Best Settings for Tracking in golfity

Most golfers open golfity, start a round, and never touch the settings screen. That works, but a few minutes of setup changes what your data can actually tell you six months from now. The golfity settings that matter most are your benchmark, your distance unit, your club list, and the input mode you pick when a round starts.

Here is how to configure each one, and what breaks if you get it wrong.

The golfity Settings That Change Your Numbers

Two settings live under Settings → Preferences and directly affect your strokes gained analysis. The rest affect how much data you capture.

Benchmark: pick one slightly better than you

golfity offers PGA Tour, scratch, and 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 handicap benchmarks. The default is PGA Tour, and for most amateurs that is the wrong choice.

A 16 handicap compared against Tour players sees something like -8.5 strokes gained total. Every category is deep red. There is no signal in that. You already knew you are not on Tour.

Compare the same round against a 15 handicap benchmark and the picture separates:

• Off the tee: +0.4
• Approach: -1.2
• Around the green: +0.1
• Putting: -0.3

Now you have a target. Approach play is costing you more than a stroke per round against players at your own level. Set the benchmark one level above where you play now: a 14 handicap should use the 10, a 22 should use the 20. More on the reasoning in why comparing to a 10 handicap beats comparing to a pro.

Distance unit: set it once and leave it

Yards or meters. The setting is trivial, but switching it halfway through a season makes your club distance averages harder to read at a glance, since older rounds display in the new unit while your mental reference points are still in the old one. Pick the unit you actually think in on the course and stop touching it.

Set Up Your Clubs Before Round Three

Settings → Your Clubs holds the list golfity shows you every time you log a shot. The default list is generic. If you carry a 5 wood and no 3 iron, and the picker still offers a 3 iron, you will eventually tap the wrong one at speed.

Editing the list does two things: it speeds up shot entry, and it keeps your club distance data clean. A club you never hit but leave in the list adds nothing. A club you hit weekly but never added means those shots get logged under something else. The full walkthrough is in setting up your clubs in golfity.

Do this before your third round. After that you are correcting history instead of recording it.

Visibility: Decide Once, Not Per Round

The visibility preference — public, friends only, or private — sets the default for every new round. You can still override it on a single round at setup, which is the point: pick the default that fits most of your golf, then change it for the exception.

Players tracking a competitive season often set private as the default and flip specific rounds to public. Players using golfity socially do the reverse.

Input Mode: The Setting You Choose Every Round

Input mode is not in Preferences. It appears when you start a round, and it is the single biggest lever on data quality.

Shot by Shot captures every shot’s location, and it is the only mode that produces full strokes gained by category. Hole by Hole takes score, putts, and fairway per hole. Total Score takes a final number.

A useful pattern: shot by shot for rounds you care about, hole by hole for casual golf. Mixing modes is fine, since your scoring stats stay continuous either way. What you lose in the lighter modes is the category breakdown, so a season logged entirely in Total Score gives you a score trend and nothing to act on.

Club and accuracy toggles

Inside shot-by-shot mode, two toggles at round setup control how much each shot asks for. Turning off club selection and accuracy tracking keeps your strokes gained intact while cutting taps per shot roughly in half. That trade is covered in detail in skip club selection and accuracy tracking.

Leave them on when you are building club distance data or testing equipment. Turn them off when the group is playing fast and you would otherwise stop logging entirely. Half-logged rounds are worse than lightly-logged ones.

A Configuration That Works for Most Players

If you want a starting point rather than a decision tree:

1. Benchmark: one handicap level above your current index
2. Distance unit: whatever you already think in
3. Clubs: edited to match your actual bag, before round three
4. Visibility: friends only
5. Input mode: shot by shot for real rounds, hole by hole for casual ones
6. Club and accuracy toggles: on for your first 15 rounds, then optional

Run that for a season and you will have a data set worth analyzing. Change the benchmark when your handicap drops a level, and leave everything else alone.

Open golfity and check your Preferences screen before your next round. The features page covers what each part of the app does with the data once you have it.