Figure Skating Runs on Checks (and Cash)

Note from Ice Mom: I strive to be accurate, but that doesn’t always happen. As many readers noted in the comments – cash works very well, too!

My mother wrote me a check for a holiday and I didn’t deposit it for a month. She had a fit. Me, I yawned.

I pay for figure skating. Heck, I have checks out there from 2008 that haven’t been cashed. Some of my checks don’t go through for a month. A few years ago, I had checks that didn’t hit my bank account for two – three months.

That’s the way it is, at least until someone comes up with a merchant account that a club, coach, or small figure skating business can afford. (Merchant accounts give businesses the ability to process credit and debit cards.)

Club treasurers are volunteers and we should all be grateful for their time because they receive a ton of checks and not a lot of thanks. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining and I certainly don’t want that job.

However, it’s one of those things: your check is going to sit for a while.

You can cope with this, though:

Get a cashier’s check. To pay for ice every month, stop by the bank and plunk down the $1.50 for a cashier’s check. The money comes right out of your account and you don’t have to worry about it.

Use your bank’s bill pay. My bank, like many others, has an online bill pay service. If one of my creditors doesn’t have an electronic account, the bank cuts a check and mails it. In my case, the money doesn’t come out of my account until the creditor cashes the check, but I know that some banks take the money out as soon as they write the check. This is a good solution.

Cash. You can’t pay for competitions, figure skating club membership, or test sessions with cash, but you might be able to pay your skater’s coach with it. *Actually, that’s not true. Many readers noted in the comments that they pay for events with cash.* You can certainly take cash with you to a competition, which is a terrific idea. Taking cash to the competition helps you set a budget – you can’t spend more on junk food, photos, dresses, and trinkets than whatever you’ve brought in your wallet.

PayPal. I’ve used PayPal as a way to transfer money electronically from my bank account to another person’s. It’s pretty easy and a bank-account-to-bank-account transaction doesn’t cost anything, at least for personal use. A quick search of PayPal’s site leads me to believe that a club would be treated like a business and face a processing fee of 2.9% on transactions. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a good solution.

How about you? Do you have outstanding checks that haven’t been cashed for years? Do you have a good solution to the time lag in cashing checks? Does your club use some form of online payment and not pay a ton of fees? Really? You should share that. I’m all ears.

Do you have a question for Ice Mom or the Advisory Board? Do you have an idea for a post you’d like to read? How about a guest post? You could write something. I’d love to read whatever you come up with. E-mail me at icemom.diane@gmail.com

Photo credits:
Cheques: Daniel Lobo on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Hanging in the balance: Betsy Fletcher on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Check-Money-Payroll: Orin Zebest on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Check Writing: David Goehring on Flickr.com Creative Commons

guest

I thought internet banking (via direct deposit) was free???
guest

Ooops – may have misuderstood – bill pay is a phone anking service here!!
Lynne

I use a highlighter in my register to highlight those checks which haven't been cashed for over a month. It's easy to spot them this way when I'm balancing my checkbook. Sometimes the ice time checks don't get cashed for 2-3 months. If that bothered me, I'd use cash to pay for my ice time. I've found that competition and test session checks are usually cashed either shortly before or just after the event takes place. The rink my son just started skating at takes credit cards for ice time, so I'll definitely pay my fall contract ice that way. The only time outstanding checks have ever been a problem is when I've been changing banks and can't close out my account because of those checks. Right now I have over $200 of outstanding checks from a few years ago for soccer. If I had to close out my account I wouldn't worry about them since I believe banks won't take checks over 6 months old.
Momof2skaters

Believe it or not, we can use cash for competitions, test sessions, and Membership. In fact, I usually pay for my membership with cash. I also pay for lessons with cash. But, we do have to pay for our commitment deposit (oops, I mean volunteer) with a check. That's because they hold the check for an entire year. If you do your time, you get the money back. I don't write checks for anything normally. I do it all electronically with my bills. In fact, I have 2 checking accounts. One has checks with my address from 2 years ago (and 1 house ago) and the other one has an address on it from 6 years ago (and 2 houses ago). I'm not getting new checks! But I have gone to using more checks for skating purposes. Only because the club thought they'd lost my receipt when I paid cash for something and they wanted me to pay again. The receipt was found but it gave my heart a jumpstart!
Momof2skaters

I do something similar. I actually have my ledger on excel. Then if a check hasn't cleared, I select the entire line and hightlight it with yellow.
SuperSkater

Same here, we can pay memebership, tests and competitions with cash so we hardly ever write checks for skating
Cake

Not cashing competition checks for 2-3 months drives me nuts. Most of the time they aren't cashed until way after the competition. Why the heck is that? How hard is it to drop by the bank once a week? Heck, once a month?!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

I think that the whole finance thing can be overwhelming. Matching checks and names with events and double-checking the fees is a big job. Our treasurer is a volunteer and she's an accountant. But she does everything on QuickBooks, which is 100% better than a treasurer who just reads off the checking account balance at a meeting, I tell you.

That's the thing about volunteers, isn't it? Many are talented folks, but busy.
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

Thank you Momof2skaters and Super Skater! I've updated the post to reflect this!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

I think it depends on the bank. With my bank, it's free and online bill pay is free, too. However, my bank used to charge $5 for online bill pay. (Ugh.)
cake

Oh I love volunteers!

However, if you are running a competition I guess I expected that the person who handles all the money would be a paid position. Seems like a safety issue to me. Of course I don't run claim to know anything about how things work. I just pay and watch the DD skate. LOL

I'm just way OCD, so I like to cross the checks off my list.
niuiceprincess

My coach is pretty good about cashing checks, the most she'd go without cashing my payments to her would be two weeks. Otherwise I can expect the check to be deposited within days. On the other hand, my club doesn't cash checks for months…the membership fee didn't get cash until 2 months later (although I got my renewal kit/skating magazine before then). Same goes with the test fees!
Anonymous

There are no paid postions, so its when the person has time to go to the bank.I just ran a test session where the money /forms came to me, I was the runner/copier person, and took money for practice ice. In the next week or two, I am sure I will go the the clubs bank and deposit. But Im not in a huge hurry.
angelfromalaska

There are no paid postions, so its when the person has time to go to the bank.I just ran a test session where the money /forms came to me, I was the runner/copier person, and took money for practice ice. In the next week or two, I am sure I will go the the clubs bank and deposit. But Im not in a huge hurry.
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

I know! I just pay and watch Ice Girl skate, too. Well, that’s not true. I bake, I clean rink toilets, I man the registration table…

I totally get the whole wanting to cross the checks off your list. It made me crazy that I had so many outstanding checks, too! I still have a couple I made out to a hockey association for figure skating ice that haven’t been cashed. They’re from 2008. Lord help me if they ever find them and cash them. My account will be torched!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

I know! I just pay and watch Ice Girl skate, too. Well, that's not true. I bake, I clean rink toilets, I man the registration table…

I totally get the whole wanting to cross the checks off your list. It made me crazy that I had so many outstanding checks, too! I still have a couple I made out to a hockey association for figure skating ice that haven't been cashed. They're from 2008. Lord help me if they ever find them and cash them. My account will be torched!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

Ice Coach is *awesome* about cashing checks. She does it the following day, which is great. Cash ‘em while I still have money!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

Ice Coach is *awesome* about cashing checks. She does it the following day, which is great. Cash 'em while I still have money!
Erica Turner

I’m terrible with money (mainly cause i figure skate, stupid expensive hobby, grr). I have to pay for everything with cash so that a) I know where i am, and b) people don’t get bounced cheques if they wait til the end of the month to cash them.

I pay coach cash every lesson, club session and patch are always cash (they’re paid on the day, so lots of small amounts, they don’t accept cheques cause it’s too expensive for them to cash them). My NISA member ship had to be paid by card, so my lovely mother did it on her card and i bank transfered the money to her. Skating camps I do by bank transfer if possible (i don’t get charged by my bank for this), but if it’s cheque, again i normally ask my mother and give her a bank transfer. Definately not an ideal solution :-/
Rsk8trmom

One of my coaches bills every 3-4 weeks and I write a check to her. That makes it much easier. My daughter has 2 other coaches who demand cash. Honestly, I think it’s so they don’t have to report all of their earnings. The USFSA should require all coaches to except check or credit only!
Maria

Interesting post… I didn’t (and still don’t, actually) see any PROBLEM with checks, regardless of how much time it takes people to cash them. May be it’s because we have a good solution?

Our bank has an online account that enables us to list all checks written, and while the money is still in our account, it is deducted from the amount shown as “available”. So it’s easy to keep track of all checks, and it doesn’t bother us at all to have this “extra” money in the account: it earns extra interest!
http://icemom.net Ice Mom

Oh, that’s very smart, Maria. My bank doesn’t do that.