Less chasing for the volunteer who runs the pool

The person running a team fundraiser is a volunteer with a day job. Most of the work is chasing: chasing payments, chasing picks, and fixing the setting that got typed wrong at 11pm. This round of work goes after all three.

Fix a setting without starting over

An admin can now edit a pool's settings after creating it, right up to the first deadline. What can still change depends on what families have already done:

• The price locks once anyone has paid or said they've sent a payment.
• The schedule locks once anyone has joined.
• Teams per entry locks once anyone has made picks.
• The name can change any time.

At the first deadline everything else locks for the season, with no override for the admin and none for me. The idea is simple: once a family has acted on something, it stops moving.

Every payment in one list

Each pool has a payments list, and from it an admin can void an entry that was made by mistake.

• Voiding rejects the payment and voids every entry that payment covered.
• It only works while no deadline has passed since the payment was sent. Once an entry has had a week in play, it stays.
• A free entry voids the same way.
• In Squares, a voided square opens back up for someone else.

A morning email when payments are waiting

Parents pay the team directly, and an admin confirms each payment. When payments are sitting unconfirmed, the pool's admins get one email about them. It goes out once a day, from 8 in the morning in the pool's own time zone, so it lands with coffee and not at midnight.

Pick reminders that send themselves

In Points Pool, Pick'em and Survivor, anyone with an entry in the week and no picks yet gets a reminder a day before the deadline. It's one email per person, it names the entries still missing picks, and it goes out once. Nobody gets nagged twice, and the admin doesn't have to text the whole group.

Prize splits, to the cent

When winners split a prize and it doesn't divide evenly, each share rounds up to the cent. The winners get the extra cents and the team covers them. I'd rather a team cover two cents than have a winner come up short.

That has one side effect worth knowing. The Safe to spend number on the admin's dashboard can drop by a cent or two when a week is scored.