Payment Reminders

Chasing clubs for entry fees is the least popular job in running a tournament. MyCup can do it for you: give a charge a due date, switch reminders on, and unpaid participants get a polite email in your name — one heads-up before the deadline, then a repeat every so often while it stays unpaid.

Nothing is sent until you turn it on, and it is off by default. Reminders are available on paid plans.

This page is about chasing. For recording what people owe in the first place, see Tracking Payments.

Due Dates Come First#

A reminder needs a deadline. A charge with no due date is never chased automatically — MyCup will not invent a deadline nobody agreed to, and a debt-collection email sent on a date that exists only in our software is worse than no email at all.

There are two places to set one.

On a fee — the Payment deadline switch offers two shapes, because organisers run both:

• Days to pay — an offset. "14" means each participant's deadline is 14 days from the day they were billed. Right when the same fee is applied at different moments: the roster in January, a late entrant in March, each with their own fair deadline.
• Fixed date — one date for everyone, whoever was billed when. Right when your tournament has a single published entry deadline. Expressing that as an offset would mean recalculating the number every time a late club is added.

Pick one; a fee never carries both. Leave the box empty for no deadline.

On a single charge — the Due date field on the charge form, and on the bulk charge form when you are billing several participants at once. Leave it empty for no deadline.

Changing a fee's deadline recalculates it on every charge that fee created, the same way changing its amount updates every balance.

Participants With Undated Debt#

If some participants owe money on charges that carry no deadline, the Finances page says so out loud and tells you they will not be chased. You can add a due date to those charges, or remind them by hand — but MyCup will not quietly start chasing them.

Turning Reminders On#

1. Open Finances and click the reminders button in the page header
2. Fill in How to pay
3. Tick Send reminders automatically
4. Choose the timing (below) and save

How to Pay Is Required, Not Optional#

You cannot switch reminders on until How to pay is filled in. An email that states an amount and gives no account, no reference and nowhere to send it is a demand the recipient cannot act on — which is the opposite of collecting. Write what a club secretary needs:

Bank transfer to … IBAN … Reference: your club name

This text is included in every reminder.

Timing#

Heads-up before the due date — how many days before the deadline to send one friendly warning. Set it to 0 for no warning at all. This fires once per deadline; if a scheduled run is missed, it catches up the next morning rather than skipping the warning entirely.

Then repeat every — once a balance is overdue, how often to chase it again.

It Only Chases From Here#

The moment you switch reminders on, MyCup stamps today's date and ignores every deadline that fell before it. Turning the feature on does not mail forty clubs about last season's debts the next morning. It chases what happens from now.

What Actually Gets Sent#

The email carries your tournament's name and logo, not MyCup's, and replies go to you. Most recipients are club secretaries with no MyCup account, and a stranger's brand demanding money is a complaint waiting to happen.

It states what the club owes, the deadline, and your How to pay text. If the Team Panel and its Payments page are both switched on, it also links the club straight to their own balance; otherwise it points them at you.

Who receives it: the club's contact email, plus every team manager who has accepted an invitation. Both, because the contact is often a secretary who never signs in and the manager who signs in is often not the contact. An unanswered invitation is not a relationship, so pending invites are never mailed.

Everyone gets their own email in their own language — never one email addressed to several people, so two clubs sharing a venue's address never see each other's balance.

Reminding by Hand#

You do not have to wait for the schedule.

• One participant — the bell button on their row, or Remind in their ledger
• Everyone who owes — Remind unpaid in the page header, which carries the count
• A few — tick the rows and use Remind in the bar that appears

A manual reminder ignores the repeat schedule, because a human deciding to chase a specific club is a decision rather than a loop.

Chasing one named participant also skips the short anti-spam gap — you typed that club's name into a confirm sheet, so a second send is a decision. A bulk chase does respect the gap: any club already reminded in the last 12 hours is skipped, so a double-click cannot mail forty clubs twice. Neither path can get past the hard ceiling of three reminders to one participant in 24 hours.

Reminding several participants happens in the background. MyCup hands the work to a queue, one job per club, rather than making you wait on a page that would time out part-way through a large roster and leave you unable to tell who had been mailed. The confirmation therefore tells you how many are being reminded, not the outcome for each one — it also reports anyone with no reachable address, since those clubs never appear in a reminder history at all. For the per-club result, open the participant's reminder history a moment later.

What Was Already Sent#

The Finances list shows when each participant was last chased. For the full picture, open a participant and expand reminders sent under their ledger: every reminder that club has been sent, newest first, with the date, whether it was automatic or sent by hand (and by whom), the amount it claimed, and the addresses it went to.

Failed deliveries appear here and nowhere else. A reminder the mail server could not deliver is not counted as a send anywhere in MyCup — that is deliberate, so a bounce does not stop the next attempt — which means the "last reminded" date stays blank and a club with a dead address looks exactly like one nobody ever chased. This list shows the attempt, the reason it failed, and the address it failed to, so you can fix the address rather than wonder.

Only the 30 most recent are listed; it says so when there are more.

When Chasing Stops#

MyCup stops on its own, so nobody is emailed forever:

• Six automatic attempts per deadline. At the default weekly repeat that is about six weeks of chasing.
• 90 days after you finish the tournament. Deliberately generous — settling an entry fee weeks after the final is normal, not an edge case.

Your own Remind button is never capped by either of these. There are also hard daily ceilings (three per participant, and a per-tournament limit) that nothing can lift, including the manual button.

A balance that gets paid stops being chased immediately, and a trivial rounding leftover under one unit of currency is never chased automatically — your own Remind button will still send if you want it to.

How "Overdue" Is Worked Out#

When a club has several charges, payments settle the oldest bill first. So a club billed 300 due in March and 200 due in June, that has paid 300, is not overdue — its March bill is settled and its June bill is not yet late. Only the June deadline matters.

This is why the ageing on the Finances page can differ from a naive reading of the balance, and it is the difference between a correct reminder and one that chases a club for a bill it paid on time.

A refund that has not been returned yet counts as money owed, but it carries no deadline, so it is never chased automatically.

If Your Plan Lapses#

Reminders stop being sent, without you having to remember to switch the toggle off. Everything you have recorded stays visible and readable.

Season Clones#

Starting next season from a copy of this tournament does not carry the reminders opt-in across. Each tournament decides for itself whether to chase, and inheriting a "yes" silently would mail a new season's clubs on last season's settings.

Next Steps#

• Tracking Payments — recording charges, fees and payments
• Payments in the Team Panel — letting clubs see their own balance and report payments