Supplier Evaluation Guide:
Tournament Management Systems

Introduction

Tournament management is a core operation for most golf facilities, and it is no exaggeration to characterize a Tournament Management System (TMS) as a "mission critical" technology platform. A reliable, fully featured, and high-performance TMS delivers major benefits to the golf operation. On the other hand, TMS failure or serious underperformance can trigger disruptions that have negative financial, reputational, or even legal consequences. It's no surprise that procuring and deploying a TMS is a major undertaking for a golf facility, where the purchase decision carries both substantial risks as well as the anticipated rewards.

This guide is for use by private golf clubs, daily fee and municipal courses, resorts, indoor golf facilities and other golf operators. The guide is made available to prospective TMS Customers (hereinafter "Customers") with the goal of helping them understand costs, benefits and risks, evaluate options, and ultimately assist them in selecting the "right" partner as a key supplier.

The availability of this guide is particularly timely because the market for TMS' is strong, growing and has recently attracted several new entrants in addition to established suppliers such as Golf Genius and BlueGolf. TMS solutions are also offered by Unknown Golf, Live Tourney, Par Four, Squabbit, Kismet, Golf Status and others. Some suppliers, such as Kismet and Golf Status, focus on corporate/charity outings, and some, such as Squabbit, focus on "social golfers" who participate in self-organized leagues and golf trips. Golf Genius is the industry's largest supplier of comprehensive tournament management solutions with nearly 11,000 customers in 63 countries. It is also the largest supplier in terms of annual revenues.

Today, all TMS suppliers (hereinafter "Suppliers") provide Software as a Service ("SaaS"), also described as "cloud based". Furthermore, most Suppliers offer a mobile app for live scoring and other functions. While some Suppliers make exaggerated claims about the number of customers they serve and degree of usage, one way to evaluate a company's market success and forward momentum is to look at independent data illustrating a company's actual number of mobile app downloads (which would be an upper bound for the number of true customers – not everyone who downloads a mobile app actually uses it). Data for 2025 and early 2026 are presented in Appendix B of this report.

Please note this guide is focused mainly on Suppliers of TMS. A second companion guide focuses on software and customer support.

The Three Components of a Solution

When selecting a TMS, Customers are seeking a complete solution. The complete solution has three important components:

Customers need to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all three of these components in order to find the solution that best meets their needs. At a high level, some important considerations include:

Software:

• A complete range of features and functions that fully satisfy current operational needs
• A history of regular product updates that demonstrates the capability to meet future Customer requirements in a timely way
• A high and sustained standard of quality
• A proven track record of reliability and scalability
• A history of rapidly adopting innovative technologies that drive more value for users
• Technical integrations with other software products used in golf operations
• Product development that is directly influenced by customer requirements and needs
• Customer case studies (references) that evidence successful adoption and effective usage

Support:

• Rapid response and knowledgeable customer support that supports a fast paced, high pressure work environment
• Trained experts that have deep experience solving customer issues in real time
• Customer support personnel that know golf, including PGA Professionals
• Support available across all relevant time zones 24/7/365
• Multi-channel support: text, phone, email
• Option for on-site event support and execution
• Robust online Knowledge Base for fast, complete answers, including video "how to's"
• A large, trained labor pool making it easier for a Customer to hire experienced personnel
• A product certification program ensuring an ongoing flow of trained experts entering the workforce
• Stellar customer reviews of their experiences using customer support

This guide is focused on the third component of a total solution, the Supplier. Before diving into the important details, here are some high level considerations for this component:

Supplier:

• Financial performance, stability, capitalization, investors, possible "going concern" issues
• "Putting the customer first" Terms of Service — Data Ownership
• Data Protection and Security
• Security and Privacy Policy explaining what data is collected and how it is used while ensuring strict compliance with privacy laws
• System reliability, resilience and availability
• Scalability — handling growth
• Pricing transparency
• Term, cancellation, auto-renewal and refund policies
• Major golf industry partnerships and relationships
• Executive team experience

Choosing A Supplier

When selecting a mission-critical system, the Supplier's long-term business performance and evidence of strong customer satisfaction are key purchase factors. Choosing a TMS is a "bet your business" decision. Like product and support factors, Supplier risk should always be investigated and considered.

Financial Strength

When evaluating Suppliers, financial stability and performance is an obvious and important place to start. The number of years a supplier has been in business is significant because a new supplier in any industry usually carries the risk of heightened financial instability compared to established providers. Key financial considerations include a Supplier's capital structure, revenues and profitability, cash position, debt, customer churn, and dependency on a single or small number of large clients. Is recurring subscription revenue growing, flat, or shrinking? Healthy gross margins are important for funding Supplier reinvestment in product R&D and support. Sources of funding for present and current operations should at least satisfy the accounting principle of a "going concern", which assumes a business will continue operating for the foreseeable future. Red flags include recurring operating losses, negative cash flows from operations, or working capital deficiencies (current liabilities exceeding current assets), which may signal an inability to sustain operations.

Data Ownership

Customer data is one of a businesses' most valuable and sensitive assets, and giving up ownership or control of customer data exposes a Customer to legal, financial and strategic risks. However, in the course of everyday operations, a TMS necessarily relies on the use of Customer data, including what is legally referred to as "Personally Identifiable Information ("PII"). Examples include email addresses, phone numbers, billing information, usernames, analytics, location data based on IP addresses, and user-generated content such as messages and notes tied to a particular individual.

One of the most important subjects in a Supplier's Terms of Service Agreement is the language regarding ownership of Customer data. Look for contractual language such as: "Customer retains all rights, title and interest in Customer Data", and "The Supplier has only a limited license to use Customer Data to provide the service." Many Suppliers vaguely or ambiguously address the issue of data ownership. Some Suppliers even have broad licenses to use, aggregate and profit from your data.

Data Protection

Suppliers handling customer data — and PII in particular — assume two distinct obligations. The first is transparency: being explicit about what rights they claim over Customer data. The second is security: 1) ensuring that unauthorized parties cannot access, alter, or copy data, and, 2) ensuring that if Customer data is illicitly accessed by unauthorized parties, that data are fully encrypted. The following sections explain what Customers should demand from any Supplier they entrust with their data.

Penetration Testing

Cybersecurity evolves constantly as threat actors develop increasingly sophisticated tools, requiring Suppliers to continually bolster their defenses. A proven way to evaluate these defenses is through third-party penetration testing, where an independent security firm simulates real-world attacks to probe a Supplier's systems.

A reputable penetration testing firm will produce a detailed report documenting the scope of testing, the methodology used, and any vulnerabilities discovered. A Customer evaluating a new Supplier should determine whether or not regular penetration testing is performed, by whom, and should request evidence of the most recent test.

Even with robust cyber defenses, breaches can occur. Encryption is therefore essential: all Customer data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit (i.e., encrypted when transmitted over the Internet and encrypted when stored on external servers in the cloud), so that any data an attacker manages to reach is unreadable and unusable.

Customers should confirm this "best practice" with any prospective Tournament Management Supplier.

PCI Compliance

Many Suppliers offer payment processing, typically through third-party providers such as Stripe or Worldpay, as part of their TMS offering. Every business is well aware that a credit card data breach can be a catastrophic event triggering mass card reissuance, potential for fraudulent transactions, legal exposure and a loss of trust among Supplier's customers. Therefore, it's critical that Suppliers handling credit card transactions be required to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) — a set of security requirements governing how cardholder data is processed, stored, and transmitted.

PCI compliance is assessed across four levels based on transaction volume. Suppliers should be prepared to share their PCI certificate of attestation with prospective Customers, and Customers should ask for it.

Additional Security Requirements

PCI DSS compliance encompasses several distinct and mandatory testing requirements. Penetration testing, as described above, is not only a security best practice — it is explicitly required under PCI DSS. Suppliers offering payment processing must conduct penetration tests at least annually (and following any significant changes to their infrastructure) using qualified internal or external testers. The results are submitted as evidence during PCI DSS assessments.

Vulnerability scanning is a separate and complementary requirement. Where penetration testing actively attempts to exploit weaknesses, vulnerability scanning uses Approved Scanning Vendors (ASVs) to systematically identify known security gaps across all in-scope networks and systems. This auditing must also be performed on a regular basis.

For Level 1 suppliers, the highest and most stringent of the four compliance levels, a complete assessment must be conducted by a PCI Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) — an independent, PCI-certified firm that evaluates all security controls across the cardholder data environment. This assessment produces both a Report of Compliance (ROC) documenting the detailed findings, and the Attestation of Compliance (AOC) that Customers may request.

Finally, Suppliers that use network segmentation controls such as firewalls or isolated network segments to limit the scope of their cardholder data environment are required to conduct segmentation testing every six months, verifying that no unauthorized pathways exist between environments.

Privacy Policy and Data Security

Most Suppliers offer TMS that are cloud based, meaning they store the application and data on hyperscaler infrastructure such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle or others. As noted above, this data is both valuable and often sensitive. It is incumbent on the Supplier to protect Customer data no matter where it resides. If a Customer does not exercise appropriate due diligence to insure that the Supplier is obligated to protect data from theft by third parties or improper use by the Supplier, then the Customer has potential legal liability in the case of a data leak or illicit use by the Supplier. A Supplier's Terms of Service should ensure transparency (specifying the personal data collected and shared), and legal compliance (GDPR in the EU, CCPA/ CPRA in California, PIPEDA in Canada), with other relevant privacy laws.

A Supplier's Terms of Service (sometimes called Terms of Use) and Privacy Policy, control the Supplier obligations. It is important to carefully review these terms. Customers should also review and understand a Supplier's mitigation strategies to reduce the risks of relying on external servers.

Product Reliability and Resilience

Software that is unavailable to the Customer, or the Customer's golfers, has zero value. Therefore, a mission critical TMS must be designed to prevent catastrophic failure and prioritize availability. In software architecture terms, the system should employ a highly available database model with multiple copies of the database residing in different locations. These database copies are kept in sync within a few milliseconds by the database software.

At the scale of Golf Genius Tournament Management, the database is divided into "shards" – whereby one very large database is divided into a set of smaller databases. This approach (which is considered a best practice for mission critical software architecture) both increases performance (many disks from which to simultaneously retrieve data) and minimizes the time required to restore data from backups (in the event of a catastrophic failure where both a shard and its high availability copy are corrupted).

In addition to maintaining high availability databases, data backups should be taken on a regular basis so that Customer data can be recovered in a defined amount of time in the event of a complete loss of data. The more database shards there are, the smaller each database, which results in faster backup and restore times. There are several factors that determine maximum recovery time, and the system must be architected carefully to minimize recovery time.

These mission critical databases should be proactively monitored 7 x 24 x 365 and trigger immediate corrective action when any potential issues arise. Golf Genius employs a third-party service provider to maintain this level of monitoring and any required emergency response.

All of these investments to minimize disruptions and maximize system availability are part of the Golf Genius commitment to being a highly reliable mission critical partner for all our Customers.

Scalability

Scalability is another crucial performance characteristic for a TMS. The system must readily handle seamless growth in number of events, users and data without any performance degradation. If a system cannot scale, it risks becoming overloaded and may slow down or fail.

Golf Genius Tournament Management is engineered from the ground up to handle peak loads (e.g., seasonal spikes) and future growth. The system has proven its ability to handle highly demanding transaction loads that occur seasonally. For example, on a peak season day last year, Golf Genius Tournament Management managed 5,542 events and 289,985 rounds of golf.. Thousands of Golf Genius Tournament Management Customers successfully ran events that day and the system performed flawlessly.

As noted above, Golf Genius contracts with third-party service providers to achieve 7 x 24 x 365 monitoring (including advanced tools and automatic alerts), consistent response time at any level of load, and emergency response to ensure high availability and exceptional uptime. Although taking place "behind the scenes", seamless scalability and robust server performance is extremely important for Customers who rely on a TMS to effectively manage their tournament and event operations under any and all conditions.

Pricing

Besides being a "fair exchange of value", software pricing must be fully transparent to the Customer. Determine whether total TMS cost is determined by predictable and fixed subscription costs alone. Be alert for additional (and unpredictable) charges from some Suppliers –– for example, a per transaction cost. If TMS usage generates transaction charges, carefully understand just what events trigger this additional cost to the Customer.

Another way some Suppliers generate revenue is to charge for their golfers' usage of the mobile application that is in fact part of their overall solution. This pricing model transfers a financial obligation to their end-customers for functionality that is necessary for a comprehensive TMS. These Suppliers often compare their price to competing Suppliers without being clear about mobile charges.

Are there other ways in which the TMS Supplier generates revenue from the customer? Besides subscription fees, suppliers can receive transaction fees, end-customer charges for mobile usage, advertising revenue, or an upcharge on credit card processing fee.

Term, Cancellation, Refunds

Customers pay a subscription fee to a Supplier, typically for unlimited use during a defined term (for example, monthly, quarterly or annually). What happens when the term ends? Many suppliers employ an "auto renewal" policy. Unless the Customer notifies the supplier before the term ends, the Customer subscription is automatically renewed and the Customer's credit card is charged. This policy can be frustrating and costly for a Customer who forgets to inform a Supplier (or misses a deadline to inform a Supplier) to cancel their subscription contract. This scenario often occurs because the subscription term end date was never properly tracked by the Customer.

Other Suppliers

How do other TM Suppliers handle auto renewal? One Supplier states "no contract; cancel anytime". But many Customers likely will not carefully review "the fine print": "Annual plans are billed in advance for a twelve month term and are nonrefundable to the fullest extent permitted by law." As is the case with other suppliers, "cancel" does not necessarily mean "refund".

Another Supplier permits cancellation, but without refund:

"ON THE RENEWAL DATE, YOUR DESIGNATED PAYMENT METHOD WILL BE CHARGED THE SUBSCRIPTION FEE. YOUR PERIODIC SUBSCRIPTION FEE WILL BE THE SAME AS YOUR INITIAL CHARGES UNLESS YOU ARE OTHERWISE NOTIFIED AT LEAST THIRTY (30) DAYS IN ADVANCE OF ANY RENEWAL DATE. YOU MAY TERMINATE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AT ANY TIME, FOR ANY REASON, BY FOLLOWING THE TERMINATION PROCEDURES SET FORTH ON OUR SITE OR IN THE APP. ONCE YOUR ACCOUNT IS TERMINATED, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT WE MAY WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU PERMANENTLY DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT AND ALL DATA ASSOCIATED WITH IT. Payments are nonrefundable and there are no refunds or credits for partially used subscription periods. Following any cancellation, however, you will continue to have access to the Services through the end of your current billing period."

Some competitors have no published Terms of Service and therefore are silent on the terms of auto-renewal, cancellations and refunds.

Availability of TMS-Trained PGA Professionals

In most cases, the users of a TMS at a private club or public facility are PGA Professionals. Typically, the actual "hands on" users of the TMS are Assistant PGA Professionals rather than the Head Professional or Director of Golf. As you know, many Assistant PGA professionals move through different clubs over their careers using their accumulated training and experience to pursue a Head Professional position. Every year, many clubs need to recruit new PGA professionals.

Given the importance of the TMS to the golf operation, many golf facilities seek to hire new staff that can be "TMS proficient" on their first day of work. Because Golf Genius is a long established and industry leading TMS Supplier, the labor pool of Assistant PGA Professional's with operating knowledge of the Golf Genius Tournament Management System is large and geographically dispersed. It is very common to see PGA job postings that require Golf Genius Tournament Management experience.

Supplier Partnerships

Customers invariably rely on a small constellation of software products to manage their golf operations. TMS Suppliers who offer a range of technical integrations with the providers of complementary products add significant value to managing operations. It is important for a Customer to investigate the number and nature of a Supplier's technical integrations.

Executive Team

Experienced managers bring deep industry expertise and a range of honed management skills to a business. An executive team's prior track record is a good indicator of future success, and a team that demonstrably invests resources, both capital and human, in customer success is likely to be a great supplier partner. Above all, supplier executives that articulate a strategy and vision that aligns with your future goals and expectations is a strong basis for a long term, mutually successful business relationship.

Appendix A: Who owns your data?

Golf Genius makes it clear that the Customer owns their data.

This Appendix reviews the data ownership positions of other TM suppliers.

© Golf Genius Software