Stop Running Your Padel Sessions on WhatsApp and PayPal
Last updated: · payments, events, operations
The message goes out to the WhatsApp group on a Thursday evening. Saturday session, £12 if you need a racket, £10.50 if you bring your own. “PayPal Friends & Family to [email protected], ✅ only once paid.” Then the organiser starts a hand-typed numbered list — names as the confirmations come in, a tick next to each one once the PayPal notification lands.
By Friday afternoon, there are 14 names on the list. Six courts are available. The maths doesn’t add up, and someone in the group is asking whether they’re in or on a waitlist. The organiser isn’t sure either.
This is how most casual padel sessions run. It works, sort of — until it doesn’t. And it has real costs that are easy to overlook because they’ve become routine.
The hidden costs of the WhatsApp + PayPal method
PayPal Friends & Family isn’t the workaround it seems
PayPal F&F exists to let you split a dinner bill with a friend. Using it to collect money for a service — a session you’ve organised, a court you’ve booked and paid for — is against PayPal’s terms of service for business or commercial payments. If PayPal decides to investigate, they can freeze the account.
More practically: your players have no buyer protection. If you cancel the session and can’t refund, they have no recourse through PayPal. That’s fine when everyone knows each other — until it isn’t.
The reason organisers use F&F is to avoid PayPal’s transaction fee. That logic makes sense. But it’s worth knowing what you’re trading: ToS exposure and zero protection, in exchange for saving a small per-transaction fee.
Manual paid-ticking doesn’t scale beyond about eight people
A numbered list with ticks is manageable for a small group. Add fourteen people, a £2 price difference depending on equipment, and a few who say “I’ll pay later” and it starts to break down. By the time the session happens, the organiser has cross-referenced the list with PayPal notifications at least twice, and there’s still uncertainty about one or two names.
That’s not because the organiser is disorganised. It’s because manually reconciling a payment list in a messaging app is genuinely hard. There’s no single source of truth, notifications arrive out of order, and the “✅ only once paid” rule depends entirely on the organiser catching every payment in real time.
Capacity is managed by counting messages in a thread
The “6 Courts Available” header doesn’t enforce anything. It’s a statement, not a limit. Whether 14 or 20 people end up on the list depends on when the organiser stops adding names — which depends on them counting, in a thread, while other messages are coming in.
An over-subscribed session means someone who paid is told there’s no space. An under-subscribed one means you’ve booked courts you don’t need. Both happen because there’s no system enforcing a real capacity limit at the moment each person signs up.
There’s no waitlist — just a second post
When a space opens up because someone drops out, the current method is to post again: “space just freed up, who wants it?” First to reply wins, not first in line. That’s frustrating for people who expressed interest earlier and were told the session was full.
What a cleaner setup looks like
The scenario above — two price tiers, a capacity limit, “first-paid-first-served” — is exactly what a simple event booking tool handles.
Two ticket variants, each at its own price. Rather than posting “£12 or £10.50 depending on whether you bring a racket” and hoping everyone pays the right amount, you create an event with two ticket options. Each player picks their variant at the point of booking and pays the corresponding amount. The paid list reflects exactly what was booked and what was charged — no side-conversations, no chasing the wrong amount.
Capacity that actually enforces itself. Set the number of places. Each one is held only once payment clears — which is exactly the “✅ only once paid” rule, automated. If you set 12 places and 12 people pay, the session is full. The 13th person goes to a waitlist automatically, no message required.
An automatic waitlist, not a second post. When someone drops out, the next person on the waitlist gets the space. You don’t need to re-post or decide who was first in line — the system has kept track.
Payments to your account, with receipts. Card payments go directly to your connected account via Stripe — Adminished’s fee is 1% on top of Stripe’s standard card processing (cash and bank transfers you record cost nothing). Every player gets an automatic receipt. You get a complete payment ledger per session, so reconciliation at the end of the week is a glance at a list, not a cross-reference between a thread and a PayPal inbox.
One link into the WhatsApp group. You don’t move the conversation anywhere. You still post in the same group; you just send a booking link instead of a PayPal address. Players click it, choose their ticket, and pay. You see the live paid list update as they do.
The one-time setup
To take card payments, you do a one-time Stripe Connect onboarding: bank details and an identity check, around 10 minutes. After that, every future session is creating an event and sharing the link. The money lands in your account automatically, without you manually tracking who has paid.
For sessions where some people prefer to pay cash or by bank transfer, you can record those payments manually in the same ledger — so everything is in one place regardless of how each person paid.
One-off or recurring, your call
The two-tier pricing setup works best as a one-off event — you create a session, set your ticket variants, and share the link. For a regular weekly group where everyone pays the same drop-in price, you can set up a recurring session instead. Both options produce the same result: a clean paid list, automatic receipts, and a capacity limit that enforces itself.
Running a casual social session shouldn’t require this much manual work. The WhatsApp-plus-PayPal method made sense when there was no straightforward alternative. There is now.
Adminished is free to start — see what it looks like for padel sessions.
Written by the Adminished team · More guides →