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FormSide

THE PRODUCT

Sports camp booking software for everything after the money lands.

FormSide is holiday camp booking software for UK sports clubs and academies. It takes the booking and the payment, then carries on through the register, the medical notes, the instalments, the messages from parents and the request to delete a child’s record two years later. This page walks through all of it.

BOOKING

A place is held the moment a family starts typing.

Open the form and a place is put aside for five minutes, extended if the family comes back to it, and released if they walk away. Two families can never both land the last place: the availability check, the hold and the booking happen in one database transaction.

One checkout covers the whole family. Each child becomes their own booking with their own admission pass, grouped under a single family reference and one total. Families can book the full programme or pick individual days — every published day carries its own places, so a full Wednesday stops selling while Monday and Tuesday carry on.

Sibling and early-bird discounts, optional extras like lunch or kit, and your own form fields all live on the same page. When a camp is full, the waitlist keeps its order and can offer a freed place to the next family automatically, behind a single-use link that expires if they don’t take it.

  • Five-minute place hold while the form is filled in
  • Several children in one checkout, one family reference
  • Day-by-day booking with per-day capacity
  • Discounts, extras and a waitlist that makes its own offers
Read more about bookings and programmes

WEEKLY PROGRAMMES

Eight Tuesdays, one booking. Not just camps.

A training block is sold the same way as a camp: pick the weekday, the session time, how many weeks it runs and any half-term to skip, and FormSide works out the dates. Families book the whole block in one go and see every session date on their confirmation and on the admission pass.

Because a programme reuses the camp model rather than a parallel one, everything else keeps working — capacity, payments, instalments, the waitlist, the register and the review request an hour after the last session.

Skip a week and the block runs a week longer so the family still gets the sessions they paid for. The pass lists the dates a programme actually meets, taken from the booking’s own snapshot, so a later change to the pattern never rewrites what someone already bought.

  • Weekday, time and session count; dates derived, never typed
  • Holiday weeks skipped, the block extended to match
  • Every session date on the pass and confirmation
  • Same capacity, payment, waitlist and review tooling
Read more about weekly programmes

PAYMENTS

Card, bank transfer, cash or instalments. One ledger.

Every booking gets an immutable, human-readable payment reference, the exact amount and a deadline. Families who pay by card go through Stripe; families who pay by transfer get your bank details and a reference that matches itself when the money arrives. Cash handed over at the desk is recorded the same way.

Instalment plans split the balance into dated payments. The deposit is taken on the day; later instalments are charged to the saved card automatically when they fall due, and a failed charge is retried rather than quietly cancelling the place.

Payment events are append-only, so a refund, a partial refund or a dispute never rewrites history. Reminders go out before a hold expires, late payments land in an exception queue rather than overselling the camp, and the accounts still balance afterwards.

  • Unique bank reference per booking, matched automatically
  • Instalments charged off-session on their due date
  • Cash and transfers recorded alongside card payments
  • Refunds and disputes recorded as events, never edits
Read more about payments

REGISTRATION DESK

The register that knows who collected whom.

Every child has a pass that is unique to their booking. Scan it on a phone at the door and they are checked in, with the time and the name of the staff member who did it. Sign-out works the same way, and records who collected them.

Medical notes, allergies and emergency contacts surface as the child arrives — flagged on the register, not buried in a spreadsheet tab. Coaches see the safety roster they need for their camp and nothing else: no bank details, no payment history, no other camps.

A balance paid in cash at the desk still counts. The register is live across every device, prints cleanly, and leaves a custody trail you can stand behind if a parent ever asks.

Split the attendees into coach groups — drawn up by hand, or dealt out evenly by age or surname — each with a coach and a colour so the desk can tell them apart at a glance. A coach named on a group sees only their own group on the roster and the register.

When something happens — an injury, a child feeling ill, a safeguarding concern, behaviour, a near miss — a coach records it against the camp and the child from the desk. Managers edit, resolve, and with one confirmed click email the family the organiser’s own account of what happened and what was done. Witness names never leave the log.

  • QR check-in and check-out with staff attribution
  • Medical notes flagged on arrival
  • Coach groups, by hand or auto-split by age or surname
  • Coaches see only their own group
  • Incident log with kind, severity, actions and witnesses
  • Family notified in writing, from the record itself
  • Live across devices, printable for the clipboard
Read more about the registration desk

FAMILIES

Every family in one place, and a way to reach them.

Each booking creates or refreshes a contact for the parent: their children, their bookings and what they have paid, read live rather than copied. Message a family directly from the dashboard; they reply from their account, and both sides get an email when there is something new.

Camp news goes only to the families who ticked the box. Marketing consent is an explicit, default-off opt-in on the booking form, withdrawn by a confirmed unsubscribe link, and campaign emails are never mixed with booking confirmations. Drop in a camp card and the dates, price and places left are pulled live at send time.

An hour after a camp ends every confirmed family is asked how it went. Stars and a comment can go on your public page with their consent; the private feedback — what went well, what to change, would they book again — comes to you.

  • Contacts built from bookings, kept current automatically
  • Direct messages with unread badges on both sides
  • Opt-in campaigns with live camp cards and merge tags
  • Reviews requested after every camp, published with consent
Read more about familiesRead more about reviews and marketing

INSIGHT

How the season is really going, on one page.

Analytics draws everything from the same ledger the accounts use, so the numbers agree with your bank statement. Pick the last 30 days, this term, the last 12 months or all time and every figure is shown against the previous period.

Money received, refunded and net by month. Bookings confirmed, cancelled and expired. Fill rate per camp. New families against repeat bookings, with the share of families who came back. Average rating and response rate from reviews. Which payment channels families actually use.

Owners, admins, finance and managers can see it; coaches cannot. The per-camp table downloads as CSV for your committee or your accountant.

  • Revenue, bookings, fill rate, families and reviews
  • 30 days, this term, 12 months or all time, each against the prior period
  • Same definitions as the accounting view
  • Per-camp CSV export
Read more about insight and integrations

INTEGRATE

Your website, your systems, your domain.

Create an API key and your club website can list live camps — dates, price, places left, a booking link — straight from FormSide. Four read-only endpoints cover camps and bookings; a booking exposes a first name and last initial only, never medical notes, contacts, consents or form answers.

Webhooks tell your systems the moment a booking is created, confirmed or cancelled, a payment is received or a review comes in. Every delivery is signed with HMAC-SHA256 and retried with backoff if your endpoint is down, and you can see each attempt and its response in the dashboard.

Serve your organisation page, camp pages and booking forms from an address you own, such as camps.yourclub.co.uk. One CNAME record, verified from the dashboard; families never see formside.app.

  • Read-only REST API, keyed per organisation, 120 requests a minute
  • Five webhook events, signed and retried
  • Keys and secrets shown once, stored hashed
  • White-label custom domain with CNAME verification
Read more about the API, webhooks and your domain

PRIVACY & SAFEGUARDING

Children’s data, handled like it matters.

Families can download a JSON copy of everything held against their email, and schedule erasure with a seven-day grace period. Organisers answer subject access requests from the booking page with the same export and anonymise tools, and every export and erasure lands in a privacy log.

Set a retention period for your organisation — anywhere from three months to ten years after a camp ends — and a nightly job enforces it. Erasure anonymises rather than deletes, so amounts, references and statuses survive for your accounts while the person does not.

Record DBS checks, first aid, safeguarding training and coaching qualifications for everyone who works at your camps. Expiry dates are tracked and flagged before they lapse; certificate numbers are stored securely and only the last four characters are ever shown.

  • Family self-service export and erasure
  • Subject access tools and a privacy log for organisers
  • Retention enforced nightly, financial record preserved
  • DBS and qualification tracking with expiry warnings
Read more about the privacy log and retention

SWITCHING FROM SPREADSHEETS?

The same six jobs, before and after.

Taking a booking

BEFOREA form tool, a payment link and a spreadsheet column for who has actually paid.

WITH FORMSIDEOne page: the place is held, the form is filled, the deposit is taken and the reference is issued.

Saturday morning

BEFOREA printed list, a pen, and a medical note somewhere in an email thread.

WITH FORMSIDEScan the pass. The note is on the register, and the sign-out says who collected whom.

Tuesday-night training

BEFOREA term's worth of sessions typed out one by one, and a separate list of who paid.

WITH FORMSIDEEight Tuesdays, one booking, half-term skipped. The dates are on the pass.

Something happens on the pitch

BEFOREA note on the back of the register and a phone call you hope you remember to make.

WITH FORMSIDERecorded at the desk with what was done. The family is emailed from the record itself.

The committee wants numbers

BEFOREAn evening with three spreadsheets and a calculator.

WITH FORMSIDERevenue, fill rate and repeat families for the term, against last term, in a CSV.

A parent asks what you hold

BEFORESearch three inboxes and a shared drive, then guess.

WITH FORMSIDEExport it from the booking page. Erase it from the same place. Both are logged.

Want the job-by-job version? Read FormSide vs spreadsheets and Google Forms, or if you started on an events platform, FormSide vs generic ticketing tools. Both include an honest section on when the old way is still fine.

RELATED

FREE TO START

Your first camp live this afternoon.

Set up takes about twenty minutes. No card, no contract, and no commission on what families pay you.