Court Hire: Split It Each Session or Once a Month?
#how-to#group
Dividing court or pitch hire by who turned up that day means the people who came on a quiet night pay the most. A worked example of pooling a month and dividing by total attendances, plus the cost carried by whoever books, and how to price guests.
Saturday badminton, weeknight five-a-side, tennis twice a month. In an adult club the faces change every session.
Court hire doesn’t. It attaches to the booked slot regardless of how many people walk in. Because those two things are out of step, splitting on the night means whoever turns up when it’s quiet pays the most.
🏸 Different people every week, the same person paying
The first thing that happens is that fronting the money becomes permanent. Whoever books pays the venue up front and collects on the night. Whatever doesn’t get collected stays with them.
The amounts are small enough that nobody notices on the night. They also repeat weekly. Six months in, the person who books is quietly carrying a meaningful shortfall, and is the only person who knows it.
The second thing that happens is that the unit price swings with the turnout.
🧮 Splitting on the night swings the price by two and a half times
Take a $40 court divided among whoever came.
| Turnout | Each |
|---|---|
| 4 | $10.00 |
| 6 | $6.67 |
| 10 | $4.00 |
Rain, a bank holiday, four people show up, and each of them pays $10 — two and a half times what they’d have paid on a full night. Same court, same two hours, price set by attendance. Somebody is always going to find that unfair.
📅 Pool the month and the price flattens
The fix is to total the month, then divide by the number of attendances.
Eight sessions at $40 is $320 for the month. Suppose attendance across all eight came to 64.
$320 ÷ 64 = $5 per session attended.
Someone who came 12 times pays $60, someone who came 6 pays $30, someone who came twice pays $10. It always adds back up to $320. Turning up on a quiet night costs no more, and the people who play most pay most.
It also cuts down the transfers. Instead of collecting cash at every session, one payment lands at month end. It’s the logic of minimising the number of settlements: fewer transfers, fewer that slip through.
💳 Let the record carry the booking fee
Pooling monthly does mean the booker is out of pocket for longer, which is exactly why the record has to sit where everyone can see it.
Create a project in Evere, enter each session’s hire, and pick only the people who played as participants on that expense. At month end the per-person figures are already there. No one has to sit down with a calculator.
Not relying on anyone’s memory of amounts pays off most for whoever is fronting the money, for the reasons set out in why a settled record matters.
🙋 Price guests separately from members
Someone brings a friend and the arithmetic wobbles. Count the guest as an attendance and the member who brought them pays nothing extra. Don’t count them and the member covers the guest.
Either is fine; not deciding means renegotiating it at every session. In practice the easiest version is a flat guest rate slightly above the member rate, with the difference going to club funds. If you also collect annual dues or a kit fund, club dues covers how to keep those separate.
❓ Common questions
Q. How do we count someone who arrives late or leaves early? As one attendance. Start apportioning by the minute and the recording costs more than the money involved.
Q. What about the hire when someone drops out at the last minute? The slot is already booked, so the cost doesn’t disappear. Who absorbs it is covered in who pays when someone cancels.
Q. Monthly pooling makes it hard to collect from people who stop coming. True, and the bigger the balance the harder it gets. For a group with a lot of churn, settle fortnightly rather than monthly.
Q. What about shuttles and balls? Splitting them among whoever played that day gets fiddly. Buy them in bulk, add them to the month’s total, and divide by the same attendance count.