Hello,
Summary: We send a mail to attendees saying what we think they should
pay, and then collect payments similarly to last year (or using
frontaccounting to make invoices).
I started thinking about attendee payment. We should at least be
letting attendees know how much we _think_ they should pay, so that
they can get their registration fixed or ask for clarification if they
see something is wrong.
This is also important so that we can figure out how much we will take
in from attendee fees (people may change their registrations when they
see the costs), or notice things that are wrong.
Jimmy/schultmc: Do you have an idea if or when the frontaccounting
setup will be ready to do invoicing? I still think that notifying
attendees of how much they will be expected to pay soon would be a
good idea. Then, we can merge in the line-items and start use
frontaccounting starting somewhere between #4 and #6. If
frontaccounting proves to be infeasible, we can alter plans.
In order to move things along, I propose this plan. It is based off
of what we did last year, but with reminder mails in advance:
1) Produce payment logic for attendees, which calculate their costs as
best can be determined from information in Pentabarf. (Richard has
already done this, but it needs to be refined to make the logic
"correct".)
2) Richard send an email to attendees saying "Here is what we
calculate your costs as". We break it down into two categories:
- Accommodation. We ask that they pay this as soon as possible.
- Food costs, based on per-day amounts, which we don't ask for
payment in advance.
3) We make it clear that since food goes day-by-day, they don't have
to buy every meal with us (tentative). If this is the case, we will
accept payments on-site. If this turns out not to be the case, you
will hear from us later.
- The Localteam will probably know more about catering by this
weekend, so this may be a non-issue.
4) Attendees may request adjustments to their bill, since some things
may be incorrect.
- For example, a professional registrant may want DebCamp sponsored,
or a professional registrant attending half of DebCamp may want to
be billed per-day for that. Someone may be able to get their
company to pay Professional for one week but not two, but they
_would_ be sponsored for DebCamp, so they want DebCamp sponsored but
be billed professional for DebConf.
- They will email registration@ and say what they think their cost
should be. Then, someone checks if the adjustment is within allowed
sponsorship rules or not, and issues a correction. I'll program a
"hints" file that can override registrations for people.
5) Attendees can pay immediately if they would like by just going to
the payments/donations web page. Many attendees don't need invoices.
6) If an attendee would like an invoice, they follow SOME_PROCEDURE to
get one made.
- This year, Jimmy has proposed to use FrontAccounting to produce
invoices. What are the chances that this can be working soon?
- Last year, it was emailing someone (me, but not me this year) who
looked at their registration, calculates the cost, makes any allowed
adjustments like above and then passes on the data to someone at SPI
or FFIS for invoice generation and sending.
- Invoicee pay however.
7) We give some deadline for the accommodation payment.
- If someone wants to pay on-site for accommodations, is this ok?
We can just say "contact registration@ if you have questions or
alternate plans made"
- I don't know much about actual deadlines for payment and so on.
What should we do? I know if there are invoices, they will have
their own deadlines, but for people without invoices what should we
say?
Of course, we need some way to track payments. Frontaccounting would
be nice here, since penta's fields are kind of non-descriptive. If we
do use penta, we should at least enable the amount_paid field to be
visible in the UI.
Any comments welcome. How soon does should stuff move, and what is
the best way to make it happen?
Thanks,
- Richard
--
| Richard Darst - rkd@ - boltzmann: up 316 days, 22:30
| http://rkd.zgib.net - pgp 0xBD356740
| "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free"
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