I was working then in the membership department of one of the known Golf and Country Clubs in the Philippines. This department is in charge of keeping confidential records of members and handling of documentations pertaining to buying and transferring of shares.
Every shareholder has his individual folder containing personal information and confidential documents that are kept in a metal filing cabinet. We are talking here of roughly a thousand golf shareholders whose membership may fall into any of the three categories such as Individual Member, as the name suggests an Individual is the sole shareholder, Corporate Member wherein the company is the owner of share and can only assign one of its signatories to avail of the privileges that goes with the membership, and lastly, Associate Member this type of membership is acquired not by purchasing a share rather by buying a condominium unit located inside the Golf and Country Club.
Though, the filing system are organized according to categories and are alphabetically arranged in separate metal filing cabinets the task is burdensome take for example members alone with surnames that starts with letter A’s could run to a hundred what about those from letters B’s to Z’s?
Let me give you a sample of how the old system goes;
Individual Members
- A –
Alberto, Gloria (written on the flap of a folder)
001-0505 ( third digit stands for the first letter in the alphabeth, the last four are
the month and year the member bought his/her share)
Alcantara, Robert
001-1203
So on and so forth
- B -
Buencamino, Allan
002-1003
So on and so forth
Corporate Members
- A -
Altamirano, Julius - Smart Communications, Inc.
001-0604
- B -
Bonifacio, Geraldine – Allied Metals Corporation
002-0900
Associate Members
Filing system works exactly the same as individual members
What I did was to consolidate the necessary information (i.e. name, address, birthday, tel/fax nos. email, stock certificate no. contact person) in a database. I run an excel file and started encoding the above data on sheet 1 which I renamed Individual Members, Sheet 2, Corporate Members and Sheet 3, Associate Members. I maintained the old system of arranging the list alphabetically on a per category basis
How does this plan unburden me?
Membership department also functions as Credit and Collection, meaning we follow up members' accounts on a daily basis we send out collection letter and give them a call to remind them of their outstanding balance. The system was so jurassic unwise as it may sound but one has to literaly have to pull out Membership Information folders one by one just to get contact details or check out the birthdates of members since the company regularly send out newsletter to all Golf and Country Club members.
In the initial stage of implementing the plan the process was laborious but what is one time pain than having to endure and tolerate the old system. By the time all informations were transferred into the database I heaved a sigh of relief. I had the excel file printed out and bound. I distributed copies with important reminder to officemates and collectors to limit the use of the record for internal purposes alone.
In the old system whenever the Corporate Office need the above information they would send over people to dig through files and wait for days to complete the task. Gone are the days just click the “attach file” the whole database can be viewed in a minute or two.
