Payment, Pricing, Discounts and Refunds

This article covers everything related to money on your tournament or clinic: accepting payments, what to charge, discounts, and refunds. These settings live on the Configure Payments and Pricing & Discounts steps when you create or edit an event.

This setting will result in all dollar values being removed from the registration workflow. If you do not want money displayed or involved at all in any way, enable this setting. This will automatically turn off if you enable any other money-related feature.

This is for tournaments where you want it to appear completely free, or you want to handle anything related to money yourself without it being mentioned or displayed in ANY way online.

This can be enabled once you have a Stripe or PayPal account connected. When you enable this, users will have the option to pay for their registration online through AskFRED, and the proceeds of that payment go to your connected payment account. This will NOT require payment, only make it an option for a user.

If both a Stripe and a PayPal account are connected, you choose which provider to use with the Payment Provider selector. Only connected providers can be selected, and only one can be active at a time. You can change the selection until your first payment comes in.

If you enable this setting, someone who has not paid will be marked with the "pending" status and will not be considered a valid registration unless you manually approve them. We extracted this setting as a distinct piece of functionality that you can independently configure at your own desire.

If you have configured your tournament to accept payments online and also require payment to register, we give the user a configurable time window to complete their payment or else their registration is removed. We send them a reminder email 30 minutes before the period has elapsed, as well, to make sure they know.

There are currently three settings: 1 hour, 1 day, or close of registration. By default, 1 hour is selected. This means that once a user saves their registration, they have 1 hour to pay or else their registration will be automatically removed. If you select "close of registration", we will give the fencer a 30 minute grace period no matter what — the purpose of this is to allow them to register at the very last second, but then still have ~30 minutes to pay for that registration instead of it being auto-deleted immediately.

We made this change in order to prevent an overly messy registration list, issues with events that have registration caps, as well as confusion with people trying to pay at the door.

Tiered pricing lets you charge a different registration fee before an early deadline or after a late deadline. The regular fee (set on the Details step) applies in between.

A few notes:

Discounts are available when online payments are enabled and a membership requirement is set on the event. There are two kinds.

A flat amount off the registration total for any fencer registering from a selected club.

A per-event discount for A- and B-rated fencers, based on each fencer's current USA Fencing rating for that event's weapon.

When online payments are enabled, you can choose a refund policy to display on your event page so fencers understand your expectations. If you also allow fencers to refund themselves (below) but choose a policy that suggests otherwise — for example, "no refunds" — AskFRED will warn you that the displayed policy may not match the actual experience.

By default, refunds of payments run through the Tournament Organizer. If you enable this setting, users can destroy their registration and refund themselves on their own without your involvement. This is only possible while the tournament's registration window is open.

This is a setting that we ask the TO to deliberately enable, because it can lead to some unexpected and/or malicious behaviors. Stripe does its best to prevent this, but things of this nature are still possible. If you have questions about this, please reach out.