RefAssist

RefAssist is a Belgian software company, based in Hillegem, that builds one thing: the platform a sport uses to manage its referees, umpires, and match officials. It started with a request from the Royal Belgian Football Association for help with referee planning. Co-founder Dieter De Naeyer was a semi-professional referee at the time and frustrated by the lack of tools; co-founder Ken De Norre – De Groof was looking for a hard problem software could solve. RefAssist launched in 2015. By its own count it now connects more than 90,000 officials and 2,000 official managers in 11 countries, appoints more than 2 million matches a season, and covers 11 sports: football, hockey, tennis, squash, netball, basketball, Australian football, cricket, water polo, pickleball, and cycling. Several of its staff are current or former referees, which the company writes about in For referees, by referees.

The RefAssist core platform holds every official’s details, category, availability, and history — appointments, no-shows, late cancellations, suspensions. More than 50 appointment rules (a maximum number of matches a week, for example) mean the appointments screen only shows officials who are eligible and available for a match, sorted by travel distance or workload. The optional automatic appointments module calculates a whole round in seconds, balancing travel costs, an even spread of games, and how often an official sees the same team, and the appointer can still override any pick. Self-appointing lets officials pick up open matches they qualify for. Published appointments trigger notifications, and the messaging tool shows who has read each message or downloaded each file. In May 2026 RefAssist released its mobile app for officials on iOS and Android: accept or decline appointments, set recurring unavailabilities, get push notifications when a game moves, open directions to the venue, file match reports, and cast award votes.

Around that core sit add-on modules that a federation picks as it needs them. Financial calculates match fees and travel allowances per appointment, takes expense claims with receipts, and exports to payroll and accounting. Match reports and surveys builds observer, disciplinary, self-assessment, and performance reports from a visual template, and since May 2026 turns the answers into match report statistics that federations use when deciding promotions. Match video management builds a tagged clip library, and the June 2026 match video enquiries feature turns those clips into multiple-choice tests. Further modules cover courses, official registration, physical follow-up with wearables such as Polar and StatSports, distance calculation, tournaments, and disciplinary files. RefAssist is licence-based, offers an API for data uploads, and takes live competition data from PlayHQ in Australia under a partnership announced in 2022.

Its published case studies are mostly European. The Royal Belgian Football Association, which runs 300,000 games a season, reports an appointment process 80% more time-efficient, with transport costs down 25 to 30% and referees driving 1.5 million fewer kilometres a season. In Antwerp, Football Flanders went from two full days of manual planning a week to half an hour of automatic scheduling for about 650 matches, plus a few manual tweaks. The Royal Dutch Hockey Association appoints around 500 umpires, 200 observers, 100 floor managers, and 30 delegates to roughly 8,000 matches a season. Belgian Cycling, the French Basketball Federation, the Luxembourg Football Federation, the Icelandic Basketball Federation, and World Squash Officiating also appear on its site. In Australia, RefAssist runs as OfficialsHQ: the AFL’s community umpiring site calls it the one-stop shop for umpire registration, payment, and rostering, and RefAssist’s help page for officials lists OfficialsHQ registration for the AFL, Netball Australia, Cricket Australia, and Australian Sporting Schools.