Outstanding credits now listed under My Account

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Adding a credit - options afford considerable control over redemptionMotorsportReg.com credits are a treasurer's best friend. Rather than taking the time to write and mail a refund check, or worse, refund to a credit card and take another hit in fees from Visa or MasterCard, an in-system credit is just like monopoly money that an attendee can use like cash towards a future registration.

The benefit of these credits is the ways in which they can be limited to restrict redemption. Since it's rare that an organization wants a credit to stay on their books indefinitely, these controls support a wide variety of cancellation policies as suggested by the screen shot to the left and a credit is always limited to the organization who created it. Plus, credits roll their balance forward if they aren't fully redeemed eliminating manual book keeping. Credits automatically flow into the event financial report for a clear breakdown of who paid and how, alongside online payment, offline payments and discounts.

While this information has always been available to organizers, there was only one point when the attendee could see their credit, on the payment screen.Redeeming a credit while paying for an event

myaccount_creditsStarting today, we're now listing these credits under the My Account tab. While this doesn't introduce a radical new capability, it does provide peace of mind for the attendee when they can see the credit listed and it will eliminate a small, but constant number of inquiries to you and us. You can point your members to look under their "My Account" tab going forward.
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Topics: Features

Racers get updated entry lists

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

attendee_race2Our racing customers have been vocal about a more competitive-oriented entry list for their events. While most events are suited just fine to an alphabetical list with sorting enabled, racers have more sophisticated needs. They want to know how many people are coming and how many people are in their class. Is it going to be a tough weekend? Is their top competition signed up? Ok, lock and load, they'll be there too.

attendee_race1Tonight we rolled out an update that includes customized entry lists for any event flagged as Club Racing or Autocross. Club Racing events include a total by group at the top (if Group is checked in your attendee list settings) and then break down the entries by class with sub-totals. Check out this SCCA Cal Club example.

attendee_soloAutocross events get a similar treatment except for special handling for events that use our built-in PAX class support. These events will see PAX classes listed first, followed by a per-class break down with sub-totals. SCCA South Carolina's Solo program has a good example which includes PAX classes.

attendee_basicAll other event types will continue to display the same entry list which is by default sorted by name. Once more than 10 entries are displayed, we enable clickable headers which will sort the table in any direction desired like in this PCA Northern New Jersey driving school.

Clubs control these lists and it's possible for it to be entirely disabled. Each list is cached for 15 minutes at a time for performance reasons so it may take a moment before new registrations show up. We love giving people what they want - now get back to racing!
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Topics: Features

Deferred payment processing has landed

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Early sketch of planning for new payment feature - from 2005It's here. No, we really mean it. Two weeks ago, deferred payment processing went live in a silky smooth release on a lazy Sunday afternoon. We've been planning this feature literally for years starting with sketches dating back to 2005. The ability to control when attendees are charged - at the time of registration, at the cancel deadline, immediately before the event or even after the event is now available to all MotorsportReg.com users when upgrading to our Premium Plan.

But that's hardly all... let's run through the changes:

Deferred Processing & Settlement



dpp_individualOnce your account is switched to the premium plan, you'll see the following options for when to finalize registrations. We first started planning this feature over 18 months ago. There is a long list of technical hurdles to clear to provide this capability in a secure and robust manner. We're excited to introduce this first - no other motorsport registration service has this capability.

Attendees clearly see their payment will settle laterDuring registration, attendees enter their payment information like normal but rather than charge them on the spot, we'll simply verify their account and hold the data in our PCI DSS-compliant Secure Vault. This lets the payment settle much closer to the event as a benefit to the attendee.

As an organizer, you have two ways of flagging the payment for settlement: on a one-by-one basis while looking at an individual registration or in batch using the new Payments tool. One click and every attendee will be settled excluding cancellations. You'll never cut a refund check again!

Void 'til EOD



Void 'til EODWhen we charge a credit card, technically the card doesn't settle until we "close the batch". This happens automatically at midnight Pacific time. Until midnight, you can cancel a transaction with no fees and we've exposed this capability via the Void 'til EOD button (EOD = End of Day). You can use this to make adjustments or alternative arrangements with the attendee.

American Express



welcome_vert_thmb_90x90We've recently added American Express processing to round out our Visa, Mastercard, Discover and e-Check acceptance. There are some compelling reasons to add American Express: businesses report increased sales which might mean getting attendees off the fence and into your events. If you're interested in American Express, contact us for details.

Check or Cash? You decide.



checkorcashSome organizations want more detail in their payment report and we listened. You can now use our offline payment capability to record cash and check payments as well as arbitrary credit or discount amounts. This increased flexibility makes balancing your registrations easier and faster with more ad-hoc capability letting registrars and organizers bypass some of the restrictions that impact attendees. You can also edit credit and discount payments in case an adjustment is needed or you make a mistake.

Outstanding Credit Report



New credit report shows all outstanding creditsAnd released just this week to much rejoicing from treasurers around the country, the outstanding credit report will list all in-system credits that have yet to be redeemed. If you're tracking your outstanding credits as revenue on your books, this report will make it easier to reconcile year to year as well as monitor who has credit remaining.

Want a taste?



You don't have to beg. All of this is available on MotorsportReg.com today. If you're interested in upgrading, just give us a call or drop an email and we'll upgrade your account on the spot.
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Topics: Features, Travel

Time Trial Vehicle Classification Registration

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Triangle Z Club Time Trial Vehicle Profile EventGet a load of this one: Stacy King from Triangle Z Club and Asphalt Ventures put together a beginning-of-year vehicle profile questionnaire for his Time Trial program. He can export all this data from his event into a spreadsheet and then perform whatever calculations are necessary to properly class the cars. This is a great example of someone taking our tools and doing awesome things with them that we never imagined.

(If the image is small when you click the link, click it to make it full-size. Some browsers scale it to fit which will make it unreadable)
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Topics: Features

Next generation form builder on its way

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Form Builder v2On the drawing board for six months and in development for three, the next generation of our drag-and-drop registration form builder is about to go live this next week:

Because we eat our own dog food, we found numerous places to improve the editing process and create accelerators for tedious tasks. The first iteration of our form builder brought a whole new level of flexibility and control - letting organizers put anything anywhere with drag-and-drop, create dependencies and complex validation rules. Combined with new capabilities like order form branching, all of that is wrapped into a slick user interface that works on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Opera on all major platforms. And just for fun, we made it about 3x faster too!

Looking back at my development notes, it's inspiring to see the progression of a user-centered design process like we use here. It starts with rough sketches on scrap paper, to pen-and-ruler designs on grid paper, to a short specifications document and feature description to early betas and finally the finished product. At each step along the way we incorporate user review, feedback and usability studies to determine how effective each change is going to be.

Stay tuned, we'll be posting a short screencast to demonstrate some of the new features that make us giggle like schoolgirls.
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Topics: Features

The sweet sound of silence: account merging

Date

June 11, 2013 by admin

I think everyone has a project where something is nagging them. There's something you know you need to do but either you aren't looking forward to it or you're busy with other priorities so you put it off. Eventually though, you wind up taking care of it and it's as though a weight has been lifted off your shoulders! The sweet sound of silence, be it mental or verbal, when you are no longer distracted by the nag is a wonderful moment.

About two weeks ago we pushed out two "relatively minor" updates to our member merger. When people forget they have an account on MotorsportReg.com or they can no longer access the email address they used, they often create a second (or third, or fourth...) account. For accuracy, we usually want to reduce this down to a single active account per member so we offer an account combining tool. This worked well for merging a single duplicate membership but it didn't know how to merge members that had multiple overlapping club memberships. This wasn't a problem early on but over time it became more and more common resulting in more accounts that could not be merged.

Operationally it's not such a big deal as you can flag one of those accounts as inactive and for all intents and purposes simply ignore it. But... it nagged me. I knew it should work. It could work. But it's a messy process that I wasn't looking forward to revisiting.

When we released our major update a couple of months ago, I was given the opportunity (or forced, depending on your point of view) to review and update the code to handle our newest features. When I was finished, I had a piece of code I was really excited about (yes, we engineer types do get excited about such things). We copy ourselves on notification emails when accounts are joined together and we also receive reports when merges fail to complete. We used to get a lot of those failure emails. You can imagine the sweet inner peace I have found now that the merge tool successfully merges all but a single indeterminate scenario (when both accounts are registered for the same event).

Organizers once again have full and complete control and I have a little more focus for the next project on my list.
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Topics: Features

We're Beta!

Date

June 11, 2013 by Mark

obl_beta_badge.gif
Fun badge from SlideShowPro.net
After many months of Brian coding his fingers down to nubbins, the next major evolution of the MotorsportReg.com Eventmaster360 motorsports management platform has gone Beta. We are very excited about this release as it both fulfills some major feature requests by competitive event organizations (such as a Permanent Number Manager and Order Form Dependencies) and also brings many, many smaller enhancements that will improve the experience for everyone who uses it.

We are particularly proud of the flexibility of the Permanent Number Manager, which allows organizers to enforce number uniqueness on a class, event, year, etc basis. It will even allow sharing of number pools across organizations in support of cross-regional or cross-divisional events.

The new order form has been streamlined both for the organizer as well as for the attendee, leveraging a lot of Javascript to make it as interactive and seamless as possible. Organizers can now set requirements such as "if you order Package A, you must also order Package B", which should go a long way toward eliminating incorrect orders and after-the-fact package editing, as well as associate questions and actions with packages directly instead of just placing them generically at the top of the page.

Our newly revamped Who's Attending feature can now optionally list car make/model, class, and sponsor and can be made publicly visible so potential attendees can scope out the competition before they sign up. We've also updated the Email Blaster with a much slicker UI that makes communicating with your members and attendees easier than ever.

This release includes some new technologies under the hood, too, which will speed development of new features. Once the Beta period is over and we are live with the new code, we'll be starting in on Round 2 of our To Do List. Next up is Deferred Payment Processing, which will allow organizers to collect payment information at the time of registration but not actually process the dollars until some arbitrary later date. Defered Payment Processing will be an industry-first in motorsports!

And wait until you see what we've got tee'd up after that!

We are in the home stretch of a process that began in mid-2007, so please bear with us as we finish up the last bit of bug hunting and code polishing. Look for MotorsportReg.com to gain some fantastic new features in a matter of days.
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Topics: Misc, Features

Unexpected Coupons = Sales

Date

September 9, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Picked this up today via MailChimp: Two researchers worked with an online grocer and found that a surprise gift certificate or coupon (an "unanticipated small windfall") caused people to buy stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. The kicker? They wind up spending more than normal.

MotorsportReg.com's Discount Code system is the perfect way to take advantage of this behavior.

Our discount code system allows you to create arbitrary codes (like "FALL07" or "RACERSPCL") with either an absolute dollar amount or a percentage-based discount. You can narrow down the use to a single event and control how many times someone can redeem the code and how many are available along with some minimum and maximum dollar controls. You can find it under "Club Profile" from your Dashboard.

Combined with our email blaster, you can create marketing pressure and incentivize people to sign up through one of these small windfalls. You might consider upselling your attendees on "extras" like t-shirts or dinners. Experiment with your holiday parties or driving events and let us know what happens!

You can read the full research paper here.

Like what you've read? Click here to subscribe
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Topics: Features

July Improvements

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

It's been a busy month since our last entry here. We've been diligently interviewing and checking the references of our top candidates for our engineer position and working to bring our first Dojo-powered widget to fruition in the form of our Student-Instructor assignment tool.

In the past, our assignment tool simply listed all of the students with a select box of instructors. This was easy to use but also easy to screw up; too many or too few students for each instructor or double-booking an instructor for a given run group. It also forced quite a bit of HTML down the pipe causing slow page loads for folks without broadband.

Click for larger versionEnter our new and improved editor! Instructors and students are now organized in a grid with a dynamic list of students showing how many assignments each student has. The list of instructors is only downloaded once making this new version about 75% faster. It's impossible to double-book an instructor in a run group and easy to make sure each student has what they need. Changes are saved right in-line without any page refreshes making the tool faster and easier to use.

We'll be continuing to add more desktop-like enhancements to our tools leveraging our professional user experience backgrounds. The email blaster and packages / inventory editor are both slated for similar updates and additional functionality soon.

Let us know what you think!
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Topics: Features

3.2.0 Is Live + Roadmap

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

After 42 revisions, 3.1 has come and gone, the last update brings better presentation to the 2% of our users who are still accessing MSR with IE5 on a Mac. Now we get to move on to some fun new things that organizers have been asking for and start to accent the application with AJAX improvements.

For 3.2, we're going to focus on refactoring a couple of core pieces that could be improved upon and adding a handful of new features. We'll also be sprinkling some AJAX features in where it makes sense. The highlights include:

  • Fees & Inventory Editor - make it easier to see the relationships between packages, inventory and assignments and add the ability to make batch changes. AJAX will support cloning and saving without refreshing the screen.
  • Instructor-Student Assignments - it is easy to over or under-subscribe an instructor due to the lack of tracking in the application. Real-time totals and a new grid presentation will make allocating instructors to students a much easier task. AJAX will be used to fetch detailed information on request about a student to help make the assignment.
  • The concept of a session timeout will be removed via a small AJAX ping. As long as the browser is open on MSR, the user will stay logged in (at least for organizers).
  • Integration of Google or Yahoo! maps into event detail pages
  • Update the WYSIWYG text editor to the latest revision which uses a new "sprite" technique to radically improve toolbar loading time over competitive products. This feature and its implementation was actually suggested by us.
  • Email blaster redesign will expose more of the backend data we collect and manage about email campaigns as well as make it easier to send "quick" email in the system to members.


These are a few of the 23 open tickets that are slated for this next iteration which may last for the next 30-60 days. Feedback encouraged if you've got a particular wish!
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Topics: Features

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