BIG Financial Update Coming!

We typically get all excited about features related to races or clubs, like making bib labels easy or enabling corporate teams. But we have a very, very big release coming up in the next month or so that we want to let everyone know about that will provide a huge update to our financial system. There are a bunch of things that are coming, but here are the highlights (we will come out with a series of blogs explaining the details over the next month):

Direct Payments – Traditionally, we take the runner’s credit card and then run weekly reports on Mondays to make payments to races. The new system will enable us to split the race payment directly to the race and the processing fee directly to us. This means that your race will receive payments on the normal credit card payment cycle of 2 days after the credit card is charged.

Manual Payments – This is our traditional way of collecting and paying which we will continue to support for the foreseeable future. It is just not nearly as nice (or future proof) as the new system 😉

Transactions Reporting – We will now be giving races and runners simple, fast access to transactions. For example, the current system will show a weekly payment and give you the ability to drill down into Participants, Store orders and Donations, but not a simple way to see a transaction that included a family of 4 runners, a donation and 3 store purchases with 6 add-on items. This will simplify a number of processes like refunds.

New Financial Reports – All of the current financial reports are being re-done. The idea is to simplify at the top level, yet provide a ton of drill-down capability. Here are some of the new things you will be able to see:

• Financial Summary will be shorter
• Spreadsheet Download – so you will be able to see a spreadsheet with each payment on a row and columns for total race fees, donations, store items, and totals. The accountant in you will love it!
• Simple date range selection – single button to pick a calendar year report or a fiscal year report, and of course set your own date range for any financial report.
• Year-to-Year Graphical Comparison – get a quick snapshot on how your registrations are progressing this vs. last year.

This is a very large set of changes because we will be changing the structure of the underlying database as well. We will likely be having a public Beta on our test server before we move this into production, and we would appreciate getting feedback when this happens. We will also need to take the system off line for about an hour when we do the full cut-over.  During that time we will not be able to process registration or make changes to races.  We will do this off-hours and try to complete it as quickly as possible while ensuring full data integrity. And of course give everyone notice!