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Organizer Terms

The terms for organizers selling event entries through Laces: settlement timing, the rolling reserve, KYC, and, stated plainly, who bears the refund exposure when an event is cancelled.

Last updated 17 August 2026 · Laces · 10 min read

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These Organizer Terms apply if you sell event entries through Laces. They sit on top of the Terms of Service, which also apply to you.

This page is the plain-language version. The binding contract between your organisation and Apta Innovations Limited is the Merchant Service Agreement, which covers chargeback liability, reserves, prohibited businesses, data security and termination in full. Where this page and that agreement differ, the Merchant Service Agreement prevails.

The most important sections are 5 (settlement timing), 6 (refund exposure on a cancelled event) and 7 (the reserve). If you read nothing else, read those three. They determine when you get your money and what happens if your event does not go ahead.

  • “Organizer,” “you” means the organisation that publishes an event on Laces and sells entries to it.
  • “Participant” and “buyer” are as defined in the Terms of Service.
  • “Gross” means everything a buyer paid for your event: entries, add-ons and donations.
  • “Net payable” means gross, less refunds, less the payment provider’s cost, less any amount withheld under sections 6 or 7.

1. Laces is free for organizers

No setup fee. No subscription. No monthly charge. No listing fee.

Laces earns UGX 500 + 2.9% of the order total (effective 2026-09-10), charged to the buyer at checkout as the “Laces Service Fee.” It applies to the full order: entries, merchandise and add-ons alike, and it already includes the cost of processing the payment. There is no separate processing charge added on top.

A free event costs you nothing at all. If you charge nothing, no payment provider is involved and no fee is charged to anyone.

The service fee is shown to the buyer as a single line before they pay. We do not call it a “registration fee”: it is not your fee and it will not be mistaken for one.

2. Your event is yours

Laces provides software. You run the event. You are responsible for:

  • Permits, road closures, and every other authorisation your event needs.
  • Insurance and medical cover.
  • Route safety, marshalling, and cut-off enforcement.
  • The accuracy of everything you publish on your event page.
  • Honouring the entries you sell, on the terms you published when you sold them.
  • Kit stock, and getting the right kit to the right participant.

Laces is not a co-organizer, a promoter, or an agent of your event beyond collecting payment on your behalf.

3. Before you can go on sale

Your event cannot be published until you have:

  • Published a refund policy. This is required, and it is deliberate: an event on sale with no stated refund policy is the single most common source of disputes in this market. Your policy appears on your event page and forms part of the participant’s purchase.
  • Provided the waiver text participants will accept, and its version.
  • Set your event’s terms.
  • Completed the payout and KYC steps in section 4, if you intend to charge for entries.

4. Payout account and KYC

To receive money you must provide a payout account (bank or mobile money) in the name of the organisation selling the entries, and complete identity and business verification.

We may ask for: certificate of incorporation or registration, TIN, the identification of directors or authorised signatories, and proof of control of the payout account.

We will not settle funds to an account we have not verified, and we will not settle to an account in a different name from the selling organisation without a documented explanation. This protects participants more than it protects us.

You may sell before verification completes. You cannot be paid before it does. The two are deliberately separated, because holding up a race launch while paperwork clears helps nobody, and paying out to an unverified account helps the wrong person.

In practice:

  • Publishing an event and selling entries does not require completed KYC.
  • Withdrawing money does. A withdrawal request against an unverified payout account is refused, and the funds stay held until verification completes.
  • Funds are never lost by this. They accrue to your balance and become withdrawable the moment verification clears.

If verification fails, or you abandon it, entries already sold must still be honoured or refunded under section 6. We will refund participants from the held funds rather than hold money for an organisation we could not verify.

5. Settlement timing

This is the section organizers care most about, so it is stated as plainly as we can state it.

Money paid by participants is collected on your behalf and credited to your balance as soon as the payment provider confirms it. In the ordinary case that is immediate: you can withdraw an entry the moment it is paid.

What we never do is credit you money the payment provider has not actually confirmed to us. That is the only condition, and it is what stops a payment reversed immediately after it was made from leaving a balance behind it.

Note what this means for a cancelled event. Because funds are available to you immediately rather than being held until race day, an event cancelled close to the date will very likely have had its entry money already withdrawn. The refund liability is then yours, and section 6 is not a formality; read it before you sell.

5.1 Settlement

A payment becomes withdrawable as soon as the payment provider confirms it. There is no minimum holding period. Our provider credits us at the moment a collection succeeds, so a confirmed entry is in your available balance immediately, on any day of the week.

The provider’s confirmation is the gate, and it is the only gate. Money that has not been confirmed to us is never withdrawable: a payment that is refunded, charged back, or not yet confirmed stays out of your available balance. This is what stops us paying out money we have not received.

One narrow exception. Where we established that a payment succeeded by querying the provider rather than by receiving the provider’s own notification, that payment is held until the notification independently corroborates it, or until a short automatic backstop releases it. This is a verification step, not a settlement delay, and it applies to a small minority of payments.

Your available balance and anything still being confirmed are shown separately in the Admin App, so the distinction is always visible to you rather than something you have to infer.

5.2 What this means in practice

Entries sold weeks before your race are withdrawable from the moment they are paid, not after the event. Laces does not hold your entry revenue until race day. This makes cancellation risk more significant, not less: if an event is later cancelled after you have withdrawn, section 6 governs, and the liability is yours.

5.3 Withdrawing

Withdrawals are requested from the Admin App against your available balance.

  • Minimum withdrawal: UGX 1,000.
  • A one-time code is emailed to you and must be entered to authorise the withdrawal. The code is bound to that specific amount and destination; it cannot be reused to send a different sum somewhere else.
  • Withdrawals run every day, including weekends. Our provider settles both bank transfers and mobile money on any day, so a Saturday or Sunday request is processed like any other. Where a destination is served by a provider that restricts a rail to business days, a request on a closed day is refused with a clear reason rather than accepted and silently stalled.

5.4 Withdrawal fees

Destination Fee
Your first withdrawal, ever Free
Mobile money, any amount UGX 1,000
Bank transfer UGX 5,400

The free first withdrawal is per organisation, once, for its lifetime, not per event and not annually. It applies to whichever rail you use first.

These are the payment provider’s Uganda payout rates and are quoted exclusive of VAT. The exact fee is quoted to you before you confirm a withdrawal, and that quote, not this table, is what you are charged. The fee schedule is currently UGX only; if we support another currency we will publish its schedule before you can sell in it.

5.5 What we commit to

  • Your settlement schedule will be visible in the Admin App before you go on sale, not discovered afterwards.
  • You will see, per event, the gross collected, fees, refunds, amount held, amount released, and the date of the next release.
  • We will not change the settlement terms of an event that is already on sale.

Free events settle nothing because they collect nothing, and are unaffected by any of this.

6. Refund exposure on a cancelled event

Read this before you sell a single entry.

6.1 The principle

If your event is cancelled, participants are entitled to a refund in line with the refund policy you published, and you bear that cost. The entry money is theirs until they have run the race they paid for. Laces does not absorb an organizer’s cancellation.

6.2 If funds have not yet been settled to you

We refund participants from the held funds directly. You are liable for any shortfall, most commonly because the payment provider’s cost on the original transaction is not recoverable, but the participants are made whole without needing to chase you.

This is the best case for everyone, and it applies to whatever has not yet been withdrawn.

6.3 If funds have already been settled to you

You are liable to refund the participants, and you must repay Laces any amount we advance to them on your behalf.

Because settlement is fast (section 5), this is a realistic scenario rather than an edge case. Treat entry revenue as money you may have to give back until the race has been run.

We may:

  • Apply the reserve held under section 7 against the refunds due.
  • Offset the amount against money held for any other event of yours on the platform.
  • Invoice you for the balance, payable within 14 days. After that we may charge interest at 2% per month on the outstanding amount and recover reasonable collection costs.
  • Suspend your ability to sell new entries until the balance is settled.

We will tell participants plainly what is happening and what they are owed. We will not tell participants their money is gone, and we will not quietly leave them chasing an unreachable organizer while their money sat in our account.

6.4 Postponement is not cancellation

If you postpone rather than cancel, your published refund policy governs what participants are entitled to. Holding funds through a postponement is treated as an extension of the settlement point, not as a cancellation, unless the event is ultimately not held.

6.5 Insolvency

If you become insolvent, enter administration or liquidation, or cease trading between settlement and your event:

  • Any funds we still hold for your events are applied to participant refunds first, before any other claim, because that money was collected from participants for a race that is not going to happen.
  • We will suspend further sales immediately and cancel the listing.
  • Amounts already withdrawn are a debt of your organisation, and participants’ claims for them rank alongside your other unsecured creditors. We will pursue the debt, and we will give participants the records they need to prove their own claim.

We are stating the limit of this openly: once money has left the platform, Laces has no mechanism to recover it from an insolvent organisation, and no participant should read these terms as a guarantee against that. The reserve in section 7 and our right of offset are the tools we have, and they are finite.

Directors, take note. Where an organisation continues selling entries while knowing it cannot deliver the event, personal liability may follow under the Companies Act 2012 and the Insolvency Act 2011. Selling into a race you already know will not happen is not a commercial risk you are passing to us.

7. Rolling reserve

We may hold a reserve (a percentage of the gross collected on your event) beyond the ordinary settlement point, released after the refund window has closed and the event has completed without dispute.

The reserve exists to cover refunds, chargebacks and disputes that surface after settlement. It is not a fee: it is your money, held for a period, and released to you.

The default reserve is currently 0%. No rolling reserve is applied to an ordinary event today, and the 24-hour settlement gate in section 5 is what protects against a payment being reversed after we credit you.

We reserve the right to apply one, up to 10% of gross, released 30 days after the event completes, where the risk warrants it: a first event, an unusually large one, an event selling far in advance of its date, or an organizer with a history of disputes or chargebacks.

If we apply a reserve to your event, you will see the percentage and the release date in the Admin App before you go on sale, and we will not impose one on an event that is already selling. A reserve is never a fee: it is your money, held for a stated period, and released to you.

8. Your statement

For every event you get a statement showing gross collected, the Laces service fee, the payment provider’s cost, refunds issued, amounts held and released, and net payable. It is downloadable at any time.

Every ledger entry traces back to an order. If a figure in your statement does not match what you expected, it can be reconciled line by line. See the settlements guide.

9. Refunds you issue

You can issue full or partial refunds from the Admin App.

  • Refunds are returned to the mobile-money account that paid.
  • A refund returns the entry amount. Fees are not reversed. The Laces Service Fee and the processing cost inside it were earned and incurred when the payment was processed, and a refund does not un-incur the telco’s cost. This is set out for participants in the Refund Policy.
  • You are refunding the base price you set; the amount you were credited. You are not asked to fund the buyer’s service fee, and you are not charged a second processing cost to issue the refund.
  • The exception is where the failure was ours: a duplicate charge, or a payment that took money without creating an entry. There the full amount including the fee is returned, and it comes out of our margin, not yours.
  • Refunds you issue are drawn from held funds where available, and from the reserve or from you where not.
  • A refund is final once submitted to the provider. It cannot be recalled if you change your mind, so check the amount before you confirm it.

10. Cash and desk registrations

Organizers take cash at a desk on race week. Laces supports recording those registrations so the participant appears on the manifest and the kit tent works for them.

Laces charges no fee on a cash registration, because no money passed through the platform. The cash is yours, collected by you, and it is your responsibility to account for it. Recorded cash orders appear on your statement marked as such, and are excluded from settlement.

11. Participant data

Participant data collected through your event is held by you as controller and by Laces as processor, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

You agree to:

  • Use it only to run the event it was collected for.
  • Not sell it, and not transfer it to another organizer or a sponsor without the participant’s specific consent.
  • Not market unrelated products to it without separate consent.
  • Comply with Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act 2019, including responding to access and deletion requests from your participants. Laces provides the export and deletion tooling; the obligation is yours.
  • Delete or return the data when your lawful basis for holding it ends.

Misusing participant data is grounds for immediate suspension.

12. Suspension

We may suspend an event, or withhold settlement, where we reasonably believe that:

  • The event is not going to be held as advertised.
  • Entries are being sold for an event the organizer is not authorised to run.
  • There is fraud, or a pattern of disputes and chargebacks.
  • Participant data is being misused.
  • A legal or regulatory obligation requires it.

Where we withhold settlement we will tell you why, and what would resolve it. Where the underlying concern is resolved, funds are released.

13. Termination

You may stop using Laces at any time. Events already on sale must be seen through, or cancelled with participants refunded under section 6.

Termination does not release either side from obligations relating to entries already sold.

14. Changes

We may update these terms. Changes will not be applied retrospectively to an event that is already on sale: the settlement and reserve terms you saw when you published are the ones that govern that event.

15. Contact