Public Registration & Payments

This guide is for organizers, admins, and treasurers who use ChessMint to collect tournament registrations and fees.

Public signup is controlled per tournament section. A section can allow players to register from the public tournament page.

During signup, the player provides the required contact details and chooses a section. FIDE ID is optional, but when the player enters one, ChessMint can use FIDE data to fill chess identity details such as name, title, ratings, and federation.

Public signup does not automatically give a player portal access. It creates or reuses the player record needed for the tournament registration.

Before sending a public link, check:

The tournament title, dates, venue, and description.
The sections that should accept public signup.
Entry fees for each section or participant type.
Whether online payment is available for the club.
Who will approve, decline, or follow up registrations.
Whether the public page and calendar visibility are correct.

Public signup is easiest to manage when the tournament is already published and the main structure is stable.

Registration Status

Registration status separates organizer approval from payment settlement.

Status shown to organizers	Meaning
Invited or pending	The registration request has been received and needs organizer review or confirmation.
Accepted	The player is approved and can be paired, but still has an open balance.
Completed	The player is approved and has no open balance.
Declined	The organizer declined the registration.
Cancelled	The registration was cancelled or withdrawn.

Both Accepted and Completed players can be part of the tournament. Completed additionally means the registration is financially settled.

Reviewing Registrations

Use the tournament participants list to review signup requests.

Useful checks:

Filter by pending or invited status when triaging new requests.
Confirm the player selected the correct section.
Check FIDE ID, rating, federation, and contact details.
Accept registrations that should play.
Decline registrations that should not be included.
Add notes when another organizer or treasurer needs context.

When a registration is accepted, completed, or declined, ChessMint notifies the player in their own language — provided both the tournament's switch for that registration route and the player's own notification preference allow it. See Tournament Notifications.

Entry Fees

Tournament entry fees can be tracked per registration. Organizers can use:

Online payment during public signup when Stripe payments are available for the club.
Manual payment recording for cash, bank transfer, check, credit, or other offline methods.
Payment history to see how a registration was paid.
Payment status in participant views and payment reports.

Online and manual payments feed the same payment record, so treasurers can follow balances in one place.

Conditional Entry Pricing

A section can charge different prices to different registrants without the organizer editing anything by hand. Alongside the standard entry fee you add fee rules, each of which sets a price when its condition is met.

A rule can key on:

Club membership — whether the registrant holds a current membership with your club, or a specific membership type.
Rating — classical, rapid, or blitz, above or below a threshold.
Birth year — for junior, youth, or veteran pricing.
Registration date — for early-bird pricing.
Federation — for a national-federation rate.

Three things are worth knowing before you set these up:

The cheapest matching rule wins. If a registrant is both a member and a junior, they pay whichever of the two is lower. You do not have to think about the order of the list, and there is no priority to set.
A missing detail never qualifies. A player with no rating on file does not qualify for "rated below 1600", and a player with no birth date does not qualify as a junior. They pay the standard fee.
Club membership is checked against your own records. A registrant cannot claim the member price by typing your club's name into the form.

You can still change an individual registration's fee afterwards. Rules set the opening price; they do not lock it.

What the player sees

When a rule changes the price, the signup form shows the standard fee, the rule that applied, and the total. If ChessMint cannot yet identify the registrant, the price is labelled an estimate — membership can only be confirmed once the registration reaches your club's records, so the estimate is never lower than what they will actually be charged.

The price shown is always the price ChessMint will charge. It is calculated on the server, not in the browser.

Registration Limits and the Waiting List

A section can have a maximum number of participants. Leave it at 0 for no limit.

The waiting-list setting sits with the limit and appears only once a limit is set: a waiting list queues signups past a limit, so without one it can never do anything. Clearing a limit hides the switch but keeps your choice — set a limit again and the waiting list comes back the way you had it. The setting stays available when public signup is off, because you can still add entries yourself.

While places remain, the public signup form shows how many are left. What happens once the section is full depends on one setting:

Waiting list off — public signup is refused with a clear "this section is full" message, before the player fills anything in.
Waiting list on — the signup is accepted and queued. The player is told they are on the waiting list and at which position, and is not charged.

The limit applies to public signup only. You can still add a late entry yourself over the limit — that is a judgement call ChessMint leaves to you.

When a place opens up

If a registration is cancelled, declined, or withdrawn, the longest-waiting person on the list is moved into the free place automatically and notified about it. They arrive as a pending registration for you to review, not as a confirmed participant — and for a paid section, payment starts at that point, not when they joined the queue.

When online payments are available, the signup flow can send the player to a checkout popup after the registration details are submitted.

The player can pay the open registration balance online. When payment is completed, ChessMint updates the payment history and can mark the registration as Completed once the balance is cleared.

Use online payment when the club wants to reduce cash handling, bank-transfer follow-up, or manual reconciliation.

Manual Payments

Manual payment recording remains useful for club desks, cash payments, bank transfers, and corrections.

When recording a manual payment, keep notes consistent:

Use the same payment method names across the club.
Include references for bank transfers when useful.
Record the actual payment date.
Add short notes only when they help later follow-up.

Treasurers and admins should review payment history before changing a participant's financial status.

Refunds

Any recorded payment can be refunded, in full or in part, from the payment history in the payment dialog. Refunds require the refund permission, which admins and treasurers have.

A refund always asks for a reason — it is stored with the refund and shown in the audit trail, so the club can always explain why money went back.

Every refund asks how the money is returned, and the answer is filled in for you:

Online payments default to being returned through the same channel the player paid with. The money leaves the club's Stripe balance automatically; nobody has to transfer anything by hand. Card refunds usually appear within a few days. Bank-based methods such as Bancontact or iDEAL can take longer, and ChessMint updates the record when the refund finally settles.
Cash, bank transfer, cheque and other manual payments default to being refunded the same way they came in. Returning the actual money is still done by the club.

You can change that answer whenever the money genuinely goes back another way. The common reason is that an online refund is not possible: the club's Stripe balance is too low because payouts have already been made, the payment is too old to reverse, or the player's card has expired. In that case pick how you are really paying them back — cash at the club, a bank transfer — and ChessMint records that instead. Nothing is sent to Stripe, so you hand over the money yourself.

Getting this right keeps the books trustworthy: a refund paid from the cash box is recorded as cash, so the season payment totals match both the Stripe account and the cash box. The original payment is never changed — it really was paid online — only the refund shows the route the money took back.

A refund reopens the participant's balance, so they show as owing again. It does not remove the player from the tournament by itself. If the player is actually withdrawing, tick Also withdraw this registration in the refund dialog — that cancels their entry as well. The player is notified that their registration was withdrawn, with the refunded amount, unless the tournament's switch for their registration route is off or they opted out themselves. Withdrawing a place also promotes the longest-waiting person on the waiting list, if there is one.

Partial refunds are supported: refund part of an entry fee and the rest stays paid. The dialog only ever lets you refund what is still refundable, and a payment that has been refunded shows a badge saying so.

Refunds a club makes directly in its own Stripe dashboard are picked up automatically and appear in ChessMint too, so the two never disagree.

Note that online payments cannot be deleted — only refunded. Deleting them would leave the money with Stripe and no record of it in the club's books. Manual payments recorded by mistake can still be deleted outright.

Treasurer Workflow

Treasurers usually focus on:

Monitoring open balances.
Recording manual payments.
Checking payment history.
Following up unpaid registrations.
Producing payment-status reports when needed.
Issuing refunds and, where relevant, withdrawing the registration.

Arbiters can run the tournament flow, but payment visibility belongs to admins and treasurers.

Public signup is enabled only for the intended sections.
Entry fees are correct before the public link is sent.
Online payment availability is checked if the event expects online checkout.
Pending registrations are reviewed regularly.
Accepted means approved with an open balance.
Completed means approved and financially settled.
Manual and online payment history is reviewed before financial follow-up.