Compulsory Membership?

[Alex Holowczak]

Alex,

Re (1), it's not several years but two years. For each new year you pay the balance owing from the previous year + the estimate for the new year.

It is several, because you need to refer to payments of organisations who forget to pay their Game Fee altogether.

Is (2) relevant to the current discussion?

Yes. It shows that under Game Fee, a Game Fee paying organisation could buy votes on Council for nothing.

What you say about (3) is nonsense if there's a proper process in place. It's a failure of current ECF Board members to institute a proper process.

It's a failure of ECF Board members, agreed. But not the current Board (by which I mean, the Board of the last couple of years). The broken system was inherited when most of them came to Office. Given that we've now moved to membership, there has perhaps naturally been less desire to fix the system given it was likely to be changing in the next 12 months anyway.

You sought to prove a point but abjectly failed even though your target - Dragoljub - wasn't especially qualified to answer your obscure questions he did so. The decent thing to do would have been to recognise that his early answers were very close to the mark.

He claimed Game Fee to be a simple process. It isn't, for the reasons I've outlined. Dragoljub has come up with the correct number of games, but we don't know how many the Treasurer has paid for, or indeed whether it was deducted from the subsequent year's numbers.

Even if Nottinghamshire's treasurer did it correctly, there are other examples from other areas:
(1) A league that systematically underpaid Game Fee for years
(2) A county that decided to pay for two years' worth of Game Fee in one go, for no apparent reason
(3) A league that underestimated its pay because it multiplied halfresults by the previous year's Game Fee figure
(4) A county that overlapped with an MO, and had no idea how many members were basic or otherwise
(5) Leagues forgetting to pay altogether until the Voting Register guy lapses them for the April Council meeting (who then has to go around chasing them up)
(6) Leagues who replace Treasurers, and they didn't realise the deadline to pay was December 15th

... and so on.

I acknowledge that Dragoljub's guesses were close, and that he indeed got it right when he did it more accurately. But I await information of how many results Nottinghamshire pay for year on year before concluding whether or not they've paid the right amount.

[Roger de Coverly]

What you say about (3) is nonsense if there's a proper process in place. It's a failure of current ECF Board members to institute a proper process.

Not just current ECF Board members. The original system design for the data collection to underpin grading and Game Fee would have one data set feeding both. The grading side of the development ran into problems so the invoicing side had to be separated. The two have never properly been reunited. Ironically the ECF's planned £ 6 per head Congress charge/ upgrade charge and £ 2 per game non-member charge don't have a hope of working unless they put in some serious effort to getting the back office side working and working cheaply. Voting rights are still based on deemed Game Fee, so whatever convoluted process generates these needs to continue.

[Roger de Coverly]

The broken system was inherited when most of them came to Office.

Why didn't the Farthing review identify and fix the issues? If you are short of money, or expect to be, you tighten up your processes for reviewing and collecting it. Collecting money for a chess federation using rating fees is a straightforward idea used by many of the world's chess federations. If some of the points of detail are difficult, you need to address and resolve them. Twelve years ago, grading was in a mess as well, but that was sorted out.

[Alex Holowczak]

Not just current ECF Board members. The original system design for the data collection to underpin grading and Game Fee would have one data set feeding both. The grading side of the development ran into problems so the invoicing side had to be separated. The two have never properly been reunited. Ironically the ECF's planned £ 6 per head Congress charge/ upgrade charge and £ 2 per game non-member charge don't have a hope of working unless they put in some serious effort to getting the back office side working and working cheaply.

I don't think the current Board are at fault. They're aware of the problems they inherited, and now that membership has come in, they won't exist going forward.

That said, I agree entirely with what you've said subsequently. If I submit a grading file to Richard, it'll get graded, regardless of whether I subsequently pay for it. Richard's approach is that he's a Grader, not a Game Fee Administrator, which is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Voting rights are still based on deemed Game Fee, so whatever convoluted process generates these needs to continue.

It'll be based on what happened last year. So if your league had 2,500 halfresults in 2011/12, it'll get 3 votes at the October 2012 and April 2013 Council meetings. There's no other way to do it.

Going forward beyond that, I'll just look at the halfresults in the previous season played by direct members if there's no evidence of a Game Fee payment to clear a bill. If a bill has been paid, then I'll just look at the total results played in the event, and assign that number of votes.

So if you run a league that's 100% membership, you make my life very simple, because all I can just read off the grading database.

[Alex Holowczak]

The broken system was inherited when most of them came to Office.

Why didn't the Farthing review identify and fix the issues? If you are short of money, or expect to be, you tighten up your processes for revewing and collecting it. Collecting money for a chess federation using rating fees is a straightforward idea used by many of the world's chess federations. If some of the points of detail are difficult, you need to address and resolve them. Twelve years ago, grading was in a mess as well, but that was sorted out.

As was mentioned at the time, I did a bit of work on this, and found (refound?) all these things. The Board were made aware of them.

Had the ECF opted for universal Game Fee instead of universal Membership, I have every confidence that the Board would have improved the administrative processes relating to Game Fee. I'm sure similar procedures will be put in place between now and the time residual Game Fee needs to be collected.

[Paul Cooksey]

I don't know if I'm touchingly naive or arrogant. But if I had:
1. access to the grading database used by the website
2. access to a list of members (cross-referencing membership and grading number, until they merge)
3. access. (or probably excel these days)

why would it take me more than half an hour to work out £2 game fee payments due?

[Roger de Coverly]

I don't know if I'm touchingly naive or arrogant. But if I had:
1. access to the grading database used by the website
2. access to a list of members (cross-referencing membership and grading number, until they merge)
3. access. (or probably excel these days)

why would it take me more than half an hour to work out £2 game fee payments due?

I believe Alex H did something similar a couple of years ago as a review project.


As it's essentially the same process, you could generate the current 58p version for 2011-12

The problems seem to come with preparing the invoices and getting the Office to send them to the right people matching the right prepayment from the previous December. Also with getting entries made on the accounting system. You may recall the issue with the 2011 accounts where Congress Game Fee appeared to show an unexpected shortfall, but no-one was prepared to say which Congresses they actually were. It may have been just the effect of a very late Easter moving Game Fee for Easter Congresses into the 2011-12 year, but no-one seemed able to find out for certain. Final grading data isn't available until June whilst the financial year end is 30th April. This gives scope for inconsistency in reporting income from leagues depending on whether your accounting convention is to back date or not.

(edit) A back of an envelope system design would join (in the sql sense) the game data with tables representing Game Fee amounts and membership flags. The idea being to compute the Game Fee (which can be zero) for every half game. You've got a test of completeness because the half game total will equal the grading totals. You then group and sum the data by organisation at whatever level of detail is needed. You've got management information as well if you want it, such as the amount not collected because of exemptions and how it groups by demographic. In a computational sense, they do something more complicated each year for grading and particularly when they reworked everyone's grade. (/edit)

[Roger de Coverly]

So Membership scheme is a benefit to the club and it shows because they have entered another team

If on the other hand, you are already running more teams than the demand in your club really supports, it isn't a benefit to be excluded from using guest, occasional or novice prospects to fill the odd gap when regulars aren't available.

If you have a prospective new member who doesn't yet know whether they want to commit to the rigours of league chess, what do you do?

[Paul Cooksey]

If you have a prospective new member who doesn't yet know whether they want to commit to the rigours of league chess, what do you do?

I know this one...

You are going to have to pay the county who run the league £2 a game, if he does not join. So you have a word with the treasurer about how many games you can let him play before asking him to pay the £2 himself. Presumably the treasurer will also be taking a view on whether to charge a full, reduced or no club membership too.

But hopefully he'll take the plunge and join the ECF, after all the policy is to encourage this. (If you're in Bucks, obviously)

[Angus French]

I don't know if I'm touchingly naive or arrogant. But if I had:
1. access to the grading database used by the website
2. access to a list of members (cross-referencing membership and grading number, until they merge)
3. access. (or probably excel these days)

why would it take me more than half an hour to work out £2 game fee payments due?

I don't think it should be too difficult for a software developer with some experience.
But note that it's possible to become a member before having a grading reference. So: there will need to be a process to match members without grading references to graded game players (perhaps local Results Officers can help with this).
Also, during the transition period, it'll be possible for a membership to lapse mid-season - this will need to be taken into account when determining what game fee is due.
Presumably you'd want to produce reports for each event and then to automatically email the result to the event's treasurer.

[Roger de Coverly]

But note that it's possible to become a member before having a grading reference. So: there will need to be a process to match members without grading references to graded game players (perhaps local Results Officers can help with this).

In some leagues, it will be mandatory. Assuming that is, that local Results Officers don't allocate codes to those that haven't played.

Actually there's a simple solution - but it probably wasn't specified. You allocate a grading code in parallel to a membership number - presumably not difficult for an on-line system, but an extra layer of complexity for an MO.

[Angus French]

The broken system was inherited when most of them came to Office.

Why didn't the Farthing review identify and fix the issues? If you are short of money, or expect to be, you tighten up your processes for revewing and collecting it. Collecting money for a chess federation using rating fees is a straightforward idea used by many of the world's chess federations. If some of the points of detail are difficult, you need to address and resolve them. Twelve years ago, grading was in a mess as well, but that was sorted out.

As was mentioned at the time, I did a bit of work on this, and found (refound?) all these things. The Board were made aware of them.

Had the ECF opted for universal Game Fee instead of universal Membership, I have every confidence that the Board would have improved the administrative processes relating to Game Fee...

That last statement is a bit rich: irrespective of the adoption of compulsory membership, improvements were promised by two current Board members, both of them senior and both of whom had reason to be intimately acquainted with the problem.

[Alex Holowczak]

I don't know if I'm touchingly naive or arrogant. But if I had:
1. access to the grading database used by the website
2. access to a list of members (cross-referencing membership and grading number, until they merge)
3. access. (or probably excel these days)

why would it take me more than half an hour to work out £2 game fee payments due?

It doesn't now.

Two years ago or so, the grading database did not output the number of halfresults played by members or direct members, and still relied on a manual calculation of Game Fee due from those numbers. These are now in the spreadsheet.

The other problem is that leagues don't pay an invoice. They pay half in advance, half in arrears, in December. So the Office have nothing to marry the payment received with until 6 months later (as it then was) when the grading file comes in.

If you become an MO, however, you will pay an invoice, as the framework agreement suggests. The grading information sent to the Office will be modified to show the number of players who are members, the number of players who aren't members (both at the necessary level for the event), and provide a number. This can be done to make invoicing relatively easy compared to what happened before.

The problem is with getting the original estimate right. Many have failed to do this with any level of accuracy.

There are a few other complications with memberships expiring at certain times, but these won't exist next year with a fixed membership season becoming the norm.

[Alex Holowczak]

That last statement is a bit rich: irrespective of the adoption of compulsory membership, improvements were promised by two current Board members, both of them senior and both of whom had reason to be intimately acquainted with the problem.

Which have been made, as I've explained in the post immediately previous to this. Rather than change and change again, the improvements to the way Game Fee is collected have been built in to the new system. (Invoicing the MOs for residual Game Fee being the one that will make the big difference, as it does away with the estimation process.)

Any major work to overhaul the system would potentially have needed separate changes to Bye-Laws, and there seems to be little point in doing that at this stage of the life of Game Fee.

[Roger de Coverly]

There are a few other complications with memberships expiring at certain times, but these won't exist next year with a fixed membership season becoming the norm.

I don't think so somehow. That issue will continue to exist until three years after the last sale of a three year membership under the old rules.

As far as invoicing is concerned the obvious common sense solution would be one piece of paper with two numbers on it

(a) balance from previous season
(b) estimate for new season

So you put both (a) and (b) separately into the accounting system as opposed to (a) + (b). At the end of the season, you are only bothered with the aggregate from the Game Fee file (c) which you need to collect or invoice as (c)-(b) which in turn becomes the (a) for the new season.

At least that's how local treasurers handle it, although every so often they confuse AGM's by putting (a)+(b) in the local accounts which sometimes generates a question if (a) is particularly large.