Starting in 2020, Zone4 has automated the process of collecting and remitting SMDL(Supporting Member Day License) fees to Nordiq Canada. SMDL are the day licence fees that racers must pay if they do not possess a valid FIS or Nordiq Canada racing licence and are racing in a category that requires a licence. Zone4 now validates each racer’s licence status at the time of registration and charges any required SMDL fee based on which categories they register for. Collected funds are automatically routed to Nordiq Canada easing the burden on race secretaries.
To get started adding this feature to your registration form, switch to the old form editor by clicking the … menu in the upper right corner and selecting “Go back to the old editor”
Select where you want to insert the SMDL fee fied (most likely after the racing licence fields or after the category fields) and click Insert Field. From the Preset Fields drop down list, select “Nordiq Canada SMDL Fees”.
There is no needs to edit any of the settings on this field so just click “Add to Form”.
When added to your form, it appears as an un-editable field with the note: “calculated automatically based on licence validation and CMDL categories.”
Now that this field has been added to your form, it activates a new column called “SMDL” on all Single Choice Fee Group, Single Choice Option Group, and Drop Down menu fields which are how you typically specify your list of categories. Edit each of your race day fields and for each category that requires a licence check the SMDL checkbox. For most races, this would include all categories U14 and up, but occasionally only U16 and would be selected depending on your race sanctioning.
That’s all it takes to activate the feature. Note these settings will all be copied next year when you copy this form so this setup only needs to be done once.
When racers go to register, the NC and FIS licence they enter are checked against both Nordiq Canada and the FIS database to see if they are valid and active. If the entered licence is active, no SMDL fees are charged. If the licence hasn’t been renewed yet or is invalid, or not provided, AND the racer is registered into an SMDL category, $5 per category/day is added to their registration. If a racer registers in younger categories that you have NOT checked the SMDL field on, then no licence information is validated and no SMDL fees are charged to them.
Collected SMDL fees and a report of racers purchasing SMDLS are automatically routed to Nordiq Canada and no further action is required by your club or race secretary. Even if your club has its own Stripe/helcim merchant account, SMDL fees are debitted just like membership and processing fees using Zone4’s automatic EFT transfer system.
Note that the fees are non-refundable so if an athlete uses an incorrect licence by mistake or renews their licence after registering for your race, they are not entitled to any refund of the assessed SMDL fees.
Advanced Notes
The SMDL feature totals up all of the options selected by the racer that have the SMDL checkbox checked on it. Therefor it is critical that you only apply the SMDL checkbox to one option per race day so that racers are not double charged for the same day.
We have seen one rare case where an organizer wanted to have 2 sanctioned races on the same day but charge just one race fee covering 1 or both races that day. The SMDL is not a ‘per-race’ fee though, it’s a ‘day’ licence so the only way to accomplish this was to separate the category fields from SMDL option. This was accomplished as follows by creating an initial Fee field with 3 options split on age and if they wanted to participate that race day. As you can see below, the SMDL label was ONLY placed on the one option for the U16 and older athletes.
Note in the above example, if the organizer had wanted to charge a race fee for each race on that day, they could have used a non-fee “Multi Option” field for field #38 to apply the SMDL setting, then used regular Single Choice Fee Group fields for the categories.