Palamedes

A website that runs dues and member records for my 60 member fraternity chapter. Members see exactly what they owe and pay by card, and the treasurer stops chasing people over text.

I am the treasurer, so I inherited the job this replaced: one spreadsheet, sixty rows, and a lot of messages that said "hey, did you pay yet".

Members genuinely did not know what they owed. The number lived on my laptop, so the only way to find out was to ask me, and the only way to pay was to send money with a note that I then typed into the spreadsheet by hand. Payments went missing. Balances were wrong often enough that people stopped trusting them, and when someone does not trust the amount they are being billed, they wait.

Now a member logs in, sees their own balance, sees what each charge is for and when it is due, and pays by card in a couple of taps. They can pay one charge, part of a charge, or everything at once, because people really do pay in pieces and the spreadsheet never handled that well. On my side every payment records itself. I have not entered a transaction by hand since it launched, and the ledger has stayed accurate.

The result the chapter actually felt was that on-time payments doubled. Almost none of that is because the software is clever. It is because paying became a thirty second job instead of something you put off, and because nobody has to message the treasurer to find out a number that was always theirs to see.

Building the thing the chapter runs on rather than a demo of it. It handles new chapter signup, invite codes, member profiles, the house points system and the searchable directory, because doing dues alone would have left half the spreadsheets alive anyway.

I also let Stripe hold the money. I am a student running the finances of a sixty person organisation, and card details are not something I want anywhere near my database. Payments go through Stripe's own checkout page, and Palamedes only ever hears back that a payment succeeded.

Officers still need full admin access to change someone's role, which hands out far more power than the job needs. A proper roster page is the next build, and honestly it should have come before several things that shipped first.

The bigger gap is attendance. Points are typed in by hand as free text today, so the points system is really a shared notepad with a leaderboard on top. Points in a chapter are earned by showing up, so events with check-in is what would make the whole thing real.