Continuing the discussion from Army & Sea Cadets smashing it again (& occasionally the Scouts):
Starting a new thread for this, if I was rolling out this feature for RAFAC on Bader I would base it on GOV.UK PAY and set it up so it wasn’t enabled until a unit has entered an API Key.
That way you enable the functionality and empower units to take digital payments without any issues of where the payment is going to.
Electronic ways of paying is a essential function for any organisation. It is an essential business function. Paying cash into a bank from a business has history. If the RAFAC does not embrace it will effect the growth or the organisation. This needs to be driven top down and not bottom up with each unit doing something different or not at all. How many events do we still do where a cadets has to hand over a wad of cash at the first day of a camp or course.?
FYI this is how RIAT Camp feed (£20) is going to be collected this year
it was trialled by SWR last year and considered successful enough to roll out nationally this year
Locally we are large users of GoCardless, and then sqns also have a SumUp for Canteen
I’ve been looking into this, as we want to move to monthly electronic subscriptions. Currently we use GovPay for 6-monthly subs and one-off events.
The difference between GovPay and GoCardless is significant! GovPay has negotiated a very competitive PSP fee.
My rough calculations show that - for a squadron with 90 cadets - we’d be paying approx £67 a year in payment fees for monthly debit cards on GovPay, and £356 a year for GoCardless.
However, GovPay requires a technical implementation for recurring payments. Essentially a website for collecting the parent consent, redirecting to the payment page, and a back-end portal for managing all the data. I could probably write this if I had time as I used to work in payments tech, but it would be better served being done for the whole RAFAC population through Bader.
That’s all provided by GoCardless isn’t it. If the annual saving is £300 for 90 cadets, that’s £3.33 per cadet so potentially over £100,000 for all RAFAC cadets. Seems worthwhile for RAFAC to take on the development, assuming that the development effort was significantly less than that cost.