Payments and payouts: where your show's money goes

Most event platforms sit between you and your money. Registrants pay the platform, the platform holds the funds, and some number of days later a payout arrives with a fee taken out. Car Show HQ is not built that way, and the difference shows up in every question below.

The short version

Your registrant pays your payment account. That is the whole flow. Car Show HQ tells your provider what to charge and records what came back, but the money moves from the person paying to the account your club already owns.

There is no payout to wait for from us, because the funds never sat with us. If your provider settles to your bank in two days, that is your timeline, and we are not a step in it.

Connecting a provider

You connect the account your club already banks with: Square, Stripe, or PayPal.

Provider	How it connects
Square	Sign in to the account your club already uses and approve, with no keys to copy and nothing to renew. Also pairs a Square Terminal card reader for the kiosk.
Stripe	Sign in and approve the same way. No Stripe account yet? You can open one on the way through; Stripe’s own onboarding collects the bank account and identity details.
PayPal	A guided flow: connect your PayPal Business account step by step, with no keys to copy.

The page reads top to bottom in the order that matters. Whatever is already taking your money sits first, with Test connection and Disconnect and nothing else to fiddle with. Below it, folded shut once something is connected, the sign-in connects for any provider you have not set up. At the bottom, folded away, is Prefer to paste your own keys?, for a club that would rather not sign in: each provider’s form comes with step-by-step directions written for a treasurer, and anything pasted is stored encrypted and never shown again. Set up more than one and each show picks which takes its entry fees on Settings, Registration.

Connecting is optional. A free show, or one collecting cash at the gate, works normally with no provider attached at all.

Merchant of record, and why the phrase matters

The merchant of record is whoever the cardholder’s bank considers the seller. That party is responsible for the transaction, and it is the party a chargeback lands on.

For your show, that is you. Car Show HQ is never the merchant of record. Practically, that means your club’s name is what appears on a registrant’s statement, your provider’s terms govern the transaction, and nobody has to ask us for permission to move their own money.

It also means the responsibility is genuinely yours, which is the honest other half. If a registrant disputes a charge, that dispute is between them, you, and your provider.

What we can and cannot see

Card numbers are entered on your provider’s own checkout pages. They do not touch our servers, and we could not show them to you if you asked.

What comes back to Car Show HQ is payment status: paid, or not. That single fact is what marks an entry paid, keeps the gate from charging somebody twice, and lets the registration table see who still owes.

Refunds, disputes, and chargebacks

All three are handled in your payment provider, because that is where the money is. Refund a registrant from your provider’s dashboard the way you would any other refund.

One distinction is worth holding onto. If the question is about money, it belongs with your provider. If the question is that a payment succeeded but the entry is not showing as paid, that is a reconciliation problem on our side, and support will fix it. Those look similar at eight in the morning and are handled in completely different places.

Fees

Your provider charges its standard processing rate on each transaction, the same rate your club already pays them for anything else. Car Show HQ does not add a percentage on top and does not take a cut of entries, sponsorships, or donations.

The full product is free for organizers with no cap on the size of your field. White-label branding is the only paid option, and that is billed to you as software rather than skimmed from your gate.

What money can come in

Three streams run through the same connected account: entry fees from registration, sponsorship payments from your public sponsor page, and donations, both the tip jar on the registration form and the public donate page for anyone at the show. Some shows add paid car-number picks on top. Going the other way, a discount code that covers the whole fee makes a free entry with no payment step at all.

They settle to the same place and appear in the same provider dashboard, which leaves the treasurer one reconciliation to do when the field clears rather than four.

Paying at the gate

Money collected at the entrance follows a different path, because a cash box is not a payment provider. Gate Mode records that an entry was collected so your list stays accurate; the cash itself is yours to count.

Cards at the gate are a switch: Take card payments at the gate, under Settings, then Registration. On, the gate’s collect screen shows a QR code, the driver scans it, and the fee lands in your connected account through the same hosted checkout online registrations use. No reader hardware, nothing extra to reconcile: the payment marks the entry paid the way any online payment would, and the registration table sees a paid car rather than a question.

Before your first paid show

Connect your provider and run one real transaction through it, ideally your own entry, then refund it. It takes five minutes and confirms the three things that actually go wrong: that the right account is connected, that money lands where you expect, and that whoever holds the provider login knows how to issue a refund without calling you.

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