ACADEMY PAYMENT COLLECTION
Payments that collect themselves.
Not a Sunday-night reconciliation ritual.
Player Portal handles academy payment collection on Stripe: monthly memberships, family billing, failed-payment recovery, automatic renewals and payment reminders. You stop being the debt collector for £30 twice a month.
COLLECTED TODAY
+£1,311
£1,311.75
Paid
45
Failed
5
Pending
2
Growing academies trust Player Portal
THE PAYMENTS PROBLEM
You chase 12 parents for £30.
Every month. Personally.
Standing orders lapse. Bank details change. A card expires. A parent forgets. Two families have a new baby and forget you exist for six weeks. You end up messaging people individually to say — very politely — that their child's football fees are late. Nobody enjoys this bit.
Payment chasing is where academies quietly lose revenue and dignity at the same time.
Before
Payments by standing order and hope.
Stripe on one tab. Bank statement on another. Reconciliation happens on the sofa at 22:00 on a Sunday.
After
Stripe billing. Automated recovery. Real numbers.
Failed payments retry themselves. Parents update cards from their own hub. Weekly revenue tells you the truth.
The money lands in your Stripe balance. Player Portal never touches it.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Recovered payments are the highest-margin revenue you have.
Every £30 monthly member you retain instead of losing to a failed payment is £360/year of pure margin. Multiply by your churn. This is the math nobody in your finance stack is doing.
~7%
monthly failure rate
is normal for card-on-file subscription billing. Half of those are recoverable with a smart retry schedule and a self-serve card update.
£360
per saved member
is what one recovered £30/month member is worth in a year of retained revenue. Multiply by your current failed-payment attrition.
Unlimited
players every tier
No cap at £20 (Starter), £35 (Pro) or £60 (Enterprise). Player Portal takes a transaction fee that steps down as you scale — 3.5% Starter, 2.5% Pro, 2% Enterprise. Stripe's own card fees apply separately.
HOW BILLING WORKS
You set the plan.
Stripe collects. Player Portal recovers.
Every plan in Player Portal maps to a Stripe subscription. You define the price, the billing interval, the training group it applies to, and the trial or pro-rata rules. When a parent signs up, a Stripe subscription is created against their card. Every renewal fires without you touching it.
When a payment fails — and it will, 5-10% of the time, because cards expire and banks flag things — Player Portal retries on a smart schedule (day 1, day 3, day 7). The parent gets a branded email at each stage. Their own parent hub shows the payment status and a one-click "update card" button. Most failures self-recover before you have to know they happened.
The academy owner side gives you a weekly revenue view, an at-risk members list (failing payments, cancelling, missed sessions), and a family billing view so a household with three kids sees one bill instead of three. You still see the individual subscriptions in the background — the family view is just how parents want to think about it.
- Stripe-native subscriptions — money lands directly in your Stripe balance
- Automatic retry schedule for failed cards, no manual chasing needed
- Parents self-serve card updates from their hub
- Family billing: one invoice per household, still tracked per player internally
- Pro-rata joins mid-month, term-based billing, sibling discounts
- One-click cancellation from parent side — no phone tag, no lock-in
PAYMENT SURFACES
Every payment lever an academy owner needs.
Not a generic subscriptions tool retrofitted for sports. Each surface below exists because academy billing has its own rules — sibling discounts, mid-term joins, pause-for-injury, and parents who need to update their card at 21:47.
Monthly memberships
Recurring plans on Stripe.
Set a price per training group or age tier. Parents pay by card, Stripe collects on the same day every month, money lands in your Stripe balance the next working day.
Failed payment recovery
Retry, remind, recover.
Smart retry schedule (day 1, 3, 7) with branded emails and a one-click card-update link. Most failures self-recover before you have to know about them.
Automatic renewals
Renewals fire without you.
Subscriptions renew on the same day of the month, every month. Term-based billing, mid-month pro-rata joins, pause-for-injury and cancel-at-period-end all handled without touching Stripe.
Payment reminders
Nudge, don't chase.
Automated reminders fire before a payment falls due, when it fails, and when a card is about to expire. Parents update themselves. You stop being the debt collector.
Family billing
One household, one bill.
Households with multiple children see a single billing view. Sibling discounts apply automatically. Internally, every subscription is still per-player — reports stay clean.
Revenue visibility
Numbers that tell the truth.
Weekly revenue, at-risk members, failed-payment recovery rate, plan-mix, MRR. Built for founder-operators making Sunday-night decisions — not for a finance team.
BILLING QUESTIONS
What academy owners ask about payments.
Do I need my own Stripe account?
What fees does Player Portal take from each payment?
What happens when a parent's card fails?
Can I offer sibling discounts and family pricing?
What about pro-rata joins mid-month, or pausing for injury?
How does a parent cancel?
Stop chasing £30.
Let Stripe do it.
Player Portal handles the retry schedule, the branded reminders, the self-serve card updates and the family billing. You get the weekly number and your Sunday nights back. Free for 14 days.
Stripe-native. Unlimited players every tier. UK-hosted. Cancel any time.
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