Tournament Manager (Help Desk)

I'm our account administrator and don't work with TM daily.  But we have to replace our club monitor and I'm now involved in documenting his workflow for his replacement.

Both TM and HS have the same design flaw.  All clubs will enter some form of golfer ID, usually a number, when they add a golfer to their HS roster.  The software  appends this ID to the GolfSoftware club ID, and carries this combination in the database as the field GSID.. There's no way within either TM or HS to use the individual golfer's ID when reporting, because GSID is the only ID field available.

Our club works with our golf course managers in scheduling rounds.  They must have the golfer's ID in order to confirm their eligibility to play on our courses, to debit their accounts for the round, credit their accounts for winnings and sweeps and account for their attendance. TM and HS reports with GSID are useless. In order to meet our requirements, we have to dump TM and HS reports into Excel and strip the GolfSoftware club ID from the ID field.  Doing so doubles our monitor's workload.

Access the golfer's ID is the key to our reporting.  This would be a very easy change to make - just adding that field to the report choices, and it will save us about 10 hours of work a week - every week.  And we pay him for the effort.. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US, very simple to implement, and should not just be filed in the IN basket for IT to look at when it gets around to it.  It's co$ting us time and money.

There are 5 custom fields in Tournament Manager tournament defaults.  Why not use one of those fields for your unique ID# and then select that field to print in your pairing sheet that you send to the golf course?

Yes there are.  And if I use one for an ID field, I am duplicating what's in the file already.  I have an aversion to work-arounds that cause workload - especially for fields that are keys to records.

Not to argue with your approach, but does your club the GSID for identifying a member?  I'm pretty certain that almost all clubs do not.  The Handicap System is the master file for Club Manager software.  It does NOT create the GSID.  So, why does Tournament Manager?  That's not consistent.  And a rhetorical question.

You design complimentary systems such as TM and HS to use the same information in the same way.  Keys to the records in both systems should be the same, and under the covers, TM uses the club member ID to identify records in HS when it's posting scores or downloading handicaps, etc.

My request isn't to re-design Tournament Manager to use the club member's ID  as its key, although that's what should happen.  I want the club member's ID to be ADDED to the TM report selection criteria  so I can use it - much the same as using a custom field with that number but without the workaround that loading that custom field requires..

No, our club does not use the GSID#.  When we first subscribed, we downloaded our membership files to the Handicap System, and it generated the GSID#s, then we copied to TM...so when you say HS does not create the GSID, I don't think that's right....HS does create the GSID# .

I don't like work arounds either.....but faced with 10 hours per week (that seems like a lot to use "find and replace" in Excel to strip the GSID part of the id#) versus a one time workaround, I'd take the one time work around.

Or maybe I don't understand your problem.

OOPS.  HS is designed so that GSID is used if the player signs in via the Internet.  The Player ID is kept separately for use in reporting.  I wish that were true in TM, obviously.

I mis-spoke when I said that it takes 10 hours - sorry.  The heat of the moment.  It does take 1 hour for our monitor to prepare the tee sheet, and I pay him $10 per hour.  And whether we like it or not, I was told that GolfSoftware won't make any changes to their systems in 2023.  Net result is I double my expen$e to use the system ($520 for the monitor and $480 for a year's subscription).  We have a small club, and every dollar gets pinched.  

The use of another field in place of GSID runs into one other problem.  Reports in TM are built in the order that the fields are listed.  So, unless the custom field can appear in front of the name on the Team Pairing Report, you may have to do some reformatting to get fields in a logical order anyway.  We try to feed the data electronically to our Golf Operations department, who then takes it into the accounting and scheduling systems that run our community, and they want it with the member number as the first field.