Poker club accounting in Excel: where it breaks and when to switch

Almost every online club starts keeping its books in Excel or Google Sheets. And that's the right start: free, flexible, everyone knows how. One sheet for players, one for debts, paste in the week's totals from the poker room report, write a rakeback formula, and the club runs.

The problem isn't Excel itself. The problem is that a spreadsheet built for ten players and one manager one day ends up serving forty players, two managers and three agents. Same formulas, different load. And it doesn't break loudly, it breaks quietly: the numbers are there, but you can't trust them anymore.

How a club's spreadsheet usually looks

For most clubs it's similar:

• a players sheet: nickname, ID, rakeback rate, who brought them;
• an operations sheet: who took how much on credit, deposited, withdrew;
• a weekly sheet: results and rake copied from the poker room report;
• formulas for rakeback and referral payouts;
• a summary sheet: how much the club made and who owes whom.

While the club is small, that's enough. Then the weak spots start to show.

Where Excel starts to break

Copying the report by hand. Every week someone copies hundreds of rows from a ClubGG, PPPoker or PokerBros report into the spreadsheet. Miss a row, shift a column, paste the wrong day, and rakeback is calculated on the wrong rake. You only see the mistake when a player does the math himself.

Formulas only one person understands. The owner or the first manager built the spreadsheet. Everyone else is afraid to touch the formulas. One broken cell reference quietly turns a total into zero, and nobody notices.

Several copies of the file. One manager works in his own copy, another in the shared one, a third writes into the chat to move it over later. A week later there are three versions, and nobody knows which one is right.

No history. A player's debt was 1,200 and now it's 700. Who changed it, when and why, the spreadsheet doesn't remember. When a player says "I never took that much", there's nothing to show him.

Different rakeback rates. 40% for one, 50% for another, a separate rate on Omaha, an agent with his own percentage from his players. Every new deal adds a nested formula, and a couple of months later checking the math by hand is impossible.

Money and debts live apart. The cashier on one sheet, debts on another, transfers between players in a chat. The totals don't match, and finding where takes an evening, or never happens at all.

The manager works from a phone. Nobody opens a big spreadsheet on a phone at two in the morning. The operation goes into the chat and gets moved to the spreadsheet in the morning. Or doesn't.

Signs it's time to switch

If three or more apply, the spreadsheet is already costing the club money, it's just not visible on any single row:

• more than 20-30 active players;
• more than one manager;
• agents or referral partners with their own percentage;
• players on different rakeback rates;
• closing the week takes more than an hour;
• at least once the totals didn't match and the cause was never found;
• the owner is the last to find out about a big player debt.

What a replacement must have

Whatever tool a club picks, it needs a few things a spreadsheet doesn't have:

• the poker room report is processed automatically, not copied by hand;
• every operation is recorded once, in one place;
• every change has an author and a time;
• the manager and the owner see different things;
• everything works from a phone;
• rakeback, referral partners and agents are calculated at their own rates without manual formulas;
• the club's money is reconciled with player debts and chips.

How EasyRake does it

EasyRake is a club accounting app that runs right inside Telegram. ClubGG reports arrive at a club email address we set up for you and are processed automatically. PPPoker and PokerBros are next.

• Cashier: debt, deposit, withdrawal and chip transfer on one screen, with a debt limit.
• Player card: debt, chips and the full money history, with the date and author of every operation.
• Rakeback: each player has their own rate, separately for hold'em and Omaha, with referral partners and agents at their own percentages.
• Reports: after every game day the owner gets a summary in Telegram.
• Access: the manager works with the cashier, club settings and money stay with the owner.

We wrote about how player debts drift in "Player debts in a ClubGG club", and about the club's cashier in "ClubGG club cashier".

Moving from Excel. No need to rebuild your spreadsheet. Just send the list of players, their rakeback rates, referral partners and agents. We connect the club the same day.