How ClubGG club owners keep their books, and why the spreadsheet always loses

Every club goes down the same road: first a notebook, then a Google Sheet, then a sheet with four editors. At some point the evening after the game turns into a bookkeeping shift. Here is where manual accounting breaks and what to do about it.

The pain people talk about out loud

We did not make this up. This is how someone who has worked with club apps for years describes running a club's numbers, on the biggest poker forum:

“A nightmare of spreadsheets, aggregating player data by hand, and long telegram convos with many screenshots.” TwoPlusTwo forum, a thread on poker club apps

A 2026 guide for club owners says the same thing in numbers: fifty-plus deposits and withdrawals a week on top of running the tables is too much for one person.

There is almost no software for this work. Owners get by on “operational discipline”, which means their own time and attention, and there is never enough of either.

What ClubGG gives you

Less than it seems. Data exports for the owner are limited: no more than 7 days per export, only the last 30 days, and every export costs diamonds, the app's paid currency. You cannot build ongoing bookkeeping on that. Anything older than a month is out of reach, and every look back costs money.

The data in the export is good, though: tables, hands, rake, chip movements. The problem is not the data. Nobody has the time to process it.

Three places where the spreadsheet breaks

• Debts. The chips handed out got written down, the return did not, and now the player's debt lives in two places: the sheet and the manager's memory. Disputes get settled with week-old screenshots.
• Rakeback. Every player has a rate of his own, tables have categories and minimums, Omaha pays a higher percentage. Sheet formulas can handle that while you have ten players. At fifty, the “why did I get this much” questions start.
• The cage. Cash, card, crypto. A deposit is on the blockchain but not in the sheet, and nobody notices until the gap has four digits. A spreadsheet cannot check itself against a wallet.

What books that balance look like

The principles are simple, and they do not depend on which software you use:

• Data comes from the export, not from typing. Whatever ClubGG has already counted (hands, rake, chip movements) should never be entered again by hand. Manual entry is where the mismatches come from.
• Money records are never edited. A wrong entry is cancelled by a new one, and both stay in the history. Backdated edits are what makes owners stop trusting their own sheet.
• The crypto wallet is matched to the records transfer by transfer. Not “the balance looks about right”: every deposit and withdrawal either matches a record or shows up as a separate line.
• Reconcile after every export, not once a month. A gap found on the day it appears takes minutes to sort out. A month later it takes an evening, if you are lucky.

We walked this road together with a live club. In its first seven weeks $139,000 in rake and 66 players went through the books, and cage discrepancies are caught to the cent. EasyRake grew out of that experience.