, removes most of the reconciliation work (payments arrive already attached to a member record), and means arrears are a system state rather than a discovery.
Migrating is the awkward part, and it is worth being honest about it: you are asking the community to re-authorise something that currently works. Do it once, alongside a rate review so there is a reason for the letter, and expect it to take a season rather than a week. Do not cancel anyone's standing order for them. Let the new mandate supersede it and watch for the overlap.
Make the reminders systematic and gentle
The point of automating reminders is not efficiency. It is that an automated reminder is nobody in particular asking, which makes it possible to send at all.
A schedule that works in practice:
- A notice before the payment is taken, so nothing is a surprise.
- A receipt when it succeeds.
- A short, warm note if it fails. Payments fail because cards expire, not because people are avoiding you, and the first message should assume exactly that.
- A slower cadence after that, ending in a human conversation rather than a fifth email.
And do not let any of it land on Shabbat or Yom Tov. This is a small detail that a system which understands the Jewish calendar handles for you, and one that generic software will get wrong every single time.
Keep the list accurate by making it useful
A membership list is accurate when people have a reason to interact with it. If members can see their own record, meaning their payment history, family details, yahrzeits and event bookings, they will correct it themselves, which is the only maintenance strategy that scales past a hundred households.
Alongside that, three habits keep the list honest: record households rather than individuals so family relationships are structural, review lapsed members annually rather than never, and give yourself a category for people who are part of the community but not members, such as regular attendees, donors and alumni, so they stop being filed as members-with-a-note.
Moving off the spreadsheet without a painful migration
- Export what you have, as it is. Do not clean it first. Clean data is the output of this process, not its entry requirement.
- Import it and map your columns. Anything worth keeping should map to a real field, including spouses, family links and yahrzeits, which are usually the most valuable columns in the sheet and the ones most often abandoned in a migration.
- Reconcile against one recent bank statement. One month, not a year. Every mismatch you find is a member record that was wrong, and you will find more than you expect.
- Set the tiers and the billing dates. This is the committee decision, and it is the actual long pole, not the software.
- Move the payments in one wave. With a rate review as the reason, and a deadline.
- Open it to members. Let them see and correct their own records, and the list starts maintaining itself.
While you are doing this, capture a Gift Aid declaration from every member in the same motion. It is the cheapest moment you will ever have to collect them, and it is worth 25% on everything eligible from then on. See the Gift Aid guide for what the declaration needs to say.
What good looks like a year later
The treasurer knows the arrears figure without preparing it. A rate change is one decision applied once. New members join without anyone retyping their details. The person who used to hold it all in their head can go on holiday. And the membership list is accurate, not because somebody heroically maintains it, but because it is the same object the shul actually uses.
Kehilla does this part: membership, subscriptions, reminders and Gift Aid in one system, with a 45-day trial long enough to run a real billing cycle before you decide.