Direct Payments

Direct Payments make payments directly to your Race Bank Account.  This reduces overhead and gets money to your race as fast as possible.

This will eventually replace the old system of the registration company holding your money and paying you at some future time. In addition to delivering money faster, this type of system is being encouraged by the IRS as well as the credit card networks like VISA to prevent money laundering and terrorist funding activities on the Internet.

How the Money Flows
When a runner completes a transaction on RunSignUp, we use a “payment gateway” service provided by Braintree. Braintree then makes calls to the various credit card networks. The credit card networks coordinate the transfer of funds from the runner’s credit/debit card account and deposits those into the appropriate accounts depending on the instructions from RunSignUp and Braintree.

The transfer of funds takes 2 business days – so transactions on Monday can be ready for deposit on Wednesday.  RunSignUp is offering the choice of making deposits Daily, Weekly or Monthly.  Note that there will always be a two day delay between the transactions that you see happening on RunSignUp and the deposit in your account. This is due to the credit card system and not RunSignUp.

The biggest advancement in this process of doing deposits is being provided by Braintree Marketplace.  This is a new innovation that has been very positively reviewed here and here and here. It also sets up interesting options to make mobile payments very easy as well.

Set-Up
Set-up can be done at any time from the Race Wizard. Existing races can make the switch at any time.

To set this up, you will need to know your bank account information as well as your organization’s TaxID.  For a non-profit, this is your 501-(c)(3) number and for-profit, this is your EIN number. The person filling out the information will also need to enter the last 4 digits of your social security number.

When you enter this information, Braintree is doing a number of automated checks with things like OFAC, KYC and Mastercard MATCH before being approved as a sub-merchant. This is obviously to prevent fraud and ensure compliance with IRS rules.

You can fill this out later if you do not have it when you create your race. In the mean time you will paid via the Manual method.

Payment Frequency
You can select Daily, Weekly (Monday Processing) or Monthly (first Monday of the month) payments.

Reports
We have updated all of the reporting.  This includes new reports that will allow you to drill down into the details on each deposit as well as by day. This will be important since credit card batch settlement currently happens at 10PM, so transactions for a Daily Deposit would be from 10PM-10PM – overlapping two day