How are credit card transactions handled?
Lil Regie offers a merchant account facility for use by clients and charges a merchant fee of 2.75%. When someone registers for your event and pays by credit card, they will receive a PDF invoice, sent out by Lil Regie on your behalf, showing that the transaction has been made and fully paid up. This registration is then marked as “Paid” inside Lil Regie.
The money from the transaction goes into a Lil Regie holding account where it is held on your behalf until the event finishes. Once the event has finished, we will send you a financial summary of it within 48 hours. This will outline how much money has been taken via credit card, what the Lil Regie fees are for the event, whether any refunds have been made back etc. It will also indicate what you are owed by Lil Regie – essentially the credit card money held, minus our fees and any refunds made.
Once you’re happy with this, we will then deposit the money into your account.
Why does Lil Regie hold the credit card money until the event has finished?
As the transactions have happened via the Lil Regie merchant account, Lil Regie is liable for all and any refunds, cancellations etc. The risk for us is that if we had paid this money out before the event, and for some reason the event didn’t go ahead, we would be liable for refund those who had paid by credit card. And if there wasn’t enough money from the event organiser, we would still be liable. So that’s why we need to hold the money until the finish of the event.
What about our cash-flow for the event if Lil Regie is holding this money?
As event organisers ourselves, we do understand cash-flow issues. There are some ways to mitigate these. The one we most recommend is that in addition offering attendees the ability to pay via credit card, you also offer then the ability to pay directly into your bank account upon receipt of an invoice from you. You can either have Lil Regie sent out an invoice on your behalf (with your bank account details on it) or hook Lil Regie up with your Xero account for invoicing.
When given this option, over a large number of events, we’ve found that between ⅓ and ½ of people typically choose the “Pay by invoice” option. The advantage of this for your cash-flow is that the money then goes directly into your bank account.
A second option is to use PayPal for your credit card transactions instead of the Lil Regie merchant account. This is very easy to set up within Lil Regie and you’ll then be dealing with PayPal in terms of getting your money.
A third option is other third-party merchant account providers such as Stripe. They pay money on a rolling basis to you for your event, and not all after the event. (See this help document for more information on setting up Stripe.)
We have our own merchant account. Can we use this with Lil Regie?
Yes, absolutely! We’ve hooked Lil Regie up with a number of customers who have their own merchant accounts. There is a setup fee for this, but it’s typically a small one, and once set up you can keep using for other events. And of course, the money goes directly to you. Please get in touch if you’d like to talk more about this.