Member qualifications

Record DBS, PVG, first aid and coaching credentials with award and expiry dates, see what is about to lapse, and use them to control who can book or coach a session.

Qualifications record the certifications, checks and awards your members hold: safeguarding checks such as DBS Enhanced or PVG, first aid certificates, coaching badges, lifeguard awards, and anything else specific to your sport.

A qualification is a record in its own right, managed at Admin > Membership > Qualifications. It carries an award date, an expiry date and a status, which is what lets ClubPal tell you a coach's check has lapsed instead of waiting for somebody to notice.

Note

Qualifications used to be free text typed onto a member's Edit Profile page, with no dates attached. They are now records with dates, added from the Qualifications card on the member's profile in the Admin area. Members no longer set their own, since a record that carries an expiry date is not something a person should be editing for themselves.

What qualifications are for

Use	Where
Keep an accurate record of what members are qualified to do	The Qualifications card on a member's profile
See what is about to lapse across the whole club	The dashboard at Admin > Membership > Qualifications
Restrict who can book a session	Required Qualifications in Eligibility rules
Restrict who can coach a session	Coach Eligibility on the session, see Coaches

Defining what your club tracks

Create each qualification once, then assign it to as many members as hold it.

Go to Admin > Membership > Qualifications.
Click Add Qualification.
Give it a name. The form suggests the common ones, including DBS Enhanced, DBS Basic, PVG, AccessNI, Garda Vetting, Working With Children Check and SafeSport, alongside first aid certificates and coaching awards.
Set the warning window, the number of days before expiry at which this qualification starts warning you.
Save.

The warning window is set separately for each qualification, because a safeguarding check and a first aid certificate do not need the same amount of notice.

Recording a qualification against a member

Open the member at Admin > Membership > Members and find the Qualifications card on their profile, beside Membership and Payments. Add the qualification, then record its award date and its expiry date.

Both dates are held against the member rather than against the qualification itself, so two coaches holding the same certificate can have different renewal dates.

If a record arrives without an expiry date, usually from an import, it is kept and shown as No expiry recorded rather than being treated as valid.

Qualification states

ClubPal works out where each record stands from its dates. You do not set the state by hand.

State	Meaning
Valid	In date.
Expiring soon	Inside the warning window you set for that qualification.
Expired	Past its expiry date.
Renewing	Expired, with Renewal in progress ticked.
No expiry recorded	No expiry date on the record.

Warning

Renewal in progress is presentation, not permission. Ticking it turns a lapsed certificate amber rather than red so the dashboard stays worth reading, but it does not satisfy an eligibility rule. An expired certificate is expired.

The qualifications dashboard

Admin > Membership > Qualifications opens on everything that is not currently valid, soonest to lapse first, so the thing needing attention is at the top without any filtering.

Filter by qualification to see every holder of one certificate, or by state to see only what has expired.
Export the list to CSV or Excel.

Renaming and archiving

Renaming a qualification updates every member who holds it at once. Nothing needs re-saving, and eligibility rules that reference it keep working.
Archiving takes a qualification out of the pickers so nothing new is assigned to it, while keeping every existing record intact.

Using qualifications to restrict booking

Once qualifications are recorded, you can require them of anyone booking a session.

Open the session in Admin > Sessions.
Click Edit.
Scroll to Eligibility Rules.
Add a Required Qualifications rule.
Select one or more qualifications.
Save the session.

Members must hold at least one of the selected qualifications, still in date, to book that session.

Using qualifications to restrict coaching

A session carries a second, separate set of rules covering who may be added to it as a coach. That check runs wherever a coach is added, including a manual add by an administrator, and it is checked against the date of the session rather than today, so a certificate lapsing before a session three months away is refused now while there is still time to renew it.

See Coaches for how to set that up, and for the Cover page listing sessions whose coaches are not credentialed.