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Entry forms for any season are usually sent out to clubs that have participated in the current and recent seasons at or shortly after the results for round 6 of the current season have been issued. Traditional paper forms are still used but in 2020 we introduced an Excel system whereby the clubs type the names and averages into a ‘spreadsheet’ for each competition. The driver behind this was that Excel can add numbers up accurately and many clubs were, to put it lightly, arithmetically challenged so that more than a few cheques that arrived did not actually match the total entry fees due. That helped considerably with the admin, but tthere are a lot of clubs still using the paper forms.
Starting with the 2022 Summer season, clubs do not send in any fees with their forms but are sent an invoice for their entries and given the option of using bank transfers as well as cheques to pay their fees. Invoices are send to avoid the issues surrounding refunds for competitions that are not run due to insufficient entries.
There’s usually about a month for clubs to complete their entry forms with their competitors’ names and averages and send them in to the organiser.
The organiser will manually enter all the entrants’ names and averages from the paper forms into a bespoke computer system and import the entry data directly from the Excel files. Once all the entries are in, the invoice for each club is generated and emailed to the club representatives. As well as acting as the invoice for entry fees due (taking any un-run competitions into accoount), this file contains the data that was actually entered into the system either manually from the paper forms or imported from the Excel files The point of this is to give the clubs an opportunity to make corrections, e.g. missing or wrongly-given names, incorrect averages, mis-spelled names etc. It is much easier for our administration to make corrections at this early stage, rather than waiting till the stickers have been issued and only then finding out there had been some mistakes, whoever made them. Club reps are strenuously requested to check this file rigorously for errors, and that includes passing it to any and all of their club colleagues who may have had input to the clubs’ overall entry.
Clubs are given two weeks from the date of issue of the invoice for paying their fees. If the fee is not received by then their entries will be removed from the system.
Once the deadline for comments on the invoice/check files has passed and the payments received, the organiser will generate what we call the ‘Round Zero’ file. This is essentially a full results file but without any scores in it. This file is published on this website and it is available there for all competitors and teams to see which division they are in and who they are shooting against before the competitions start. This file is the source for creating the files that the scorers use to record their scores (see the ‘Results service’ link on the previous page).
At this point the organiser produces the target labels using the data in the entries file, and sends them to the club representatives given on the entry forms along with a document with the shooting timetable and all the scorers’ contact details. He then heaves a sigh of relief and waits for it all to start again next season.
Note that there is no ‘promotion’ or ‘relegation’ from season to season. It is irrelevant if anyone finishes a season in the top or bottom places in a division because for the following season everything starts from a clean slate again. Which division anyone goes into is entirely dependent on their submitted average and where it comes in the list of averages of all the entrants.