Getting started: your first week

Start here. This is the order to do things in, what each step is for, and the article that covers it in depth. Nothing you do before the last step reaches a single member, so work through it without holding your breath.

Signing in puts you where you belong: staff land on the admin console, members land on the member portal. If you also want to see what your members see, the console's sidebar has a Member portal link, and the portal has an Admin console button to come back.

Your own account was created for you when your club was set up, which is why nothing was ever emailed to you about it: you sign in with the address we were given, get a sign-in link by email (there is no password), and your first sign-in is what proves the address is yours. Everyone else on your board you add yourself, under Roles in step 1.

The console tracks this list for you. Admin › Setup checklist (also a card at the top of your dashboard) shows the same steps with their current state read straight from your club's records: a tier with no price, a household count, a connected bank account. Nothing on it is a box anyone ticks, so it is never out of date, and it can go backwards: undo a step and it says so again. While anything is outstanding the dashboard card stays; once you have finished, it becomes a single line you can dismiss.

Modules are deliberately not on that list. Your club is provisioned with a set of them already switched on, and nothing we can read tells a club that reviewed them apart from one that never looked. So a checklist line for it could never go green for a club whose modules were right to begin with. Turn off the ones you do not run in Club → Programs, whenever you like.

Worth knowing up front: your club is in quiet mode until you press Go live. Every member-facing email and text is logged as blocked instead of being delivered. You can import your whole roster, generate a season's invoices and run a full rehearsal, and no member hears a thing. See Go-live and quiet mode.

Admin › Club (sections gated by role; start with Club info as super admin).

• Club info: legal name, EIN, address, and the club's timezone. The timezone drives every "today" in the product, so set it before anything with a deadline.

• Programs: turn off the parts you do not run. Camp, lap swim, events, shop, facility rentals, guest log, documents, campaigns, lessons. Turning one off hides it everywhere; it never deletes anything. Agreements (waivers) and a link to All registrations & prices sit on this section’s Related card; day-to-day sign-up windows open from each program’s Registration & pricing tab.

• Membership / Payments / Programs: dues deadline, late fee, bond, initiation, refund windows, lap limits, card-surcharge policy, and how you refer to residents. Every article in this corpus says "configured in Settings" instead of a number because this is where the number lives.

• Membership tiers, your actual tier names (prices per season live on Renewals).

• Staff & tools → Roles, who can do what: super admin, treasurer, manager (plus instructor, which grants only an instructor's own lesson pages). Grant the narrowest role that works; you can widen it later.

→ Club settings

Stripe capability badges use readable labels such as Active and Pending. Check the relevant payment method's status; completing account setup alone does not mean that method is ready to charge.

Admin › Club → Payments (or Stripe Connect; treasurer or super admin).

Do this early. Stripe's identity and bank checks can take a day or two, and you do not want to discover that during renewal week. Finishing Stripe's form is not the same as being able to charge — watch the per-capability status (card, ACH debit, bank transfer) until the page says Ready to charge.

If status says Paying through shared account, members can already pay online today, but payouts are not yet going to the club's own bank. Use Create connected account on that same page to finish the cutover.

→ Connecting your club's Stripe account

Club → Advanced → Member import (super admin only), or add households by hand. You can also open it with Search (⌘K / Ctrl K).

Import is money-safe: it creates people and households, never charges anything. Run it, read the batch report, fix what it quarantined, run it again: it is designed to be re-run. Rows it thinks are duplicates go to a review queue rather than being merged.

Two things to expect afterwards:

• Imported addresses receive nothing until someone at that address proves it. That is a second gate on top of quiet mode, and going live does not lift it. See Email confirmation.

• Possible duplicates wait for you on the admin home dashboard under Household reviews (also searchable with ⌘K).

→ CSV member import · Households and portal login · Reviewing possible duplicate households

Still in quiet mode, run the season the way you will actually run it: open a renewal season, look at the invoices it creates, open a household and read its statement, send yourself a test campaign and read what got logged as blocked. Every blocked message is recorded with what it would have said, on the household's timeline and in campaign and workflow run detail. That is what rehearsing in quiet mode is for.

Check the things that surprise people:

• The dues deadline and late fee you set in step 1, on a real invoice.

• What a member sees in the portal (log in as yourself as a member).

• Whether your workflows fire when you expect.

→ Renewals and dues · Campaigns and segments · Workflows · Statements

Admin › Club → Club info, the go-live control (also linked from Setup / Home while provisioning).

This turns on real delivery to real members and cannot be undone from the console. Before you press it: Stripe says Ready to charge, the roster looks right, the tier prices are right, and you have read at least one rendered message you are about to start sending.

→ Go-live and quiet mode

• "How is the club doing this year?": the snapshot strip at the top of Reports. If something looks technically broken, see Swim Ops support for who to contact.

• A member says they got nothing, Member isn't getting emails or texts.

• A member can't sign in, Member can't sign in.

• Anything about a number. It is a setting; look in Settings.