Payments and change requests

What this is for

Two things that come up constantly once registration is open: getting paid,
and studios asking to change something after they’ve hit send. This page
covers both from your side.

The money is yours, in your account

This is the most important thing to understand, so it’s worth stating
plainly:

You are the merchant. The money settles into your bank account.

Herding Cats doesn’t hold your registration money, doesn’t sit between you
and it, and doesn’t pay it out to you later. A studio pays; it lands in
your account on your normal payout schedule.

The card on the Registration page says it the same way: You’re the
merchant of record: money settles to your bank, refunds are yours to
issue.

Refunds and disputed charges are handled in your own payment account, not
here.

Turning on card payments

You’ll need a payment account. Setting one up is a guided process run by
the payment company, not by us — we just hand you off and get the answer
back.

If you’ve made changes on their side and the badge looks stale, click
Refresh status.

What a studio sees

Once you’re Live, a studio that has submitted sees a Payment card
with Total, Paid, and Balance, and a button reading
Pay {amount} online. It takes them to a secure hosted checkout page.

Nobody at your company, and nobody at Herding Cats, ever sees a card
number. There is no card box anywhere in Herding Cats.

If you turned on deposits, they also get Pay {amount} deposit instead,
which only appears when a deposit is genuinely less than the full balance.

Setting up your payment rules

These live on each event’s Registration tab, in the Payments
section.

• Accept checks — Studios submit first and mail a check; you record it
  from the Registration inbox.
• Allow paying a deposit now, balance later — turn it on and then say
  what the deposit is: A set amount per entry or
  A percentage of the total.

Recording a check

When an envelope shows up, write it down.

The studio gets an email saying their payment was recorded, and it appears
in their own payment history right away.

If you typed a check wrong, your team can delete that line and enter it
again. Card payments can’t be deleted — they’re a real record of a real
charge.

The invoice a studio can print

Every studio can open View / print invoice on their own registration.
It’s numbered (something like REG-A4F91C22), lists their entries and
what’s been paid, and shows the Balance due. The footer tells them to
put that number on the memo line of a check.

You don’t have to generate anything. It’s always there and always current.

Putting a registration on your books

The printable invoice above is for the studio. It doesn’t appear in
Receivables — so a studio sitting on $8,400 of unpaid entries shows a
zero balance on its statement, and none of that money turns up in your
aging buckets.

Invoice on the studio’s row in Submissions fixes that. It raises a
real, numbered invoice (INV-0043) for what the registration owes, and
from that moment the money behaves like every other receivable you have.

What changes once you’ve done it:

• The studio’s statement shows the balance, and the invoice lands in
  the right aging bucket from the date they submitted.
• Every payment already recorded — checks you typed in, cards they
  paid — is carried across, so the invoice opens showing the right
  balance, not the full amount.
• New payments keep up on their own. Record a check, or a studio pays
  by card, and the invoice updates itself. There is no second thing to
  remember.
• Refunds come across too, as negative lines that put the balance back up.

You’ll only see the button if Receivables is part of your plan.

Change requests

Once a studio has submitted — or once your edit deadline has passed — they
can no longer edit their own registration. Instead they send you a change
request: a short note saying what they need.

This exists so those asks stop living in your inbox. Every request is on
the record, attached to the right registration, with your answer next to
it.

Approving or declining one

There are two ways to approve, and picking the right one saves you the
work.

What happens after Approve & reopen

Their registration flips to Reopened for edits and shows up that way
in your Submissions list, so you can see who you’re still waiting on.
It stays in the inbox the whole time — the fees are still counted, and a
check that arrives mid-edit still records normally. You can’t lock it
until they resubmit.

On their side, the studio’s wizard opens back up with a banner explaining
why, and the button now reads Resubmit registration. When they hit it,
their total is recalculated from the entries as they now stand and you get
a fresh submission notification.

Making the edit yourself (plain Approve)

On the studio’s row in Submissions there’s a lock button. Click it to
Unlock, make the change, then click it again to Lock. Unlocking is
for your own editing — it doesn’t hand the registration back to the studio.
That’s what Approve & reopen is for.

What a studio sees

Their request shows as pending until you decide, then approved or
denied, with your note underneath. They can Withdraw anything still
pending.

They get an email either way — subject Change request approved or
Change request declined — carrying your note. If you left the note
blank, the default depends on what you clicked:

• Approve & reopen — Approved — your registration is open for edits.
  Make the change and resubmit.
• Approve — The competition will apply the change on {event}.
• Decline — The competition declined this change.