An in-depth look at how Collingtree Park Golf Club collaborated with GCMA Partners Nextrasoft to implement a scalable workforce-management solution that supports cost control, operational oversight and future growth.
Overview & Challenge
Collingtree Park Golf Club (Northamptonshire) is a well-established, high-end golf club
with extensive staff-based operations across the clubhouse, pro shop, hospitality,
events, and large grounds/maintenance teams. With multiple departments, zero-hour
contracts, mobile staff, and some remote work areas (notably the green-keeping team,
whose place of work is almost 1 mile from the main clubhouse), the club’s workforcemanagement environment had grown complex.
Before engaging Nextrasoft, Collingtree’s existing workforce system provided only
around 70% of the required solution: it did rostering and time-sheeting in a basic sense,
but lacked full integration with mobile clocking, geolocation, detailed cost reporting,
zero-hour shift allocation, and multi-department location tracking. The result was:
- Manual workarounds and spreadsheets remained heavily used, increasing
- admin time
- Staff clock-in/out errors and unverified attendances (especially in remote zones
like the green-keepers) - Limited real-time visibility of shift costs across departments
- Rota availability offered only “whole-day” slots to zero-hour staff, reducing
flexibility and risking over- or under-staffing - Incomplete audit-trail and poor linkage to payroll/HR systems
Why Nextrasoft?
Nextrasoft offers a fully modular, cloud-based workforce-management platform that
emphasises 100% solution coverage, rather than partial fixes:
- Nextra covers all your workforce management needs, including mobile clocking,
geolocation, time & attendance, rostering, absence management, reporting and
more. - For golf-club operations specifically, Nextrasoft lists a dedicated “Golf Club Staff
Management” module, designed to support rotas, mobile clock-in, departmental
skills/certifications, zero-hours, integration with payroll & HR, and geolocation
tracking. - As a partner of the Golf Club Managers’ Association (GCMA) they are positioned
to support golf clubs and similar leisure operations.
Thus Collingtree Park engaged Nextrasoft to replace the “70% solution” with a bespoke
“100% fit” tailored for their club’s unique departmental, geographical and contractual
complexity.
Solution Implementation – Tailoring the Platform
Department & Location Geofencing
A key challenge was tracking staff working in distinct physical areas across the estate.
For example, the green-keeping team often commenced work near holes and
maintenance buildings, which were almost a mile away from the clubhouse. Nextrasoft
implemented a geolocation/geofencing system via mobile clock-in, so that:
- Staff must clock in/out within the defined virtual boundary for that department.
- Ensures that remote-site staff (green-keepers) are truly on-site, avoiding “buddypunching” or unsupervised clock-in.
- Provides visibility of remote workforce whereabouts, enhancing audit-trail and
session-cost accuracy.
Custom Shift Cost Reporting
The new system enabled Collingtree’s management team to generate daily reports of
shift costs by department, including clubhouse, hospitality, pro shop, events, and
green-keeping. These reports deliver:
- Live/near-live view of hours worked per department, overtime, idle time, etc.
- Cost per shift, cost per department, cost per event.
- Ability to compare planned vs actual staffing cost, enabling better budget control
and forecasting. - Better board-level summaries for the club’s leadership team, aligning with
strategic and operational KPIs.
Mobile App & Zero-Hour Staff Availability Slots
Zero-hour contract staff (e.g., catering assistants, events staff) required greater
flexibility. The prior system offered only “whole-day availability”, which was limiting.
Nextrasoft implemented the following enhancements:
- In the mobile self-service app, zero-hour staff can now specify time-slots (e.g.,
10:00-14:00, 18:00-22:00) instead of “any time” or “whole day”. - Managers can push shift-offers to eligible staff in the app and see acceptance in
real-time. - Rota building then functions with greater granularity – matching demand to
supply more precisely, reducing over-staffing and under-staffing.
Full Platform Implementation & Training
- The Nextrasoft team implemented the full suite: rostering, time & attendance,
self-service mobile app, geolocation, reporting, absence management, and
skills management. - On-site training was provided to the club’s HR/operations team and
departmental managers (green-keeping lead, hospitality manager, pro-shop
manager). - Existing data from the “70% system” and spreadsheets were migrated, and
processes re-engineered to reduce manual touch-points. - Managers were briefed on how to use the platform to extract reports and drive
operational insight.
Outcomes & Benefits
Since go-live, Collingtree Park Golf Club has realised a number of tangible
improvements:
- Reduced administrative burden: Manual spreadsheets and patchwork systems
have been replaced; managers report significantly fewer hours spent on rotabuilding, attendance queries and payroll reconciliation - Better cost-control and visibility: Daily departmental shift-cost reporting
means the club can see where staffing budget is being consumed and make
informed adjustments - Improved accuracy of time recording: The geofenced mobile clock-in ensures
remote staff (e.g., green-keepers) are correctly registered, reducing unverified
hours and time-fraud risk - Greater flexibility for zero-hour staff: Time-slot availability means the club can
match staffing more tightly to demand (e.g., events, functions, peak hospitality
hours), reducing overspend and increasing utilisation of workforce - Strategic decision-making support: The club’s senior leadership now has
access to board-level summaries of staffing cost, shift utilisation, overtime
trends – enabling more effective operational and financial planning - Single scalable tool: As the club considers future expansion (additional event
space, perhaps multiple sites), the platform is scalable and modular such that
additional modules/features can be switched on later – aligning with
Nextrasoft’s “ready to scale” value-proposition
Why This Matters for Golf Clubs
Golf clubs have unique operational demands, including large estates, multiple
departments (greens, clubhouse, events, pro shop), a mix of full-time and part-time
staff, frequent events/functions, fluctuating seasonal demand, and often remote
working zones (grounds/maintenance). The ability to manage all of this on a single,
integrated platform rather than multiple point systems is a strategic advantage.
By replacing a partial 70% solution, Collingtree Park has moved to a tailored 100% fit –
reducing risk, improving efficiency and enabling smarter decision-making.
“Switching to Nextrasoft was a game-changer for us. For the first time, we have one
platform that covers every staff shift, department and location across the club. The
geolocation for our grounds team alone paid for the investment. Now we can see daily
shift costs, match staffing to demand and offer real flexibility to our zero-hour staff.
Administration time has come down, and the board-level dashboards now give us
strategic insight we’ve never had before.”
— Oliver Hart – Club General Manager, Collingtree Park Golf Club
Key Takeaways for Other Clubs & Multi-Site Leisure Businesses
- Don’t settle for a “70%” workforce management system when your business has
multiple departments, remote teams, zero-hour staff and fluctuating demand:
aim for full-coverage. - Geolocation isn’t just a “nice to have” — for outdoor estates, remote work zones
or dispersed teams, it’s a control and audit-tool. - Flexibility in staff availability is critical: moving from whole-day availability to
time-slot availability significantly improves scheduling precision and labour
utilisation. - Daily shift-cost reporting drives operational discipline and supports board-level
decision-making — not just HR/operations. - Choose a platform that can scale and evolve with your business, rather than
layering on point-solutions that don’t integrate. - Ensure implementation includes training for departmental leads (grounds,
hospitality, events) — not just HR — since they are users of the system.
By engaging Nextrasoft, Collingtree Park Golf Club achieved a clean, modern, fullyfledged workforce-management solution tailored to its complexities. The result: better
visibility, tighter cost control, more efficient administration and a flexible foundation for
future growth.
Find out more about Nextrasoft here
By Mark Shanley
