The Golfdom Files: Can a country club afford data processing?

Modern-day superintendents have access to dozens of tools that make their lives easier. Technologies like soil moisture meters, labor-tracking software and autonomous mowers, are just a few examples.

Screencap: Golfdom staff

It makes you wonder; how did superintendents balance their budgets back in the day? For some, outside data processing companies and their advanced computers (for the time) were the keys to making their financials work.

Take a trip back to April 1963, when Golfdom spoke with R.J. Kearns, owner of Robert J. Kearns & Co., in Aurora Ill., to learn how his business helped superintendents. View the full article here.

Q. Mr. Kearns, most people think of data processing as a tool of big corporations. How can a private club afford a system that obviously is designed and priced for these giants?

They can’t, but they don’t have to. Big companies have big problems and the systems they use to solve them have captured the public imagination.

But smaller organizations use smaller systems. And organizations that cannot justify purchasing their own systems can buy services from processing specialists. We provide this service for many of our clients, including nine country clubs. We call it R/K Service.

Q. What does R/K Service consist of? What do you do for the individual country club?

We offer a complete service covering all phases of bookkeeping and accounting needs. We process and mail the members’ monthly statements, compute and write payroll and government reports, maintain accounts payable and general account checks, post the general ledger and prepare monthly financial statements. Some clubs prefer to retain one or more of these functions. In such cases, we do only part of the job and bill the club accordingly.

Q. What do you use as source material?

Once a week, the club sends us all its accumulated sales checks, invoices and other transaction records. A (worker) in our office reads the pertinent information from the records and enters it in a tape-punching adding machine. When all the information is entered, the records are returned to the club and the punched tape is filed away. At the end of the month, all of the tapes are processed on our NCR 390 computer to generate the desired reports and forms.

Peaks and Valleys

Q. What is the primary advantage of this arrangement to the country club?

A country club, particularly in the North, has extreme fluctuation in its accounting workload. One of our clubs has 30,000 transactions in July and only 500 in January. An accounting department capable of handling the peak wastes many man-hours during the lull. R/K Service levels off accounting personnel requirements to one person on a year-round basis.