12/24/2013 7:12 AM
I thought I would share a few insights I ran across this year.
For years I have used Google Calendar to display to my members our most important task for the year. I simply opened an account with google and built a yearly google calendar which I had attached to the bottom of my blog as an interactive calendar.
This year I stepped up my game by adding extra calendars to it which other departments started using for anything from booking club functions, course tournaments or employee scheduling. The best use I have found for it is the ability to build a daily work board which I use in building my budget. I have installed the dates of everything from cutting, verticutting or rolling the greens to every spray application I plan on making which, also includes all of the chemicals I plan on spraying. Now I can simply open the calendar at any time to see what our plans are for the next day, week or month. our membership can also access it at anytime to see what is going on. After building a master plan for the year on the calendar I simply took each spray application and pasted it to an excell sheet where I added the needed budget numbers for the application. This allows me to build my chemical budget fairly easily and making changes is as easy as a few clicks.
Another great tip for those who want to build a better plan for their course is using Google earth and google planimeter. Google earth had updated their overhead photos last year (for my course it was early May) and I found that I could copy sections to my computer. I use the overheads to layout the course on a hole by hole basis in order to get great visuals. I use their planimeter to measure out every part of my course. For those who may of never used planimeter it is a site that has the overhead of your course which allows you to place pin points around an object or area in order to get the square footage of the area mapped out. I have now done this to every part of my course and can tell you how many acres of fairways, tees, ponds or greens we have. This is the closest you can get to the actual measurements. So now I have every part of our course mapped out and placed in files for their respective areas with overhead pictures to show them.
I think it took me about 10 hours to map out the whole course and get the measurements logged in.
Just thought I would pass it on. Anyone else have some great tips to pass on?