Collecting a whole league night at once

Collecting dues is the same job every week: stand at the desk, take money from thirty or eighty people, and remember who did not pay. The collection sheet does that in one screen instead of one bowler at a time.

Open the Dues page, pick the season, and click Collect dues. Choose the week you are collecting and the sheet lists everyone on the roster with this week’s amount already filled in and everyone ticked.

Untick whoever did not pay

That is the whole workflow. The list starts with everyone ticked because on a normal night most people pay, so the short job is marking the exceptions rather than the rule. Untick the two who are not in, hit the button, and every payment and receipt is recorded at once.

Whoever still owes something is listed first. On a night when three people out of seventy are behind, those three are at the top rather than buried among sixty-seven greyed-out rows.

The three amounts that actually come up

Each row offers the amounts a desk actually deals with, so you are not doing arithmetic in your head with a queue forming:

• This week. The usual case.
• Up to date. Everything owed to and including tonight, for the bowler who missed a fortnight and wants to square up.
• The rest of the season. For the bowler who would rather pay the year off and stop thinking about it.

A bowler who is behind shows how far behind, right on their row. You can also type any other amount.

A mixed night is normal

Most people hand over cash, one writes a check, two tap a card at the counter. Set the method most people used at the top and change only the rows that differ. The running total splits by method as you go, so the cash box can be counted against the cash figure without adding up receipts by hand.

What happens to the money

Payments are applied by the season’s normal rule, not simply marked against tonight. A bowler who is three weeks behind and hands over one week’s dues is paying down the oldest week first, because that is what they owe. Pretending the money settled tonight would leave real arrears hidden, and the point of the whole feature is that arrears are visible.

Anyone who pays more than they owe banks the surplus against the end of the season, working backwards.

Every bowler collected gets a numbered receipt, and the whole batch shows up in the season’s payment history with who recorded it and when.

You cannot charge a night twice

The failure that matters here is a double click charging eighty people twice, which is a great deal worse than the tedium this replaces. So the sheet carries a token minted when you opened it, and a batch that has already been recorded is refused rather than processed again.

After recording, the sheet reloads with everything unticked, so a second glance at the screen cannot turn into a second collection.

Who can do this

Taking payments needs the Take payments permission, which League Treasurer has by default and League Manager can be given. Setting prices, adopting a season and voiding a payment are a separate permission, so the person at the desk on Monday need not be the person who decides what things cost. See Roles and permissions.

Related

See League dues: getting started, Taking and tracking payments, and Past-due reminder emails.