The recreation software buyer worksheet.

1. Build the five-year number, not the year-one number

Vendors price differently on purpose. A common template is the only honest comparison. Fill one column per vendor.

A percentage fee is not a software cost, it is a charge on your registration revenue that grows every time your programs succeed. On a department processing a million dollars a year, one percentage point is ten thousand dollars annually, forever. A flat per-registration fee behaves worse on high-volume low-price programs: two dollars on a fifteen dollar drop-in class is a thirteen percent haircut.

On passing card costs to residents, rules vary by state. Washington's MRSC guidance distinguishes a surcharge from a service fee, caps credit surcharges at 4 percent, and notes debit cannot be surcharged at all. Check your own state before building a fee into your pricing.

2. Decide your scoring weights before you see a single proposal

There is no industry norm to inherit. Four agencies buying this same category weighted it four different ways, all published:

Cost weight ranges from 30 percent to zero across four agencies buying the same thing. Whatever you write becomes the standard for your award, so write it deliberately. Run a scoring trial against a fake proposal first: if two evaluators score the same paragraph forty points apart, the criterion is not written yet.

Our weights:

3. Demand evidence, not adjectives

• An ACR or VPAT, not a sentence. Section508.gov directs buyers to assess a conformance report. Some states bar purchase without one. Marketing copy claiming a standard is not a conformance report.
• A named security attestation with its report type and date. "Adheres to SOC standards" is not an attestation. Ask which report, Type 1 or Type 2, and when it was issued. Ask the same about GovRAMP or StateRAMP status.
• PCI evidence in writing. Whether card numbers touch your systems at all, and the Attestation of Compliance on request. Ask whether the vendor reduces your PCI scope or merely moves the liability to you.
• A subprocessor list and where data physically resides.
• Incident response and breach notification terms, with a deadline in days, in the contract rather than in a sales conversation.
• Backup, disaster recovery and restoration terms. How long to restore, and how much data can be lost in the process.

4. Make the demo a test, not a performance

Send every finalist the same scenarios a week ahead, with your real fee table and facility list. They drive, live, while your staff watch. Score during the session, not after.

• Sibling registration with a scholarship. One household, three children, two programs, fee assistance applied to two of them and not the third. Does the discount stack? What does the revenue report say the program earned?
• The double-booked field. A league block and a rental request on the same field and hour. Does it stop, warn, or take the money twice?
• The mid-season refund. Week 4 of 8, prorate it, part back to the card and part to household credit, and produce the audit trail finance will ask for.
• The failed payment. A recurring membership charge declines. What happens automatically, what does the family see, and how does the front desk retry without reading a card number aloud?

Score three things per scenario: completed without a workaround, how many screens staff had to touch, and whether the money ended up right. Every evaluator scores independently before anyone talks.

5. Check references properly

Three references, of similar size and program mix, currently live on the system, contactable without the vendor arranging the call. Ask for the installation date and the deployed version, so you are hearing about the software you are being sold.

• What did go-live week actually look like, and what broke?
• What did you pay in year one that was not in the proposal?
• What does your staff still do in a spreadsheet?
• What happened the last time you had an outage during registration?
• Would you buy it again? If not, what would you buy?

6. Fix the exit terms before you sign

You are negotiating the next five years, and the leverage never comes back after signature.

• Data ownership stated plainly, including anything derived from your data, and whether the vendor licenses it for benchmarking.
• Export format and deadline. Whether relationships between households, registrations and payments survive the export, and how many days after termination it arrives. A flat CSV that unlinks everything satisfies the clause and fails you.
• Extraction cost, fixed now. Ask in plain words what you will be charged to get your own data back. "Professional services at then-current rates" is not an answer.
• A renewal increase cap tied to CPI or a fixed percentage, across the full term including renewal options. Without it your five-year total is unknowable.
• An SLA with an actual remedy. Define downtime, exclusions, measurement, and the credit when it is missed.
• Retention and certified deletion after you leave.

Timeline: what these actually take

From five published municipal procurement schedules, presented as five documented examples rather than an average:

• Issue to proposal deadline ran three to four and a half weeks.
• Issue to award or selection ran six to nine weeks.
• Award to executed contract added weeks to months, governed by your council calendar.
• Issue to go-live ran seven and a half to twelve months.

Schedule go-live in your quietest registration window and count backward. Launching the week before your biggest revenue event means the first real load test is the one your council hears about.

One more thing worth a phone call before you draft anything: ask purchasing whether a cooperative contract covers this. Recreation software is usually filed under technology and software categories, not the parks category, which is where most people look and conclude nothing exists.