Who pays the card fee, and how should we price?

Families pay exactly the amount you set — the deposit, the season fee, the ticket price — and nothing is added at checkout for paying by card. The cost of processing a payment comes out of the club's share instead.

This changed. Clubhouse used to add the card fee on top of the amount you configured, so a $250 deposit was charged to the family as $255.05 and the club received the full $250. It now charges the family $250 and roughly $245.45 reaches the club.

The Reserve Bank of Australia is ending card surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa from 1 October 2026. Adding a card fee to a family's total is a surcharge, whoever collects it, so it had to go. It was removed early rather than on the deadline so that no retention offer sent during the winter — which a family might not pay until October — could carry a fee that had become non-compliant by the time they paid it.

The practical upshot for the committee: the same headline fee now brings in slightly less. On a $250 deposit paid by card that is about $4.55.

1. Absorb it. Do nothing. Families pay what your fee schedule says, and the club treats processing as an operating cost — which is how it appears in Finance and how it posts to Xero. Simplest, and for most clubs the difference is small against the total.

2. Re-price to cover it. On Settings → Payments, under the club default deposit, there is a Raise to $X to cover card costs button. It lifts the advertised amount so that after a card payment the club still receives what it received before.

Two things worth being clear about with a committee:

• It raises the price for every family, on every payment method. A family paying by bank transfer pays the higher amount too, and the club keeps all of it. That is what makes it a price rise rather than a surcharge, and it is the only compliant way to recover the cost.
• The button only changes the club default. Each programme's deposit and season fee is set with that programme in Settings → Modules & Programs, and event ticket prices live on each event.

Not every payment costs the same. The How families paid panel in Finance shows what each payment method cost the club for the period:

Link is Stripe's saved-details option — a family who has used it elsewhere can pay in one tap. It appears as its own row in the panel because it is not always a card underneath, but it is priced like one.

PayTo depends on the family's own bank agreeing to the payment, and refusals rise sharply on larger amounts — some accounts cannot authorise a PayTo agreement at all. A family committing to a season fee and being refused by their own bank, with no idea why, is a worse outcome than the fee saving is worth. So from $1,000 up, PayTo is not shown at checkout: the family sees card, and bank transfer where your club has it switched on.

That applies to whatever is being paid — a deposit, a season fee, an event ticket — because the threshold is about the amount and the family's bank, not what it is for.

So for the big payments, bank transfer is the method to encourage, not PayTo. A $1,995 season fee costs the club about $34 on a card and nothing at all on a bank transfer, and on a season's worth of registrations that is the difference a committee would otherwise be trying to recover through pricing. PayTo's cap still makes it the cheapest option on the payments below $1,000, where it is offered.

Since the family pays the same amount on every method, encouraging bank transfer costs them nothing and is the single largest saving available to the club. Finance shows the saving as a figure each period so you can see whether it is working.

You cannot offer a discount for paying by bank transfer. A price that varies by payment method is the same arithmetic as a surcharge, and the RBA has named it as counter to the reform. Encourage the cheaper methods by explaining them, not by pricing them differently.

The Finance → Summary tab separates the two figures that used to be nearly the same:

• Families paid — the total charged, which is now exactly the sum of your advertised prices
• Processing cost — what it cost the club to accept those payments
• Collected — the hero figure: what actually reached the club, after processing costs and anything refunded

The board-pack PDF export carries the same three lines, and Xero receives income at the full amount with the processing cost as a separate expense line, so it appears in the P&L where a committee expects to find a cost.

A payment that did not go through has no processing cost and nothing collected. In the payments list it shows a Failed status; open it and the amount is labelled Attempted rather than Charged — the figure the family tried to pay, useful when you ring them, and not to be counted as income.

If a family's balance previously showed them still owing the card fee on a deposit they had paid, that is fixed. A family is now credited the full amount they paid, so a small number of balances will have dropped by a few dollars. This corrected an inconsistency — the Debtors list was already using the paid amount, while the offer screen was using the after-fee amount — rather than writing anything off.