We haven’t gone live with this yet, but figured I would toss it out for any feedback from TD’s.
It’s a step by step process on how you would deposit funds into your IFPA account. If there’s something that doesn’t make sense, could be clarified better, etc. . . let me know.
https://www.ifpapinball.com/endorsement-fee-payment-walkthrough/
I haven’t used Stripe before, but this sounds pretty straightforward. I had planned on buying a larger amount instead of issuing the exact for each tournament anyway.
While submitting results for the tournament, will there be reminders if I haven’t paid? Do I need to submit results before payment?
You can submit payments anytime you want. On the back end of things, following approval from @PressStart , the event flows into a payment approval module that I work through. For TD’s that have an existing balance, I can simply click “Approve” and the tournament gets loaded, funds decreased from the TD’s account. For any TD that doesn’t have enough funds, there is a notice that pops up for me that won’t allow me to approve that result.
At that time I was simply planning on emailing TD’s manually to bring it to their attention, but perhaps @Shep has something up his sleeve to do something auto-magically.
Hopefully by the start of the year, or sometime in January, directors will have a management page that they can log into and it’ll show various information regarding their tournaments, payment history, etc.
After that, the notifications we send out for tournament result submissions will be adjusted to also show your current balance just to give a heads up.
Sure you have – it’s the same payment processor I use for Match Play 
Stripe is great to work with. Secure and powers an insane amount of online shops/services.
Patreon uses Stripe as well so as far as safety & security it’s as trustworthy as many of the other most popular payment processors.
Do you intend to use stripe for the IFPA WC too? looks like the fees are smaller and Paypal exchange rates are horrible.
Yeah that’s the plan. Paypal is just my personal account which has helped serve the needs over the years.
As we move forward with a “more professional IFPA”, the idea of having everything go through Stripe which is only connected to my IFPA LLC banking account will be much preferred by myself and my accountant 
@pinwizj: Do you have plans to update state Standings pages with prize pool $ throughout the year or maybe all at once near the end of the year?
Or will players be expected to dig through posted events and figure this out when deciding which state to commit to?
Related to Steve’s question, has the payout structure been determined? Will Super States™ pay deeper, to all 24 qualifiers?
@Shep can speak to that, but the plan is dynamic “LIVE” progressive prize pool updates You should be able to jump into the Vermont SCS standings and see the prize pool is currently $317.84 as of that most recent rebuild of the database.
Yep . . . it’s all on the official rules page which just hasn’t been posted publicly yet. Here’s the breakdown:
Any state with 16 finalists will have the following payout structure:
1st place – 30% of the prize pool
2nd place – 18% of the prize pool
3rd place – 12% of the prize pool
4th place – 8% of the prize pool
5th through 8th place – 4% of the prize pool each
9th through 16th place – 2% of the prize pool each
Any state with 24 finalists will have the following payout structure:
1st place – 28% of the prize pool
2nd place – 16% of the prize pool
3rd place – 10% of the prize pool
4th place – 6% of the prize pool
5th through 8th place – 4% of the prize pool each
9th through 16th place – 2% of the prize pool each
17th through 24th place – 1% of the prize pool each
There are a set of new pages that provide overall information, standings and the current payouts. I hope to have it out next week so you can see how it would look if 2017 was done like 2018 will be.
Brian
plan postponed? you already implemented Stripe, but still using PayPal?
Shoot, so 2% of, like… a million… is enough for a bus ticket and an airbnb right?
Still using Paypal. For IFPA’s books I have the funds transfers from Stripe going directly to the IFPA Savings account. Reconciling that is easier when EVERYTHING is SCS/PCS funds, versus having to go through and pull out all the IFPA WC related payments.
Just for full transparency I wanted to give an update on where the fees collected landed for the year.
We took in $90,074.19, which gave us $4503.71 to cover all associated fees (5%).
I was hoping to end up with a surplus of funds, but instead we ended up with a shortfall of $1280.89. I attribute this to a few things:
Any Stripe payment we receive that’s under $15, and the overall percentage of fees is greater than 5% (there’s a $.30 fixed fee no matter the size of the deposit).
The Canada currency translation has additional fees associated with it (roughly 3% in addition to the payment processing fees). This doesn’t take into account the hit from converting the money back into CAD for the PCS payouts. That will come out of those PCS prize pools.
Fortunately we earned enough interest in the IFPA savings account on these funds to cover most of the shortage. For 2019 Becker is going to help reduce the Canadian currency translation fees by offering EMT payments for Canadian TD’s. This will keep the money in CAD the whole year rather than being converted twice.
We’ll be staying with the 5% fee for the 2019 season and will re-evaluate once again next year to see where we end up.
Interesting numbers, Josh. Thanks for sharing.
Will you be doing anything to encourage larger rather than small Swipe deposits moving forward?
Vermont stuck to a $100/transaction clip all of last year.
It’s tough for me to do anything to encourage that besides, “Help the IFPA save on processing fees!”. I find most TD’s pay for their events as they submit results rather than carrying a balance, and I don’t blame them one bit.
Between the interest income and the sponsorship dollars generated for 2019, I’m not too worried about it. More disappointed in my own estimates thinking 5% would cover it
Now introducing the IFPA MasterCard, with no fees on submitting events! Bonus cashback rewards on pinball expenses!