Registration platforms count registrants, because that is what most events are made of. A camp, a retreat or a conference is not. A household books places for the whole family and pays once. A group leader reserves a block of places, settles one invoice and supplies the names later. Per-registrant pricing charges hardest in exactly the place your sign-ups come from.
The pricing is only half of it. The larger problem is that a per-person system cannot hold the shape of a household or a group at all, so the office holds it instead.
What a household booking actually is
- One payer, several attendees, one payment and one receipt.
- A different price for each attendee: an adult rate, a child rate, an under-five who is free, an infant who still needs a place on the list.
- A form for each attendee carrying consent, allergies and medication, collected without sending the payer back through checkout for every one.
- Late additions, where a child is added after the booking is made and keeps the same payer and the same balance.
- Partial attendance, where one parent comes for the weekend and the rest of the family for the week.
Run that through a tool built for one person per transaction and each line becomes a separate registration, a separate fee, and a manual note joining them together.
A group is not a list of individuals
A church sending students is one relationship, one leader and one invoice. The leader needs to hold places before the names exist, because the names are still being recruited.
- Places reserved by count, with a deposit, and names filled in as they are confirmed.
- A deadline after which unfilled places are released rather than invoiced.
- A leader who can see who has completed a form and who has not, without seeing what anybody paid.
- Rooming or cabin preferences kept with the group, so people who travelled together are not scattered across the site.
- One invoice to the sending church, with individual payments from families netted off it.
Most of what an office does in the last fortnight before a camp is this: chasing names, chasing forms, and reconciling one invoice against a dozen part-payments.
The calendar makes it worse
A summer camp may open for a few weeks and a conference for a weekend, while the licence runs all year and the system sits quiet for most of it. Registration for next summer opens while this one is still being packed away. Adding a second week or a winter retreat adds another set of per-registrant fees rather than using capacity you have already bought.
Working out what it costs you
- Take last year's registrations and count how many were households or groups rather than single attendees.
- Count the people on those bookings. That is the number the fee was charged on.
- Add the database band, which rises each time a visitor, a child or a one-off guest is recorded.
- Add any share taken on giving, which sits on top of what the card processor already takes.
- Put a full year of it into the software bill calculator and look at the three-year figure.
Then add the part that is never billed: the hours spent joining records together by hand.
What stays rented
Card processing stays with your payment processor. Background checks on staff and volunteers stay with the accredited provider that carries them out; a system of your own records the reference and the expiry and tells you who is about to lapse, but it does not run the check. Charity or denominational returns are filed through the systems those bodies require.
What is left is ordinary software shaped like your sign-ups: one payer with many attendees, a leader holding places, a form for each person, and a rooming board you can move a name on. Our page on what churches, conferences and camps rent and what can be rebuilt sets out what that covers, and the guide to renting versus owning software is honest about when one subscription and people who know each other is the better answer.