Registration & payments

The COMS payment module allows you to collect and track registration and payments performed by the participants. Both credit card payments and payments made by bank transfer can be handled, either exclusively or simultaneously. This page gives an overview of the module. Implementation details are described in the pages that follow.

You will need to access an admin account on your COMS site, https://conference-service.com/{event_acronym}, in order to set up and manage the payments.

• Create custom registration forms.
• The forms can include multiple bookable items, variable fees, registration periods (early bird, standard, late), more than one currency, quotas and discounts.
• Collect online payments from the delegates.
• Collect offline payments from the delegates.
• Automatically generate invoices and receipts for the delegates.
• Collect scans of student cards. These can be viewed and annotated by administrators of the site.
• View, edit, export registration and payment records.

• If you are planning to use online payments, you will need to connect your bank account to the COMS system, in order to collect payments from the delegates.
• For this, you will need to select a payment solution (payment gateway) that can be integrated with COMS. The payment solution will also connect to your account, thus allowing registrations performed on the COMS site to be paid directly into your bank account.
• Available options are listed here.
• Small to medium sized events
  For events with less than about 500 participants, we recommend the use of either Stripe or PayPal, which can be set up quickly and work with standard accounts (checking accounts). Other platforms, which require a merchant account, might offer better (lower) commissions. However, they require more time to set up and may incur fees for the maintenance of the account. These additional costs might not be offset by the lower commissions, if the number of delegates is low.
• Detailed guidelines are given in this doc for the setup of a Stripe or PayPal account and the creation of an interface to your COMS site.
• Once the interface between COMS and your bank account is ready, you can activate or deactivate it at will in the configuration of your COMS site. When online payments are activated, users are given access to the payment gateway through a "Pay now" button.
• Online payments are reported in COMS in real time. The status of a payment immediately up to date and a receipt is automatically emailed to the user.

• Offline payments (mostly bank transfers) can be used to collect payments, independently or in combination with online payments.
• They can be activated by administrators in the configuration of the COMS site. When they are activated, users can specify their intention to pay offline and are presented with your bank details. These can also be printed on the generated invoice.
• Note: offline payments are not reported to the COMS server and need to be manually input on the COMS site in order to update the status of a payment.