It is 9:30 pm, the committee meeting has just ended. The treasurer opens the club software to “tidy up”: three members have stopped since January, a fourth has moved away. He looks for the Delete button.
It is the most natural reflex in the world. It is also the surest way to corrupt the club’s history, and sometimes to put yourself on the wrong side of the GDPR.
Three actions hide behind “removing someone”: archive, delete and erase. They do not do the same thing, and only one fits the vast majority of cases.
The problem with “Delete”
A member who spent two seasons at the club is everywhere: in the attendance sheets of seventy sessions, in three match sheets, in the coach’s ratings, in two paid membership fees.
Deleting them removes them from all of it. The session of 12 November showed eleven present; it will show ten. The tournament match sheet no longer says who played. The team’s attendance summary, the one you show at the general assembly, drops a notch for no reason.
A spreadsheet does not protect you from this: a deleted row is a lost row. Serious club software does. In Paak, deleting a member who is part of the history is refused, with the explanation (how many sessions, memberships, match sheets) and the right action offered instead.
Deletion keeps a single legitimate use: a record created by mistake, an import duplicate, a person who never had a session, a membership or a match. There, yes, delete.
Archive: the normal action when someone leaves
Archiving tells the software: “this person is no longer a member”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Concretely, an archived member:
- disappears from the members list, team selections, the roll call, email sends, fee reminders and the headcount your plan counts;
- stays in past sessions, match sheets, ratings and payments;
- comes back in one click if they return next season: their past memberships and teams are still there.
It is exactly what a well-run club does with its paper files: the binder of current members on one side, the archives on the other. Nobody tears up last year’s attendance sheets because Lucas changed clubs.
In Paak this is done from the member’s page (Actions → Archive) or for several people at once from the list. A running direct debit for their fees is stopped along the way: someone who left must not keep being charged. Archived members stay readable with a filter, departure date included.
Erase: the GDPR request, and what it really means
The right to erasure (Article 17 of the GDPR) exists, and a member or a parent can exercise it. But “erase” does not mean “make attendance sheets disappear”.
The GDPR protects the identification of a person. A “present” line in a 2025 session with no name, no email, no date of birth no longer identifies anyone. It is no longer personal data. The right answer to an erasure request is therefore anonymisation: the identity and contact details are removed, and the anonymous lines the club needs for accurate statistics and history are kept.
That is how Paak handles an erasure request, and it is also what happens automatically for former members, two years after their last membership ended. Archiving a member also starts that clock without you thinking about it.
Two special cases, for completeness:
- Payments are kept for the legal period, as accounting records, without identity.
- Health notes written by a coach (injury, observation) are removed immediately on request, without waiting for that period.
The rule in one sentence
A member who leaves is archived. An empty record is deleted. A GDPR request is anonymised.
When in doubt, archive: it is the only one of the three that undoes in one click.
What it changes for your club
- Your lists only speak of current members: convocations reach the right people, the roll call no longer shows those who left.
- Your attendance statistics and general-assembly reports stay right from one season to the next.
- Your GDPR register is easy to keep: you know who is a member, who is archived, and you know anonymisation comes by itself.
- You never lose a member who comes back. And they often do.
Paak handles this cycle for you, on every plan, including the free one up to 100 members. The details of the three actions are in the help center: A member leaves the club.
Try Paak for free, with your real members: create your account in 2 minutes.