Community,
I would appreciate advice from the users out there on how to handle summer camp payments online. As posted separately here, our Troop wants to do online payment. We primarily want to do this for summer camp as it is a large amount of money and sometimes hard to keep track of. We normally provide parents a payment schedule to hopefully spread the cost out and make the payment feel less painful. Is there any reasonable way to do this in TroopTrack?
Can we set the cost of the event as the full amount and then can people “underpay” by the due date for the first portion? For example if Camp was June 6th and cost $300. Set the event in TroopTrack as June 6 and the cost at $300. But have the parents pay $100 against that $300 by a certain date? Does TroopTrack support that type of “underpayment” approach?
Any other suggestions? Are we making this too hard? Our Troop is shying away from “money accounts”. Is that a mistake? The Troop worries about “managing people’s money”. Would being open to money accounts be the smarter way to deal with this?
Suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve
There’s no way to do this in the event itself as far as I’m aware, but you can charge the fees to their individual accounts. So you would go to all money accounts and create a bulk transaction. You would debit the amount of the first payment and check off whose account you would like to charge the fee to. The parents would then go in and make the payment to the scout account. You can later do a bulk transfer of these fees to your main money account.
For this to work on the event side though, you’d have to allow people to RSVP without paying. If you want to keep track of it through the event it would be a little more complicated I think. You’d have to go to the event and go to View All Payments. You would click on Charge Fee to whoever hasn’t paid. This would charge their “account” the full fee, but they could still pay it in installments. It would just be harder to keep track of when and if the payments were actually made if you have a large troop. I hope this makes sense.
I like the money accounts mainly because it gives the parents access to their payment records, etc. We don’t require online payments so it’s nice that it still has the flexibility that we can enter manual payments as well. It takes some playing around with to get used to, but after you get it down it’s fairly simple and very beneficial. At least for our troop it is! 