Lost property

Members → Lost Property. Every club has a drawer behind the bar with a fleece, three pairs of glasses, a measure and somebody’s car keys in it. It works perfectly well right up until the person who knows what is in it is away — at which point a member asking after a jumper is told to have a look themselves, and the club has just invited somebody to rummage through everybody else’s belongings.

📷 Take the photograph

It is the first thing the form asks for, and it matters more than the words. “Blue fleece” describes forty fleeces and settles nothing; a photograph settles it in one glance, at a distance, without anybody opening the drawer. The description is optional as long as there is a picture.

📍 Where it is kept is never published

There is a “kept where” box and it is admin-only, on purpose. The public list shows the picture and the description and stops there. A club that publishes “gold bracelet” alongside “in the unlocked cupboard in the green hut” has published a shopping list.

✍️ Handing it over

Press Collected, pick the member or type a name for somebody who is not one, and ask them to sign on the screen with a finger. The signature is stored against that collection rather than against the item, so an item collected, and later found to have been somebody else’s, never carries the wrong person’s signature forward.

🧹 The charity-shop run

The middle tab lists everything that has sat there longer than your club’s patience — eight weeks unless you change it. Mark what is going and record where it went. Nothing is ever deleted, including things given away: a member asking in March gets an answer rather than a shrug, which is the whole reason for keeping a list rather than a drawer.

🌐 Putting it on your website

Add the [pvl_lost_property] shortcode to a page, or to the members’ app. Somebody who has lost their glasses can check from home before driving over.

Common questions

Do we have to photograph everything?

No — a description on its own is fine. But an entry with neither a description nor a photograph is refused, because that is a row nobody can ever match to anything.

Somebody who is not a member has come for something.

Leave the member box on “somebody who is not a member” and type their name. Visitors leave things behind more often than members do.

Can we change eight weeks to something else?

Yes. Anything from a week to two years. Clubs with a small drawer tend to choose less; clubs with a cupboard tend to choose more.

What happens if we log something by mistake?

Edit it, or mark it as given away with a note saying so. There is no delete, deliberately — a list that can be tidied up afterwards cannot answer the question it exists to answer.

Is the signature legally binding?

It is a squiggle proving somebody stood there and took the item, not evidence for a court, and it is stored small on that basis. For anything genuinely valuable, the useful record is the photograph, the date and the name beside it.