Entry system - terms and conditions

Last updated: 26 Feb 2017

Our entry system is being used more and more widely, with 5 counties and a number of clubs in spring 2017. We have therefore reached a point where we need to be clearer about who does what. This page sets out the terms of use for the 2017 summer season.

Background to the service

Our hope is to make athletics and running events more fun and easier to manage, thus allowing the sport to grow. The first step to a well-run competition is to take entries quickly and accurately, with a system that understands the sport. Athletics is complicated, with many different types of competitions and rules, and the development is an ongoing journey.

At the time being, this is essentially a not-for-profit “public service”. The total revenue we obtain from most athletics meetings is between £50 and £200, which does not cover our costs. For this service to grow, we cannot provide personalised support to individual competitions; instead we’re trying to put our time into a better automated system which you can operate yourself.

Costs and money handling

We use Stripe to take online payments.

Meeting organisers who signed up prior to 1st April 2017 are paying a basic rate of 50p + 5% on each card transaction. Thus, on a £10.00 “basket” (e.g two events at £5.00), the host club will keep £9.00. Out of the remaining £1.00, we pay about 39p in card fees, and VAT on the remainder, so we see about 50p. Users are free to change or add events, and change or add people, up to the closing date. If the new total cost is higher, they pay the difference.

If you want to use this for a free event, or one where payment happens on arrival or through separate channels, please contact us. We may charge a nominal setup fee.

Funds are transferred to your own bank account at a frequency you can set in the Stripe control panel - usually on a 7 day rolling basis.

These prices were chosen to align with the major online entry providers working at road races. However, road races often have thousands of entries and costs tens of pounds, so their revenue is many times greater.

It is likely that we may revise our prices in future.

Skills required on your side

We can give “admin rights” to multiple users from each host club or association; it’s good to have more than one, in case the regular contact is busy or away.

We assume that the designated user(s) are personally comfortable with technology, including spreadsheets and browsers, with good attention to detail; and that he or she will be around and have time to respond to enquiries about your competition. If this is not the case, you may want to discuss an enhanced service where we charge a bit more and can be the “help desk” - see below.

Initial Setup

We do not yet have a completely self-operated “setup process”, so for now (spring 2017) we will assist with the setup of your first meeting. You will need to do the following things

1. sign up for an account on the entry system
2. send us a meeting entry form, information sheet or timetable. Try to be 100% clear about who is allowed to enter what, especially if it varies with age
3. sign up for a Payments account with Stripe
4. review and test the entry process on a separate test server, before it goes live
5. undergo a short briefing, via a shared screen.

Our intention is that later this summer, you (or the appointed person) will be able to copy previous “meeting specs”, or copy from templates, so that going forwards you can set up your own competitions, test them and put them “live” at any time, without even needing our help. Several of our key meeting organisers are doing this already.

Your responsibilities

You will be the first line of support for athletes enter the meeting. Our own support address is for you and should not be given out to athletes without prior agreement.

1. Provide a public contact email address for the meeting, so queries come to you and not to us.
2. Provide the exact text copy you wish to see, do updates to this yourself through the admin interface, and check it is showing up correctly.
3. If one of your users does have a problem and you need to contact us, obtain enough information beforehand: exactly how far did they get? What error message did they see? What options were they inputting? Have they tried on a second computer? When did it happen, so we can check our logs? We will not investigate incidents caused by user error.

Our responsibilities

We aim to provide a high quality, reliable service to ALL customers, whether it’s a school fun run or county championships, with the following service level:

1. Keep the systems up and running 99.99% of the time
2. Have backup systems, hosted in a different country, available to take over within minutes if there are any serious issues at our data centre.
3. Fix genuine, reproducible bugs and issues reported by you - e.g. if an athlete is having difficulty, and you have been through the FAQs with them, you can then contact us. (We also get alerts every time there is an error, and will often be investigating before you know about it…)
4. In most cases, to respond on the same day within UK working hours (09:00-18:00), with 5 technical staff available to help.

No other entry system we know of in the UK offers the same support guarantees and depth of support.

Extra charges

The following items will be chargeable separately:

1. Custom event web sites: if you’d like a special look and feel, we are very happy to quote to implement it, and indeed we’ve designed things so we can “override” the pages for a particular competition.
2. Custom programming: if you come up with a pricing rule or entry criterion we haven’t seen before, or want something changing on a particular screen, then we are happy to discuss a paid enhancement to the system.
3. Providing your event with an “entries help desk”. If you would like this doing, so people can contact us or you can just forward an issue without even analysing it, then we can offer an enhanced package for slightly higher costs - typically £1.00 per athlete extra, or 10% of entry fees, whichever is greater
4. Spending time on financial reconciliation and reports. Our system keeps records of all online payments, which you can download or see at a glance. Club treasurers have at times wanted to reconcile things to the penny; but if you have asked us to do ad-hoc refunds, changed prices in mid-season, or you have “accepted” cash or cheque entries which were not paid online, your own Treasurer’s calculations may differ from the reports on our side. Please check the reports and Stripe panel before raising any issues.