When I wrote exepted - I of course ment accepted :) sorry

Christina

Moya emailed me about this yesterday, hopefully you have heard back from her by now (as Moya is 11 hours time difference from my location there can sometimes be delays between our responses).

When Moya reported your problem to me I looked into it straight away. I checked into the banking system that our web-site connects to and found your payment for 370 Euros, recorded as being made at 10.25 on 18th June.

We have had one other report of a problem and after hearing about yours I was concerned that there might be others. I then printed out detail of all payments that have been made through this system since we launched it at the end of December (109 in total) and compared these with the records in the VolunteerAfrica web-site (which is where Moya was looking). The only other 'missing' payments was two made by the same person on the same day in May, and which are the ones we were already aware of.

There are three other problems that we have noticed. One is that payments are correctly taken but the volunteers 'total' does not increase. However if you check inside your 'account' you will see all of the payments correctly listed.

The second problem is that we found that if you make a payment and then click on the refresh button, or the back button, the system takes a second payment. We refunded the money to people as soon as they made us aware of this and once we realised what was causing the problem, and put a warning note on the payments page saying not to click on 'refresh' or 'back' it has not happened since.

Finaly we have had some problems with payments being refused, but we think this is due to some banks, especially in the US, which cap the amount that can be paid 'on-line' to cut down on fraud. In these cases volunteers have found that if they make several smaller payments the money goes through.

This is a new system and we are trying to balance providing a good, safe and efficient service to volunteers with minimising the amount that we spend on administration / technology (and that we spend in bank charges) so that as much of volunteers money as possible can be spent in Tanzania. The alternative is that we go back to just using cheques, but overall we feel that these are a bigger risk as they can get lost in the post, take weeks to clear through the banking system (with the risk of them then bouncing) and cost a lot in bank charges. The best sytem, for VolAfrica, would probably be to get eveyone to make deposits direct into the charity's bank account, but I think this would be to complicated and expensive for volunteers.

I will get our IT providers to look into why the problem you have reported is happening but in the meantime if anyone else gets a similar problem (or any other payment related problems) can they please let Moya or me know straight away.

Simon Headington
VolunteerAfrica

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Hello Simon

Thought I'd better let you know that I have also had a problem with payments being recorded on my VA account.? I have sent two lots of cheques and received emailed receipts from Moya for each (?300 on receipt 550 on 5 April, and ?270 on receipt 656 on 1?July) but neither has shown up on the website account.? The payments were to be split threeways between myself, Sandra and Lauren Bailey.

It's not so much of a problem, as I have the receipts but you may want to look into this as well.

Thanks

Michele

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Michele

Thanks for your posting. Your payments are particularly complicated as with three of you travelling together Moya has had to split each of your cheques across three accounts, which was not a feature that we designed into the system. However, having said this, it should still be possible to see one third of the amount of each batch of cheques you sent, on each of your three accounts. It is possible that the figures are there but your log-in is not giving you full access. Inorder to sort this out can you email me on simon@volunteerafrica.org and we can arrange a time when we can talk on the phone whilst both in front of computers, so that we can compare what it is that we can each see.

Thanks

Simon?

That will teach me to check whether I was the last one to use the computer, or if my wife is still logged in, before posting to the forum!

Simon?