I thought I’d ask here as the STW forum seems to have an answer to anything.

I’m on the committee of my hockey club and I’m currently investigating different ways of of our members paying us for their annual subscriptions.
Has anyone used paypal before for their club/organisation? What are the charges like? Or has anyone recommend an alternative solution that doesn’t cost too much?

We usually offer our members the option of either an annual lump sum or to pay monthly, but currently rely on them setting up a standard order

thanks

Yep, using it for the Hope Valley Adventure Film Festival – it’s hooked into a ticket sales website. TBH charges are around 50p on a ticket of £8.50, you need to confirm the organisation’s identify a couple of times and again if you hit their ceiling of £1900 to continue to withdraw cash.
It is a bit of a faff to get set up properly and then keep re confirming things but it makes taking money so much simpler and traceable.

(Which Hockey Club? I play for Chesterfield and may suggest the same thing to our treasurer – unless you are our treasurer!! 8O)

Yep, PMBA http://www.pmba.org.uk, I set it up to allow online subscriptions, wasn’t too difficult to incorporate into a website as a novice web designer. We lose around 35p for each £5 subscription.

I used it ages back for a youth football team… We lost a proportion of the payments but it was well worth it IMO (also, I’m reasonably sure we got extra donations because people don’t think of paypal balances as real money 😉 )

I use it for membership for Newforce. Fee is about 5% (56p on annual £10.50 membership) but it is way simpler to administer then people sending me cheques and having to pay them into the bank.

We’ve just got a couple of buttons on the ‘how to join’ page on the website – our webmaster (another member) added them but I believe its quite straight forward and well documented on the internet.

Note – you will need to set up paypal as a business account to transfer money into your club bank account. Also, make sure you pick a life-time member of the club as the paypal account holder as its pretty near impossible to change names.

We use it for the TROG MTB site. Think they take about 60p of our £10 annual membership fee**. Any items we sell just have the PayPal commission added on (there are plenty of paypal fee calcs online).

I found plenty of guides on line for setting up buttons and using IPN for confirming receipt of payments etc.

Biggest headache is with confirming your identity with them. Also as we’re a CASC not a company sorting out tax reference IDs that they understood was a headache. Finger’s crossed we’re there now, but I’m forever waiting for them to demand some other form of ID that I’ve no idea how to get hold of…

** Join now and get the remainder of 2012 for free folks 😉

thanks guys, really informative.

@rogerthecat – It’s Huddersfield Dragons and I’d be more than happy to feed any info back to you.
The concern with any of these paypal/direct debit systems is the percentage that is taken. Due to the size of the club and the amount of transactions we’d be talking a reasonable chunk of our operational budget, but that needs to be weighed up against the time it currently takes to manage the current subs system