Conditional Fees: Approve, Capture & Release

Registration form Acknowledgements can collect "conditional" fees. Conditional fees provide a way to collect pre-approved fees, penalties, or deposits at a later date if some condition is not met. 

For example, you can charge a "Volunteer Penalty" as a conditional fee per swimmer or per family, to be applied during registration but only charged to the pre-approved credit card after the season is over.

You can apply multi-swimmer discounts and and age-range overrides to conditional fees, and set a maximum fee, just like with other acknowledgement section fees.

During checkout, conditional fees are noted separately from all other itemized charges. Only the "Total Amount Due" will be charged at checkout.  

The conditional fee will be saved with the registration and can be captured or released by an admin up to 8 months from the date of the approval.

Approval for the amount due at registration plus any conditional fees will be obtained at registration. The amount due at registration will be immediately charged against the pre-approved amount. The remaining pre-approved balance (the amount of the conditional fee) can be captured at a later time, or released.

After checkout, the payer will receive an email containing a link to modify their payment method if necessary (in case a card is lost, stolen or expired).

Capture Conditional Fees

Click the Capture button to enter an amount that is between $1 and the original authorized amount. You can also add a message to be included in the WePay payment notification email.

>> Note: Capture is a one-time action. You cannot capture a partial amount and then come back and capture the remainder at a later date. The capture button will no longer display after it is used. If you included more than one conditional fee to your form, you will have to approve all fees at one time. WePay will display an error if you try to approve one fee at a time.

Click Save to process the credit card and collect the fee entered.

After the fee has been captured, it will be included in the order total, and will also appear as a separate payment with the date of capture in the registration detail.

Expired or Denied Transactions

If you attempt to capture a conditional fee but it is denied for any reason (insufficient funds, expired, lost, stolen) you should contact the payer to get a different form of payment and submit a ticket to WePay Customer Support for assistance.

We do not have insight into the exact reason for the failure, since the communication is going through WePay, but we have always understood this to be an issue with the person’s card when it has occured.

For more information ➞ See our WePay Payment Issues article.

Transaction Fees

Each payment transaction will be processed separately. The first (amount due) transaction will be processed immediately and assessed the standard processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30, while the second (conditional) transaction, if and when it is processed, will also be charged a processing fee of 2.9% plus an additional $0.30, because it represents a separate transaction.

For example, the fees for the sample transactions above would be as follows:

Release Conditional Fees

Click the Release button in the Registration form detail to immediately cancel the existing pre-approval. No email notification from WePay will be sent when a conditional fee is released.

** Note that manually releasing pre-authorized fees is optional, as all conditional fees automatically expire 8 months from the date they are authorized. Because the pre-approval is not a "hold" on the card, it won't affect the parent's ability to use their credit card during this time. Instead, it is a pre-approval in the sense that the customer has authorized their card details to be stored temporarily for use in a future transaction.