Payment methods

[ramon]

Hello all,

I have a question about payment methods.
Has anyone been in a situation where institutional payments need to be made which are not paid at registration, but rather are received (maybe long) after the conference has ended?
This situation is quite common in Brazil, because public institutions and ONGs usually required their participants to return and be audited (report on the event, turn in receipts, and so forth) to authorize the payments (otherwise it's on the participant's account). Since these institutions are forbidden to transfer funds to their employees for such activities (or some of them), it would be easier to transfer the funds to the Conference directly.

However, these are done in 2 steps: first, the institution issues a document stating their commitment to pay whatever is due, judicially generating a debt. Then, the financial department makes the transfer some date later. Between the first and the second, there may be months, so the Conference cannot count with that payment as quickly.

AFAIK, the only method that would be generic enough is the manual payment. However, manual payment requires a lot of work and attention to detail.

Does the Paypal method (never tested it) allow for "manual" inclusion or may help assist the above situation somehow?

[jmacgreg]

Hi Ramon,

I don't think the PayPal option will do what you want -- IIRC, there isn't any way to register but request the fee be waived during registration, so anyone registering with the PayPal method enabled must go through the PayPal payment system. The Manual option should be flexible enough to handle what you want; can you describe how it requires more work and attention to detail? Unfortunately, I suspect that dealing with systemic late payments may just require an additional level of attention using the current plugins ... or a new plugin specially crafted for that purpose.

Cheers,
James

[ramon]

Hello James,

The problem with the Manual Payment is that it requires a lot of steps that may not be enforced, meaning that the participant will have to upload a payment receipt of some sort. Most users are not savvy enough to "print" to PDFs and email the file to the Manager (even if you have specific instructions!). They would copy and paste the result from the internet banking system. Some may pay at ATMs, which will force them to generate a scanned version of the printed receipt (although most have cell phones and laptops with cameras, they hardly think of those options also).
In any case, the Registration Manager won't have an easy task checking each payment to confirm, as this will have to be done individually.
Most events don't have enough people working to dedicate a single person to handle only registrations. And these events are shared, which means, they share the sponsors (not the day they happen), but registration is simultaneous, which becomes a bigger hassle.

Most of the payment methods require a lot of work. In Brazil, we have a PagSeguroservice (requires a business account with them), which is similar to PayPal, but allows credit card payments to be split in up to 12 months, bank bills or other 2 methods I don't remember now. They have a PHP script to add to any site, but they charge a pretty high fee for each transaction (lower than direct banking APIs, though). I'm not sure if it would fit the "late payment" requirements, we'd have to check.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Ramon,

It sounds like maybe a plugin to incorporate the PagSeguro service might be worth looking into. I'll also ask Kevin if he has any thoughts on this matter -- he set up our PKP Conference's payment services, and while they were never anywhere near as complicated as what you list here, he definitely has more of a grasp of this area than I do.

Cheers,
James