I am a relatively new TD. I have my first (what I would consider) large tournament this weekend. It is an RBO that I thought would draw about 24 people. I have 50 pre-registrations. When I figured out that I was getting huge numbers, I hired another club TD and also a local coach to help.
The make-up right now is about 65% absolutely new members or unrateds, including a handful of unrated adults in the highest section.
Since I have such a large portion of new memberships I am processing, I am trying to get them all in a batch on the USCF site, and I will process the batch right after check-in is done. Then, I plan on putting the new member ids in SwissSys. I was thinking about test uploading the first round to make sure all of the membership issues are okay while I have all the parents there. I do have internet access at the playing site.
Any words of wisdom or things I should consider or watch out for?
Why are you waiting to do the memberships in 1 batch? If you have all of the information with the pre-registration, I’d go ahead and process those memberships so you only have to worry with the on site registrations later. (Plus you will already have the ID’s in your pairing program for those players) I’ve done 5 different membership batches for the same tournament; just to process everything as I went.
Other than that, sounds like a smart call to get some extra help to deal with all of the issues from so many new players!
Rob - I have the information, just not payment from most people. The vast majority of my registrations came in via email. It is pretty common around here to allow pre-regsistration with payment on site (though I might do that differently next time). I don’t want to get stuck paying memberships for no-shows. You are right, though, it is probably a good idea for me to pull out the ones that have paid, and get those done tonight or tomorrow.
There is a practical reason for doing this if you pay for the memberships by credit card. If you make too many transactions on the same card in a short period, the system locks you out and will not accept that card again for several hours. I assume this is a security feature, but it’s kind of annoying. It will often save time to wait until you have all (or nearly all) of the memberships, and do them all at once.
Most security measures wind up being a bit annoying.
The next round of changes in the credit card processing module will give the office the ability to set ‘high activity level’ flags on designated credit cards, either temporarily or permanently. (There are other security measures that will still be in place, including one recently recommended to us by our credit card processing vendor, which I do not plan to discuss here for obvious reasons.)
If you have all the information needed for the USCF memberships you could go ahead and put them into an excel spreadsheet. Once you get the payments, and know who’s not coming you can delete the information you don’t need. Save the excel file as a text file, and use the upload batch feature to submit your memberships. The upload feature is so much easier to use then putting in the names one by one on the membership batch page.