Stop Holding Seats for People Who Never Pay: Requiring Payment in Advance for Events
Last updated: · events, payments, cashflow
You open bookings for a half-term camp. Twenty places. By Wednesday the page says “Sold out” — twenty bookings in. You stop promoting it. You turn families away.
Then the camp arrives and fourteen children turn up.
What happened to the other six? They booked, meant to pay, and never did. Their “booking” held a seat for a fortnight — a seat a real, paying family would have taken — and then evaporated on the morning. You turned away paying customers to hold space for people who were never coming.
This is the quiet tax of letting people reserve before they pay. And for popular, limited events, it’s the difference between a full camp and a half-empty one.
Why “book now, pay later” leaks
Most booking systems — and most clubs running off a WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet — separate the booking from the payment. Someone clicks “book”, and now there’s an obligation hanging in the air: they owe you money, you owe them a place. The gap between those two events is where everything goes wrong.
- A keen parent books three things in five minutes and only pays for one.
- Someone books “to be safe” while they check with the other parent, then forgets.
- A family books, doesn’t pay, and you’re too polite to chase — so the seat sits dead.
Every one of those is a seat removed from your real capacity. On a 20-place camp, even a 25% no-pay rate means you’ve been running a 15-place camp the whole time and didn’t know it.
What “require payment in advance” actually does
In Adminished you can switch a single setting on any event: require payment in advance. When it’s on, the rule is simple and absolute — a place is only confirmed once it’s been paid for by card.
There’s no held-but-unpaid limbo. A parent who wants to book is taken straight to a secure card checkout. They pay, the place is theirs, and your capacity count reflects reality. A parent who isn’t ready to pay hasn’t taken a seat from anyone.
It also closes the back door. Normally a coach can mark a booking as paid by hand — useful when someone genuinely pays by cash or bank transfer. On a prepaid event that manual route is switched off, so a seat can never be quietly marked “paid” without the money actually arriving. If someone truly can’t pay online, you cancel their booking and free the place on purpose, rather than carrying a maybe.
The no-show effect
There’s a well-documented behavioural truth here: people value what they’ve paid for. A parent who has put £20 on the card for Saturday’s session turns up to Saturday’s session. A parent who “booked” for free and intended to settle up later has nothing on the line, and the first rainy morning wins.
Requiring payment up front doesn’t just protect your capacity count — it raises your actual attendance. The people in your “sold out” twenty are twenty people who reached for their card. If reducing no-shows is on your list — and it should be — this is one of the highest-leverage changes you can make, alongside the broader case for collecting payment at booking.
Where it’s the obvious choice
Not every event needs this. A free open day, or a long-standing weekly drop-in with regulars you trust, runs fine on the honour system. Turn it on where the stakes are real:
- Limited-capacity camps and workshops, where a wasted seat is a turned-away family.
- Trips with money committed up front — coach hire, venue deposits, activity-centre bookings. You’re spending real money on a date; you want the income secured before you do. The income curve should match the booking curve, not lag three weeks behind it.
- Anything “pay on the day” has burned you on before. Once is a lesson; twice is a policy.
What it costs, and what it saves
Card payments aren’t free. For UK domestic cards Stripe charges roughly 1.5% + 25p, and Adminished adds a 1% platform fee — so on a £20 camp place you’re looking at a little under 60p in fees.
Weigh that against the alternative honestly. Six unpaid seats on a twenty-place camp at £20 each is £120 of revenue that simply didn’t happen — plus the paying families you turned away because the page said full. Sixty pence a head to make every booking a real one is not a cost. It’s the cheapest insurance you’ll buy all term.
Setting it up
It takes about thirty seconds:
- Connect your payment account once under Settings → Payments (this is what lets you take card online at all).
- Open the event and tick Require payment in advance.
- Save. The public booking page now tells attendees payment is taken when they book, and every confirmed place from then on is a paid place.
Refunds still work the same way — one click back to the card, no bank details to chase — and a parent can self-cancel a future place from their own dashboard. Requiring payment up front doesn’t make you inflexible. It just stops you holding seats for people who were never going to pay.
For the step-by-step, see requiring payment in advance for an event.
Events, advance payment, and one-click refunds are part of Adminished’s paid plans. See what’s included and how fees compare.
Written by the Adminished team · More guides →