Closed pilot · Washington Lodge No. 19 · Monroe, Connecticut

Modern tools for enduring institutions.

Gavel Suite is multi-tenant software for fraternal lodges — Masonic, Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows, Knights of Columbus — that handles dues collection, Trestleboard production, member tracking, and a privacy-respecting Procedural Assistant that answers questions from your own documents. It plays well with Grand View and other Grand Lodge systems; it does not try to replace them.

Access is closed, and closed on purpose.

One lodge is on Gavel Suite: Washington Lodge No. 19 in Monroe. There is no sign-up form on this page and there will not be one until the Connecticut proof-of-concept has real numbers behind it. Connecticut lodges are next in line, by invitation.

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Lodge name & number

Address · Grand Master · District Deputy

Q4 · October–December

Meetings & events

events calendar

Stated Communicationdinner 6:30 · gavel 7:30
Fellowcraft Degreerehearsal 6:00
Table Lodgesocial

Officers

officer assignments

Worshipful Masterphone · email
Senior Wardenphone · email
Secretaryphone · email
Treasurerphone · email

Committees

committee roster

Charity
Finance
Investigation

Past Masters

member history

Name · years served
Name · years served
Name · years served

Associated bodies

lodge settings

Order of the Eastern Star · Scottish Rite · York Rite

The Master's Message

written by the Worshipful Master

The Trestleboard generator's page structure. Every block but the message is filled from data the lodge has already entered — and the finished document carries the lodge's name, not ours.

Lodge administration is not hard work. It is scattered work.

The record lives in five places

A member list in a spreadsheet, dues in the Treasurer's notebook, dates in an email chain, minutes in a paper book. Reconciling them at return time is the whole problem.

Institutional memory walks out

When a Secretary steps down, twenty years of knowing how things are done goes with him. The next one starts from the files he can find.

The same documents, rebuilt every year

Each Master reproduces the Trestleboard and the agenda from the last Master's Word file, retyping officer names and meeting dates that the lodge already knows.

What it does

The work, by the chair that does it.

A lodge divides its work by office, so the software does too. Permissions follow the officer line and rotate when the chairs do. Titles are set by the lodge's organisation profile — what a Masonic lodge calls a Worshipful Master, an Elks lodge calls an Exalted Ruler.

Executive

Worshipful Master

Plan the lodge year on one calendar. Recurring meetings — second Monday of the month, gavel at 7:30 — are set once and repeat.
Produce the Trestleboard for any period: masthead, meetings, officers, committees, Past Masters and associated bodies, all from data already entered. You write the Master's Message.
Draft a meeting agenda from the calendar and the business still on the table.
See membership, finances and upcoming work on one dashboard, with read access across the lodge's records.
Close the year with a portfolio: the year's Trestleboards, attendance, finances and degree work, ready to hand to the next Master.

Administrator

Secretary

Keep the roster: active, demit, suspended, expelled, plural, deceased — with a reason code recorded on every status change.
Import the roster from a Grand View export instead of retyping it.
Track degree progression with conferral dates and proficiency, and pair candidates with mentors.
Record minutes against the agenda, archive them, and make them searchable alongside the bylaws.
Upload bylaws, Grand Lodge code, officer manuals and past proceedings to the document library.
Send email to the whole lodge, to the officers, or to members at a given status. SMS is a paid add-on the lodge switches on.
Every administrative action is written to an append-only audit log with actor, timestamp and a before-and-after diff.

Financial officer

Treasurer

Raise dues invoices on a schedule and let members pay by card or ACH through the lodge's own Stripe account — the lodge holds the account, not us.
Enter cash and cheque payments by hand. They land in the same ledger as everything else.
Read arrears in 30, 60 and 90-day buckets, with a suspension workflow the lodge configures.
Track expenses with receipt photos and pull an end-of-year profit-and-loss export.
Export the ledger as CSV that reconciles against the lodge's books. A CPA still files the return; we produce the data.

Member

Brother

Pay dues from a phone in about the time it takes to find the chequebook.
RSVP to meetings and dinners, so the lodge can plan the meal and count a quorum before the night.
See your own progression — degrees conferred, dates, proficiency standing.
Ask a question about the bylaws and get an answer with the source cited.
Install it to the home screen. It behaves like an app; there is nothing to download from a store.

Mentor

Mentor or Coach

Candidate and mentor look at the same milestones, so nobody is guessing where a candidate stands.
Track proficiency, schedule study sessions, and recommend advancement when the work is done.

Jurisdiction

District Deputy or Grand Lodge officer

Read-only visibility across the lodges in the jurisdiction — and only that jurisdiction.
Provision, suspend and audit subordinate lodges without asking each Secretary for a spreadsheet.

The assistant

Your bylaws, answerable. Privately.

Twenty years of proceedings are only useful if someone can find the paragraph that settles the question. That is the whole job here — not writing your minutes for you, not deciding anything.

Grounded in the lodge's own papers
The Secretary uploads bylaws, Grand Lodge code, officer manuals, past minutes and proceedings. Anyone with access can ask a question in plain language — what the waiting period is between degrees, what the code says about a ballot — and read the answer instead of the file.
A citation, or no answer
Every answer names the document, the section and the year it came from, so the Secretary can check it before acting on it. Nothing the assistant produces is applied on its own — a person confirms it.
One lodge cannot read another
Embeddings carry the lodge's tenant identifier, and the vector store is partitioned per lodge. A query from one lodge cannot retrieve another lodge's documents even if it reaches the store directly.

The Grand Lodge's system

Grand View stays the record. We feed it.

Grand View Systems is the official membership platform for Connecticut and other jurisdictions, and it has been the standard for fifteen years. Gavel Suite is the day-to-day toolkit that sits alongside it — the Trestleboard the Master actually sends, the dues link a member actually clicks.

01
Grand View holds the record
It is the canonical roster — status, demits, suspensions, and everything else the Grand Lodge depends on. That is not in scope for us and never will be.
02
Gavel Suite mirrors it
The lodge's roster comes across from Grand View rather than being typed in again, and can be re-synced when the Secretary asks for the latest.
03
Grand View wins any disagreement
If a member is suspended there and active here, Gavel Suite reports the conflict and takes Grand View's answer. There is no second competing record.
04
Gavel Suite adds what the record does not track
Mentor assignments, proficiency standing, committee roles, past-officer flags, how long since anyone contacted a member. These live here only.
05
The return still goes to Grand View
Dues and events happen in Gavel Suite; the annual return is produced where the Grand Lodge expects it, with cleaner data behind it. Where a lodge wants it, dues collected can be written back into Grand View's fields.

Gavel Suite is not a replacement for Grand View or any other Grand Lodge system of record, and it is not being built to become one. An officer using it should feel they are working faster inside their Grand Lodge's arrangements, never around them.

Terminology

It speaks your lodge's language.

Trestleboard for Masons, Lodge Calendar for Elks, however your bylaws name it. The lodge picks an organisation profile once and every label in the product follows — officer line, degrees, meeting types, member statuses. Individual labels can be overridden.

The same concept under four shipped organisation profiles
Concept	Masonic Blue Lodge	Elks	Odd Fellows	Knights of Columbus
Executive officer	Worshipful Master	Exalted Ruler	Noble Grand	Grand Knight
Second in line	Senior Warden	Leading Knight	Vice Grand	Deputy Grand Knight
Calendar	Trestleboard	Lodge Calendar	Lodge Calendar	Council Calendar
Regular meeting	Stated Communication	Regular Meeting	Regular Meeting	Council Meeting
Member	Brother	Member	Brother / Sister	Brother Knight
Local body	lodge	lodge	lodge	council

Seven profiles ship: Masonic Blue Lodge, Prince Hall, Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows, Knights of Columbus, and a generic profile configured from scratch. The first release is Masonic-first — the platform is built for the others, and they are onboarded as the jurisdictions come.

Privacy

Privacy is the architecture, not the policy page.

A lodge is a private association. Its roster, its finances and its records are not public data, and members extend real trust by belonging to an organisation that keeps them. That is a design constraint here, not a paragraph in a policy.

Isolation at the database, not just the app

Every lodge is a tenant, and every tenant-owned table carries a Postgres row-level-security policy. The tenant is read from the signed-in officer's token and re-asserted on every query, so an application bug cannot hand one lodge another lodge's rows.

An audit log you can actually audit

Administrative actions — member edits, payment changes, document deletions — are written to an append-only, hash-chained log with actor, timestamp and a before-and-after diff. It is retained for seven years, which matches how fraternal records are kept anyway.

We do not read the lodge's content

Product analytics measure which features get used. Not message content, not document content, not what anyone asked the assistant.

The lodge owns its data

Full CSV and JSON export on request, processed within seven business days. Thirty-day soft delete if a lodge leaves, hard delete after that. Document originals are held for the life of the subscription plus ninety days.

Where the build stands

Honest about what is finished.

Gavel Suite is a founder-built product in its first year, developed in the room with the officers using it. Here is what runs at the pilot lodge and what does not. When there are real numbers — dues collected, accounts claimed, hours the Secretary got back — they will be published with the lodge named and the method stated. There are none yet, so there are none on this page.

Running today

Member roster, degree progression and mentor assignment
Roster import from a Grand View export
Dues invoicing, manual cash and cheque entry, and the Treasurer's collected-versus-outstanding summary
Stripe checkout and payment reconciliation
Events calendar with recurring rules, event types and RSVP
Trestleboard data assembled from the calendar, officers and committees
Email and SMS gateways with audience selectors
Per-lodge terminology, role permissions and the audit log

Not yet

The Trestleboard rendered to .docx and .pdf — the data is there, the document render is not
Live card payments in production; Stripe is wired but not switched on
The Procedural Assistant — document ingestion, ritual routing and citation are in build
Scheduled Grand View sync and dues write-back
Arrears ageing reports, expense tracking, agenda builder, minutes assistant, year-in-review

Access

One lodge at a time. On purpose.

Sign-up is private. Washington Lodge No. 19 is the only lodge on Gavel Suite, and it stays that way until the Connecticut proof-of-concept has results worth showing. A lodge trusts this software with its roster, its money and its records; earning that takes proving it somewhere first, in the open, with the officers who have to live with the result.

Now
One lodge
Washington Lodge No. 19 in Monroe, Connecticut. Closed pilot, real roster, real dues, weekly contact with the officers using it.
Next
Connecticut, by invitation
Five to fifteen Connecticut lodges, chosen rather than signed up, each willing to be measured on what changed. Peer introductions and District Deputies, not advertising.
After
Statewide, then beyond
Connecticut in full, then New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — and the same product under Elks, Moose and Odd Fellows terminology.

What a Connecticut lodge needs to join the next round

A Secretary or Worshipful Master willing to champion it inside the lodge.
Around forty or more active members — enough that the administrative load is real.
Willingness to be measured, and to say plainly what did not work.

Tell us your lodge, your chair and roughly how many active members. It reaches the founder directly — there is no sales team to route around.

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