Series 3 — Solution · Paper 4
A Standing Arrangement
Mark is the treasurer of a Sunday football club. Eighty-three members, £120 annual subscription, one person responsible for collecting it.
Every August he sends a message to the group asking for transfers. He includes the club’s sort code and account number and asks people to use their name as the reference so he can match the payments to the members. Some people pay immediately. Most mean to. By the end of September he has received about sixty payments and has begun the process of working out which twenty-three he is still waiting for.
He knows who they are. He sends a reminder. Some of them pay. He sends another reminder. A few more pay. He has been doing this for four years. The same six or seven people appear in his outstanding list every year. They are not bad people. They are busy people who have not yet done the thing they intend to do.
In October, at training, he mentions it. This works better than the messages. Most of the remaining members pay within the week. Two or three pay in November. One pays in January, apologetically, citing a difficult few months. Mark accepts this because the alternative is a conversation he does not want to have.
By the time the last subscription arrives, Mark has spent approximately twelve hours collecting £9,960 that everyone agreed to pay in August.
This year the club set up a payment arrangement through the scheme.
In August, Mark sent each member a link. Each link opened a payment screen showing the club’s name, the amount, and the payment date — the first of September. Each member confirmed the arrangement once, with their fingerprint or their PIN. That was the only action required from them.
On the first of September, eighty-one payments arrived. Two members had cancelled their arrangements in advance — one had moved away, one had a knee injury and wasn’t sure he’d be playing. Mark received a notification for each cancellation when it happened, not when the payment failed to arrive. He knew about both before September.
The two members who cancelled got in touch separately to explain. Mark already knew. The conversation was about their situations, not about chasing money.
What each member did once — confirming the arrangement — is the same action David took at the market and Sophie took with the invoice. A payment request existed. They approved it. Their bank received the instruction and moved the money.
The difference is that Mark’s payment request was set up to run on a specific date, for a specific amount, without requiring any further action from the members who had already approved it. The approval they gave in August covered the payment in September.
Each member can see the arrangement in their payment app. They can see what they approved, when it runs, and a button that cancels it if they need to. Cancellation takes the same number of steps as approval. The club receives a notification when a member cancels, with enough notice to manage the transition. No payment fails silently. No member is surprised by a charge they had forgotten about.
Mark spent about forty minutes on subscriptions this year. Most of that was the initial setup in August.
He has not sent a chasing message. He has not mentioned it at training. He has not had the conversation in January that he was not looking forward to.
The football has not changed. The members have not changed. The amount has not changed. What changed is that the arrangement the club and its members had always intended to keep became the arrangement the infrastructure made it easy to keep.
The twelve hours Mark used to spend on this he now spends watching his team play.