A spreadsheet is free. Here’s what it can’t do.

Let’s be fair to the spreadsheet. It’s free, you already have it, and nobody needs teaching how to use it. For eight players and one round it does the job perfectly well - and if that’s your outing, you don’t need us either. Our free tier stops at twelve players and one round for exactly that reason.

The trouble starts when the sheet stops being a list and becomes a puzzle. Thirty-two names. Four rounds. The couples who want to play together. The two who must never be drawn together again, for reasons nobody will write down. The low handicappers who shouldn’t all land in the same group. A spreadsheet will hold every one of those names quite happily. What it will not do is work out where they go. You will. On a Tuesday night.

That’s the first thing. Trying the arrangements is not a formula you can maintain, it’s a search - and there are more ways to arrange thirty-two players than you will ever check by hand. Ours tries thousands of them against your rules and hands back the five fairest, in the time it takes to make a coffee. You set the rules once. It does the searching every time after that.

The second is the maths. Playing handicaps under WHS 2024, across seventeen formats, with the right allowance applied and the rounding done once at the end rather than at every step. You can build that in a sheet. People do. They also carry last season’s version into this one and don’t spot it until someone loses a match by a shot they should have had.

The third is everything that happens after you press send. A spreadsheet is out of date the moment it leaves your hands. Someone drops out, you redo the groups, you send it again, and half the group is still looking at the old one. Instead your players open one link: their tee time, their group, and when the golf starts, live scoring they enter from the course with no app to download and no account needed. Ties settle on countback instead of in the bar. Run it across a season and the Order of Merit keeps itself.

So no, a spreadsheet doesn’t cost anything. It costs one person their evening, every single time, so that everyone else can just turn up. That’s the bill we’re trying to settle.