If your tee sheet goes down on a Saturday morning, the clubhouse phone turns into a live radio talk show about missed tee times. Disaster recovery isn’t a geeky checklist — it’s insurance that golfers still get to play and your staff don’t spend the day firefighting missing reservations and payment questions.
What to demand first: RTO and RPO
Two acronyms you should know before you start handing out questions: recovery time objective (RTO) — how long until the system is back online — and recovery point objective (RPO) — how much recent data you can afford to lose. For a tee-sheet platform, both matter: losing two hours of bookings is a different problem than losing yesterday’s payment tokens or member records.
Ask the vendor to state both values clearly for their production environment and any auxiliary services (booking API, reporting, payment tokens). If they give vague answers, that’s a flag.
Sample questions
– What is your contractual RTO and RPO for the tee sheet, booking API, and golfer profile data? Please state them separately.
– How are RTO and RPO measured during a real incident?
Backups: frequency, retention, and scope
Backups are only useful if they cover everything you care about and can be restored quickly. Confirm what is backed up (database, file storage, configuration, logs), how often backups occur, where backups are stored, and how long they are retained.
Don’t forget exportability: your course should be able to get a usable data export without being forced into a full migration process.
Sample questions
– What data elements are included in regular backups (tee sheet, profiles, payments metadata, scorecards)?
– Backup cadence: full, incremental, and transaction-log backups — what’s the schedule?
– Where are backups stored geographically? Are backups encrypted at rest and in transit?
– How long do you retain backups? Can the customer request a historical export?
Restore testing and proof
Backups are worthless until they’ve been restored. Ask for evidence of scheduled restore tests and the scope of those tests. You want to know frequency (quarterly, monthly), the chosen scenarios, and whether tests include full restores as well as point-in-time restores.
Sample questions
– How often do you perform full restore tests for production data?
– Can you provide recent test reports that include RTO/RPO achieved and any lessons learned?
– Do restore tests include verification that integrations (payment, tee-sheet widgets, APIs) work after a restore?
Failover, redundancy, and geographic separation
Find out whether the vendor’s environment uses active/active or active/passive architectures, whether there’s automatic failover, and whether the infrastructure is spread across multiple availability zones or regions. Ask how quickly traffic switches and whether clients need to change DNS or configuration to point to a failover endpoint.
Sample questions
– Describe your failover architecture and the expected switchover process.
– Is failover automatic or manual? How is the cutover validated?
– If you use cloud hosting, are resources deployed across multiple regions or availability zones?
Monitoring, alerting, and escalation
A plan is only as good as the people who execute it. Ask about 24/7 monitoring, alert thresholds, and the vendor’s incident escalation process. Who gets notified? What are the expected response windows? Municipal contracts often want these in writing.
See our vendor VPS monitoring checklist for practical demo questions that dig into monitoring and on-call procedures.
What to expect from a vendor’s VPS monitoring and support (practical questions for demos)
Communications plan: internal and golfer-facing
When the tee sheet is down, the right message to golfers and staff matters as much as the fix. Ask for a communications plan template that shows who notifies the course, what wording will be used for golfers, and which channels will be updated (status page, email, in-app, social). Templates should include estimated timelines for updates.
Sample questions
– Do you maintain a public status page? Will the course be listed as a contact for local updates?
– Can you provide sample customer-facing notifications for partial and full outages?
– Who on your team is the designated incident liaison for our account?
Data ownership, portability, and exit planning
Make sure your contract states that the course owns its data and can export it in a usable format. Ask about export formats, APIs, and sample timelines for a full data export or migration. If you ever decide to switch platforms, you don’t want to be scrambling for raw CSV dumps that nobody can parse.
For migration tactics and a phased cutover plan, our guide to migrating a tee sheet with minimal downtime is a useful companion during procurement discussions.
Migrating a tee sheet with minimal downtime: a 5-phase plan for courses
Payment implications and compliance
If your tee sheet integrates with a payment processor, ask how backups and restores handle payment tokens and what role the payment processor plays in recovery. Don’t guess — get the vendor to explain how payment data (or token references) are preserved and whether restores require coordination with your payment partner.
See our guide on protecting golfer payment data for practical points to raise with vendors and payment teams.
Protecting golfer payment data: best practices when your course integrates third-party processors
Red flags and deal-breakers
Watch for vague answers, refusal to provide test reports, or unwillingness to put RTO/RPO into the contract. Other red flags: backups stored in the same physical location as production without geographic separation, no documented restore tests, and no customer-facing communications plan.
If a vendor resists discussing data exportability or tries to lock access behind long lead times, that’s a procurement conversation you don’t want to wait on.
Practical procurement checklist
When you sit down with a vendor, bring this short checklist:
- Ask for written RTO and RPO for each critical service.
- Request backup schedules, retention, and encryption details.
- Require recent restore-test reports and a testing cadence.
- Confirm failover architecture and whether failover is automatic.
- Get a communications plan template and SLA on incident updates.
- Verify data ownership and export formats/timelines.
- Clarify how payment tokens are handled during backups and restores.
- Note any monitoring and on-call response SLAs.
Pair these questions with a short tabletop run-through at your course — who calls golfers, who posts to the club’s social pages, and who handles walk-ins. A little practice saves a lot of flapping when something actually breaks.
For more on reducing outage risk during busy times, read our practical guide on hosting, failover, and operational protocols that help keep a tee sheet live when golfers show up ready to blame the weather.
Reducing outage risk during peak season: VPS hosting, failover, and operational protocols
Wrap-up
Don’t let disaster recovery be a line item buried in legalese. Treat it like an operational requirement: testable, measurable, and contractual. If a vendor can’t explain how they’ll get your tee sheet and golfer data back to a usable state — quickly and with clear communication — you’re planning to run your weekend on apologies and clipboard chaos.
Considering an alternative to your current golf course software? Talk With Northpoint About GolfSuite. See whether Northpoint GolfSuite fits your course. Tell us how your golf course operates today and we can discuss what a GolfSuite installation could look like for you. Looking to replace your current golf course software? Talk with Northpoint about your tee sheet, payments, scoring, food service, fleet, grounds, and golfer experience.
