Budget

Track income and expenses against the camp, including per-person costs that scale with headcount automatically. A separate camp fees panel tracks who's paid, and can sync with Online Scout Manager's Finances tab if you use OSM.

Once your group has connected its own GoCardless account, its own Stripe account, or both (see the "Collect payments" and "Take cards" cards on your organisation's page), each unpaid attendee gets a Get payment link option in the fees panel — send it to a parent and they pay straight into your group's own account, with the attendee marked paid automatically once the payment confirms. Our platform fee of 1% is deducted from each payment either way — GoCardless and Stripe each charge their own transaction fee on top, separately, which is theirs, not ours. The manual "mark as paid" checkbox still works too, for parents who pay by cash or bank transfer instead — and ticking it no longer overwrites the record of a payment made online.

If you've connected both, the payment link offers bank transfer first and card second — a card costs you roughly double what a bank payment does on anything but a small amount, so the cheaper option is what the parent sees first. They can still choose either.

By bank, the parent chooses how to pay. Pay now from your bank is approved in their banking app and clears straight away, and sets up a Direct Debit at the same time so any balance still owing doesn't need authorising again. Set up a Direct Debit is authorised once and collected over about three working days. Either way they never type card details, and the money goes to your group, not to us.

By card, there's no standing authorisation to set up — every card payment is its own, confirming in seconds rather than the few working days a bank payment takes to clear.

A parent who has already set up a Direct Debit with your group — for an earlier camp, or for another child — is offered a third thing: pay with the Direct Debit they already have. The page names the account ("Barclays account ending 1234") and takes the payment on one click, with no bank details and no trip to GoCardless. If the camp has a deposit and a balance date, they can spread the cost on that same Direct Debit too.

It only appears when we can match them, which needs their email address on the roster or their parent form (see Parent email addresses). If anything has changed, or they'd rather not, the ordinary options are still there underneath.

Because Direct Debit takes days to clear, the fees panel shows what each payment is actually doing rather than just paid or unpaid. Payment processing means it's on its way and there's nothing to chase. Payment failed means it didn't go through and the parent can try again from the same link. Payment failed — being retried automatically means GoCardless is having another go on the day it judges most likely to work, so there's nobody to chase — the parent doesn't need to do anything. Payment charged back means the parent's bank reversed it after it had gone through — the fee goes back to unpaid on its own, so the list stays honest.