Post-dated cheques!

[Kelso]

Dee

I have every sympathy for you in having cheques rejected by your bank, and dealing with post-dated cheques.

We need to put a stop to this practice which has been initiated by well intentioned but misguided people attempting to help people with apparent financial problems.
It is simply putting off the day of reckoning.
If I may misquote Benjamin Franklin..."In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and entry fees."
Or (misquote) Margaret Mitchell..."Death, taxes and entry fees! There's never any convenient time for any of them."

If these people really wanted to help they might consider paying the entry fee for the person they wish to help!

The rule in the Slalom Year Book states:
C12 UKC12.3
Incorrect or incomplete entries should be rejected by the Organiser, in particular if they are illegible, or lack the correct fee or do not show membership number.

I consider that the fee has only been received when it is confirmed as "cleared funds" in our bank account.
Until that time, I do not consider the fee has been received.
If you agree with this, then if you are unable to obtain the fee at your bank, the rule book as quoted above states that you should reject the entry.

And if you have any cost involved in re-presenting a cheque, I consider it reasonable to continue to reject the entry until such time as you have been reimbursed, so that the full fee has been received by the organiser.

[Dee]

I can't think of another sport event that I have been involved in where people think that claiming a refund for late cancellation is their right but I have had the odd run in with those that do when running slaloms..

A couple of years ago I would only get a few cancellations at most. This year I've had far more and this is for an event early in the season. Although I'm happy to pass on the place to another paddler I am now refusing refunds as I've already paid the cheques in. What is interesting as most reasons given for refund requests are injuries/doctors advice, but one of those when refused a refund decided to paddle anyway No wonder I'm getting cynical

[Debs]

I think the sooner an online entry/payment system is sorted the better.
Most bank accounts are planning on getting rid of cheque books and some already have, I have had to talk very nicely to family members and ask them to write cheques for me in exchange for cash, so I can send in entries. I have one account where I can get bankers cheques which is ok for the first half of the season but not for the second half as bankers cheques are dated the day you draw them. I would think an online payment system would also be easier to do refunds. People's bank accounts would be debited immediately rather than not knowing when the cheque is going to be banked.

Another suggestion is to stagger the release of race entry information through the first half of the season. Still publish the calendar in November so that people can book time off work but as we saw slightly at the beginning of this year, hold back the entry details. They could the be released periodically/monthly to give everyone a fair chance at getting an entry.

As for death, taxes and entry fees - do we really want our sport to become inaccessible to all???? Do we want it to become an elitist sport where only the paddlers that can afford to send all their entries in in January will get an entry???
I certainly hope not!
All sport should be accessible to all, that is how we find the best paddlers! How many David Florences, Joe Clarke's, Fiona Pennies, etc... would not be discovered?

[Debs]

Dee

We need to put a stop to this practice which has been initiated by well intentioned but misguided people attempting to help people with apparent financial problems.
It is simply putting off the day of reckoning.
If I may misquote Benjamin Franklin..."In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and entry fees."
Or (misquote) Margaret Mitchell..."Death, taxes and entry fees! There's never any convenient time for any of them."

If these people really wanted to help they might consider paying the entry fee for the person they wish to help!.

I am speechless!!!

[Dee]

I don't think the advice is necessarily about the ability to pay. I think it is a genuine belief that this is the right thing to do, possibly because of requests by organisers running late season events. The advisers may be wrong but I have no doubt they genuinely thought that they were correct and just being helpful!

I have to say that online entries have proved much easier to manage (though it is probably true to say that coding the system is proving very time consuming)

[TobyLerone]

The slalom model for entries is tricky when it comes to translating to an online entry system... Unless there's a single payment point (i.e. one account that receives all monies) it becomes very hard to implement and roll out to each club. It would require clubs (as some have already done) to set-up their own way of receiving and processing entries on their own websites.

From my technical point of view (and opinion), the system to replace entry cards/cheques I believe should be centralised, similar in that respect to EntryCentral and similar. Entries are tracked to an event and then periodically the monies are distributed back to the clubs (via a manual operation point of view - due to PCI compliance I believe this may be the only manual task - generated from an automatic system report). Subsequently the centralised system could then be tied into other admin tasks such as start lists, checking bib numbers (or perhaps even being able to request them).

The reason this issue keeps raising itself is any system of this nature isn't a quick fix to implement and as a result would require considerable technical investment. I feel there needs to be a panel of community members/experts to help champion and draw up a solution to pave the way for the future. I for one am happy to help in this manner.

[Dee]

The slalom model for entries is tricky when it comes to translating to an online entry system... Unless there's a single payment point (i.e. one account that receives all monies) it becomes very hard to implement and roll out to each club. It would require clubs (as some have already done) to set-up their own way of receiving and processing entries on their own websites.

From my technical point of view (and opinion), the system to replace entry cards/cheques I believe should be centralised, similar in that respect to EntryCentral and similar. Entries are tracked to an event and then periodically the monies are distributed back to the clubs (via a manual operation point of view - due to PCI compliance I believe this may be the only manual task - generated from an automatic system report). Subsequently the centralised system could then be tied into other admin tasks such as start lists, checking bib numbers (or perhaps even being able to request them).

The reason this issue keeps raising itself is any system of this nature isn't a quick fix to implement and as a result would require considerable technical investment. I feel there needs to be a panel of community members/experts to help champion and draw up a solution to pave the way for the future. I for one am happy to help in this manner.

Whilst I agree it's tricky, what we have created for Shepperton has been very much done so with the aim of rolling out to other clubs. We are not storing or even receiving debit card/credit card details directly, but for everyone's benefit using a third party for this.

Over the years there has been regular discussions on this forum about setting up a group and at one point some of us did sort of make a start, but with everyone being geographically separate, coming from hugely disparate technological backgrounds and having differing amounts of time at different times of the year, it never really got off the ground.

Hence, I've gone ahead (with Forbes) and created a system (well am still creating really). It won't be perfect (no system ever is!) but certainly the responses from paddlers has been really positive, so what we're currently working on is a friendly back end for organisers. A few clubs have been in touch with me, so I'm hoping that next year they will come on board.

In terms of time invested so far, we haven't measured it, and it's been overlapping with Sheppy planning, but at a guess heading for 1000 man hours. I'm expecting to double that by the end of the year, but should have a flexible, robust and friendly system by then. In terms of costs, paddlers are paying directly for transaction costs and very slightly more which is going towards hosting costs. We are covering the rest of the hosting costs ourselves for now at least. We may look at increasing transaction costs very slightly to cover more of this (to 2.5 or 2.9% maybe), but the more clubs that come on board the more viable it will be, so we will review towards end of year.

If you want to post more on a system can we move to "my" thread to avoid taking this one further off topic