Taking payments and getting paid: Laces

This guide is about money: how a participant pays you, what they are charged, when that money reaches your account, and how to check the numbers.

If you only take one thing from it, take this: Laces is free for you, the fee is charged to the buyer at checkout, and your mobile-money takings are yours to withdraw as soon as each payment is confirmed. The rest is detail.

1. How a participant pays

A participant opens your event page, picks a distance, adds any kit or extras, and pays by mobile money: MTN MoMo or Airtel Money. They do not need an account with anyone, just a wallet with money in it, and you do not have to enable anything.

MTN lands in your Instant Wallet and Airtel Money lands in your Standard Wallet — two different payment partners work behind the scenes, which is why they are priced and settled slightly differently. See sections 2 and 4.

What happens on their phone when they pay:

They enter their number and press pay.
A prompt arrives on their handset.
They enter their Mobile Money PIN to authorise it.
The entry is confirmed and they get an order code on screen straight away.

Nothing leaves their account until they enter the PIN. If the prompt times out, nothing was charged and their place is still held for a few more minutes while they retry.

The things that go wrong, and what to tell people

You will be asked about all three of these.

What they say	What is actually happening
“No prompt came”	It is usually late rather than missing. They can dial their telco’s pending-request menu and approve it there, or press resend on the page
“It said failed”	Almost always insufficient balance, or the number they typed is not the one holding the wallet
“I paid twice”	Rare, and recoverable. Every payment attempt carries an idempotency key, and a genuine duplicate is refunded in full. Send them to support@laces.run with the order code

Cash at the desk

Participants will turn up on event week with cash. Record them in the Admin App as a desk registration and they land on the same manifest as everyone else, so the check-in desk works for them.

Laces charges nothing on a cash registration: no money went through the platform. The cash is yours and it is yours to account for. Cash orders show on your statement marked as such and are excluded from settlement.

2. The fee line, and what it covers

The Laces Service Fee is UGX 900 + 5% of the order on mobile money, MTN and Airtel Money alike, and the participant sees the exact total before they confirm. A participant buying a UGX 50,000 entry on MTN sees this:

21KM Entry                    UGX  50,000
Laces Service Fee             UGX   3,400
                              ───────────
Total                         UGX  53,400

The same entry paid by Airtel Money shows the same UGX 3,400 fee and UGX 53,400 total.

You receive UGX 50,000 either way. The fee is added on top of your price and charged to the buyer; it never changes your side of it.

The fee applies to the whole order: entries, merchandise and add-ons alike. It is a single, consolidated charge; it already includes the cost of processing the payment, so there is no separate “Payment Processing” line added on top of it.

Two more things worth knowing:

The fee is charged to the buyer, not to you. It is added on top of your price. You set UGX 50,000 and UGX 50,000 is what counts towards your gross.
It is never called a “registration fee.” That label makes participants think it is your charge, and it starts an argument you should not have to have.

A free event costs nothing at all. No payment provider is involved and no fee is charged to anyone, on either rail.

3. Getting set up to be paid

Before you can charge for entries you need:

A payout account (bank or mobile money) in the name of the organisation selling the entries.
KYC verification. Expect to provide your certificate of incorporation or registration, your TIN, identification for directors or signatories, and proof that you control the payout account.

Two rules that exist to protect participants more than they protect us:

We will not settle to an account we have not verified.
We will not settle to an account in a different name from the selling organisation without a documented explanation.

Do this early. It is the step most likely to hold up a first payout, and it is much less stressful in the week you create your event than in the week after your event.

You can start selling before verification completes: you just cannot be paid until it does. Entries sell, money accrues to your balance, and the moment verification clears it becomes withdrawable. Nothing is lost by starting early; the only thing that waits is the payout.

4. When your money arrives

In the Admin App your money is shown as Total Earnings — your combined balance across two wallets. MTN and other mobile-money sales land in your Instant Wallet; card and Airtel Money sales land in your Standard Wallet. The two wallets clear at different speeds, which is what the rest of this section is about.

MTN mobile money is withdrawable as soon as the payment is confirmed. An MTN entry is not held at all: the moment the charge is confirmed, that money lands in your Instant Wallet and you can take it out. There is no 24-hour wait and no settlement batch to sit through. You are not waiting for event day, and you are not waiting for a business day either.

Airtel Money clears a little differently. It settles into your Standard Wallet, which holds it briefly until our payment partner’s own settlement process confirms it — usually within about a day and a half, never more than roughly two days. Once settled, withdrawing it to mobile money works exactly like the Instant Wallet: instant, any day of the week. A bank withdrawal from the Standard Wallet specifically takes three to five business days instead, and does not run on weekends — see “Getting the money out” below.

One more narrow case: a charge we had to confirm by polling rather than by the provider’s own callback is held briefly until that callback independently corroborates it. This is a belt-and-braces check on MTN payments, not a real delay you should plan around.

Your Total Earnings always separates what is available in each wallet from what is still clearing, so you never have to guess which case a given payment is in.

Getting the money out

Minimum withdrawal is UGX 1,000.
Your first withdrawal is free, once per organisation, across your whole balance. After that, the fee depends on which wallet you are withdrawing from. Each withdrawal after your first carries a fixed transfer fee per country, shown before you confirm:
- Instant Wallet (MTN and other mobile-money sales) — UGX 1,000 to mobile money at any amount, and UGX 5,400 for a bank transfer.
- Standard Wallet (card and Airtel Money sales) — quoted to you before you confirm: mobile money is instant once the funds have settled, a bank transfer takes three to five business days. The exact fee and arrival time are always shown in full before you confirm.
A code is emailed to you to authorise each withdrawal. It is tied to that amount and that destination.
Withdrawals to mobile money run every day, weekends included, from either wallet. A bank withdrawal from the Standard Wallet only settles on a business day — a weekend request against it is refused rather than accepted and silently stalled. The Instant Wallet has no such restriction on either rail.
To withdraw: tap Withdraw on Total Earnings (or on an event’s own Earnings) and choose a wallet, or tap Withdraw on a wallet directly to go straight to it. A bank withdrawal from the Standard Wallet shows the three-to-five-business-day notice, weekends excluded, before you confirm. Anything that goes wrong with a withdrawal goes to payments@laces.run.

There is no rolling reserve by default. We reserve the right to apply one (up to 10% of gross, released 30 days after the event) for a first event, an unusually large one, or an organizer with a history of disputes. If we do, you will see it in the Admin App before you go on sale, and we will not apply one to an event that is already selling.

The full terms are in section 5 and section 7 of the Organizer Terms.

If you cancel

You bear the refunds, and this is the part to think hard about. Because your money is available from each sale rather than being held until event day, an event cancelled close to the date has usually already been paid out, and possibly spent. Instant settlement makes this more important, not less.

If funds are still held, we refund participants from them and you do not have to find the cash. If they have already been withdrawn, you are liable to repay them. Section 6 of the Organizer Terms sets out exactly how that works.

The practical advice: treat entry revenue as money you may have to give back until the event has actually been run.

This is the single most important paragraph in this guide for anyone planning a first event on a tight budget.

5. Reading your statement

Every event has a statement. It shows:

Line	What it means
Gross collected	Everything participants paid you: entries, add-ons, donations
Laces service fee	Our fee. Charged to the buyer, shown here for completeness
Payment processing	The provider’s cost on those transactions
Refunds	What has been refunded, and to whom
Held	Collected but not yet released, per section 4
Released	Already paid out to you, with dates
Reserve	Held back against post-event disputes, with its release date
Net payable	What is coming to you

Every line traces back to an order. If a figure is not what you expected, open it and follow it down to the individual orders behind it. The usual causes of a surprise, in order of how often they come up:

Refunds you forgot you issued. They reduce gross.
Cash registrations counted in your head but not in settlement. They are on the manifest, but no money passed through the platform, so they are not in the payout.
The reserve. It looks like missing money and it is not: check its release date.
An event still inside its holding period. Check the settlement date shown on the statement.

Download it any time. If a number still does not reconcile after that, email finance@laces.run with your event and the figure you expected, and it can be traced line by line.

6. Issuing a refund

From the Admin App, open the order and refund it in full or in part.

The money goes back to the mobile-money account that paid for the order. It cannot be redirected to a different number, as that is how refunds get diverted.
You refund the entry price you set. The Laces service fee is not reversed: it paid to move the money, and that cost was incurred when the payment was processed. You are not asked to fund it, and you are not charged again to issue the refund.
Where the failure was ours (a duplicate charge, or a payment that took money without creating an entry) the full amount including the fee goes back, out of our margin rather than yours.
Refunds come out of held funds where there are any.
A refund cannot be recalled once submitted, so check the amount first.

Your event’s own refund policy decides whether a refund is owed. You publish that policy, and Laces will not let your event go on sale without one: an event selling entries with no stated refund policy is the most reliable source of disputes in this market.

Laces has its own platform refund policy covering how a refund is processed once it is due, and the handful of situations where we act regardless of your policy: duplicate charges, payments that took money without registering anyone, and cancelled events.

Consider allowing transfers as well. A participant who cannot make it can hand their place to someone else; you keep your number, they are not out of pocket, and nobody has to process anything.

7. A short checklist

Payout account added, in the selling organisation’s name
KYC submitted early, not the week of the event
Refund policy written and published, required before you can go on sale
Settlement schedule and reserve read and understood, in the Admin App
Someone briefed to answer “no prompt came” at the registration desk
Cash desk mode tried once before event week