Don’t Throw Out the Data with the Tee Sheet

Now’s the time when many courses decide to switch over their tee sheet and point of sale (POS) systems. Changing your systems can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. It often leads to taking shortcuts, like dumping the old system before taking steps to preserve your historical data.

Your new vendor may be primarily concerned with moving existing bookings and customers into your new system. They may tell you there is little value in converting your historical data. While that may be true for the tee sheet, it does not mean your historical data isn’t worth saving—it’s actually one of your most valuable business assets and should be preserved.

Why your historical data matters

You may be thinking we’re talking about your customer data, ie golfer names, email addresses and phone numbers. While that data is extremely important for your marketing and customer relationship management activities, it may not be the most valuable data for your business.

Your booking history could actually contribute more to your bottom-line revenue over the next few years.

A revolution is coming to the golf industry, and it relies heavily on the past. New technologies and methods are allowing innovative companies to mine your historical booking data to make predictions about future demand—predictions that can contribute greatly to increasing golf course revenue.

These systems rely on the information contained in the last one to three years of booking history. The good news is, preserving that information when switching systems usually only takes a few minutes.

So before you shut down your old tee sheet or point of sale system for good, jump into the reports section and generate some historical reports.

How to save historical data in your tee sheet

Look for a booking history report that will give you the following key pieces of data for each reservation:

tee date & time
numbers of players
booking date & time
booking source
fee name
amount
checked-in status (or only run the report for checked-in rounds)
Additional information may include player names and email addresses, reservation IDs and/or booking IDs.

Run each report for a one-year period (ie 1/1 to 12/31) and export the reports in CSV format, if possible.

How to save historical data in your POS system

Look for a sales activity report that will give you the following key pieces of data:

transaction date and time
item description
group/category details
amounts (net, gross, tax and total) and quantity purchased.

Run each report over one-year periods (ie 1/1 to 12/31) and export the reports in CSV format, if possible.

Your past data indicates future performance

While upgrading your systems is usually a smart move, just remember to do it responsibly and preserve your historical booking data. New advances in golf technology are using these reports to predict future demand.

This insight is enabling courses to price and promote tee times more effectively than ever before. At Sagacity, we call it TruDemand Technology, and it’s been proven to increase bottom-line revenues by 10-15%.

Hundreds of courses across the country are taking advantage of this new technology and realizing incredible results. Whether you’re ready to consider this innovation or not, preserving your historical booking data is a solid investment in your future.