Referee costs: fees, claims and paying the referees

The fee grid uses whatever referee roles your sport has, so the columns under Setup Costs differ between sports. In handball, the second role is presented as "Hoveddommer 1" rather than the generic assistant-referee name, both in the fee grid and wherever else the role is shown.

Everything else on this page — the fee model, the claim workflow, the payment states, the bill and the export — is the same for every sport and every federation.

What a referee should actually be paid, whether mileage is reimbursed, and what documentation is required are federation and organiser policy. Profixio does not enforce any of it: it pays out exactly the amounts you type into the fee grid and the rates you set for expenses.

In the tournament administration menu, open Referee → Referee Costs.

Two separate rights give access, and they see different buttons:

• The referee coordinator — the person allowed to edit referee costs. They set the fees, look after the referees' details, and are the first reviewer of an expense claim.
• The finance reviewer — the person allowed to edit the tournament's economy. They are the second reviewer of a claim and the only one who can send a bill to the accounting system.

One person can hold both rights, which is the normal setup for a small tournament, and then they see everything on one screen.

Anyone without either right cannot open the screen at all — the menu entry is not shown and the address is refused. Rights are granted per tournament from the tournament's user administration; being a referee administrator for the match list is not enough on its own.

Fees are set once per tournament, before you start paying anyone. Open Setup Costs at the top of the referee costs screen.

Cost per Category is a grid: one row per class in the tournament, one column per referee role (main referee, assistant referee, and whatever other roles your sport uses). Type an amount in a cell and leave it, and it is saved with a "Cost updated" confirmation. Clear a cell to remove that fee again.

That is the whole fee model: class × referee role → amount. A referee who has three matches in a class where the main referee role is worth 300 and one match in a class worth 450 earns 1 350. There is no separate rate per referee, per day or per round — if two referees should be paid differently for the same match, that has to come from the role they are given on the match.

A class with no amount, or a role with no amount for that class, is worth nothing. That is the most common reason a referee's match total stays at zero even though they clearly refereed matches.

Cost per Arena, further down the same panel, is a read-only forecast. It lists each facility with the number of matches played there, what each referee role costs across those matches, and a running total — useful for budgeting before the tournament and for checking that you have not left a class unpriced.

Changing a fee changes the totals of everyone who has matches in that class, including referees you have already marked as paid. The amount already recorded as paid out is not recalculated, so if you correct a fee late you have to look through the referees you have already settled.

The table lists every referee registered in the tournament, one row per referee, with:

• Referee Name, Email, Mobile and Referee Number — the referee's contact details as registered in this tournament.
• Kostn. kamper ("match costs") — the fee for the matches this referee refereed, using the fees you set under Setup Costs.
• Andre utgifter ("other expenses") — the referee's approved expense lines.
• Til utbetaling ("to pay out") — the two added together. This is the amount the referee is owed. It is shown in a warning colour until the referee has been marked as paid.
• Match Count — how many matches in this tournament the referee is set up on. Hidden matches are left out of this count even though they are still paid for, so the count can be lower than the number of matches on the bill.
• Eco Status — the payment state: new referee, ready for payment, paid, or email sent.
• Submission Status — the state of the referee's expense claim. This column only appears when expense claims are switched on for the tournament.
• Account Number and Paid Amount — hidden by default; switch them on with the column selector when you are doing the actual payout.

Above the table is a row of quick filters that jump straight to a payment state — new referees, ready for payment, paid, email sent — plus one for referees who have matches, and a reset button. The regular filter menu adds Eco Status, Has Matches, Missing Account Number, Missing Email and Submission Status. "Missing Account Number" and "Missing Email" are the two you want before a payout run: they show exactly who you cannot pay yet.

You can search the list by referee name and by email.

The screen works in one of two modes, and which buttons you see depends on it. The switch is Enable Expense Claims under Expense Settings at the top of the screen.

Without expense claims (the default). Referees never touch Profixio's economy. You set the fees, the system adds up the match fees, you add any extra amounts by hand, and then you walk each referee through ready for payment → paid → summary email sent. This is the right mode for a tournament that pays its referees from the match fees and a handful of manual lines.

With expense claims switched on. Referees submit their own claim — travel, accommodation, mileage and other lines with receipts — from their own pages, and the claim goes through a review before it becomes payable. The simple "Mark Ready" and "Mark Paid" buttons disappear, and the Submission Status column and the Review action take their place. The referee's side of that form is described under referee expense claims.

Switching the setting on mid-tournament changes which buttons the screen offers, but does not convert anything you already recorded.

With claims switched on, the payment state also stops being something you set by hand: it follows the claim. A finance-approved claim makes the referee ready for payment, a claim marked paid makes them paid, and a claim sent to the accounting system counts as the summary having gone out.

Every referee starts as a new referee. From there:

1. Mark Ready moves the referee to ready for payment. It asks for confirmation first. Use it once you are satisfied that the match total and any manual lines are correct.
2. Mark Paid moves the referee to paid, and records the amount owed at that moment as the amount paid out. It is only offered for referees who are already marked as ready for payment.
3. Send Email sends the referee a summary of their referee economy for this tournament, with the bill attached as a PDF, and moves the referee to email sent. It is only offered once the referee has been marked as paid, and it asks you to confirm the address it will use.

Whether a copy of that email also goes to the organiser depends on the tournament's own email settings and on the referee module's recipient list.

The same three steps exist as bulk actions: select several referees and use Mark Ready for Payment or Mark Paid on all of them at once. Both are hidden when expense claims are switched on.

Profixio does not move any money here. Marking someone as paid records that you paid them — the payment itself happens in your bank or accounting system.

When expense claims are switched on, a referee who has submitted a claim gets a Review action on their row. It opens the claim in a panel with:

• Referee Info — name, referee number, email and account number.
• The claim itself, split into Match Fees, Driving, Accommodation, Travel and Other Expenses, each with its own subtotal, and a Grand Total.
• Receipts — the files the referee attached, which you can open one by one.
• Referee Comment — what the referee wrote when submitting.
• Review History — every approval and rejection so far, with who did it and when.

The claim moves through up to two reviews:

• Coordinator Review. The referee coordinator approves or rejects. A rejection needs a comment, which is sent to the referee so they know what to correct.
• Finance Review. The finance reviewer approves or rejects what the coordinator let through. This step is skipped entirely when Require Finance Approval is switched off under Expense Settings — the coordinator's approval then makes the claim finance-approved in one move.

The coordinator can also Edit the claim before approving: correct a mileage line, remove a line that should not be there (you are asked for a reason), or add a missing one. Editing is only possible while the claim is waiting for the coordinator or has come back rejected from finance.

A rejection made by the coordinator can be taken back with Undo Rejection, which puts the claim back to waiting for coordinator review. A claim rejected by finance does not need it — it is already back with the coordinator to correct and send on again.

Two notices you may see in the panel: one telling you the referee was removed from the tournament but worked matches, so their claim is still open for review; and one warning that the deductions on the claim are larger than the expenses, so the total is negative. Negative lines are allowed on purpose — they are how you deduct something the tournament already covered.

If you already know a claim is wrong and do not need to look at it, Reject on the row does the same thing without opening the panel — it asks only for the rejection reason. That button only appears when the claim is waiting for your review step.

Review is different: it opens for either reviewer as soon as the referee has sent a claim, so you can always look at one that is waiting for your colleague. You simply will not see the approve and reject buttons inside the panel until it is your turn.

Select several referees with the checkboxes and the bulk actions appear:

• Approve Expenses — approves every pending claim among the selected referees, taking each one the next step forward in whichever review stage it is in. Claims that are not waiting for you are left alone.
• Reject Expenses — rejects them, with one rejection reason applied to all of them.
• Download PDF — builds one combined document holding the bills for all selected referees. If none of them has anything to bill, you are told that no invoice data was found instead of getting an empty file.
• Send to Economy System — sends the bill of every finance-approved claim among the selected referees to the accounting system.
• Mark Ready for Payment and Mark Paid — the simple payment states, only when expense claims are switched off.

Each bulk action tells you afterwards how many rows it actually changed, and names the referees whose receipts could not be read and were therefore left out of the sent bill.

Send to Economy System is the heavy one: it builds a separate bill, with receipts merged in, for every referee in the selection. On a large tournament, send it in batches of a few dozen rather than selecting everyone at once. Downloading a combined PDF is cheaper, because the whole document is built in one pass.

Download PDF on a referee's row produces that referee's bill. It lists the matches they refereed — match number, start, class, home team, away team, their role and what that match paid — then their expense lines with descriptions and amounts, the number of matches, the sum of the match fees, the expenses, and the total. Their account number is printed on it, and there are signature lines for the tournament and for the referee. Receipts are appended at the back: photos as extra pages, PDF receipts merged in.

The same bill is what gets attached to the summary email and what is sent to the accounting system, so it is worth opening one before a payout run to check that the fees look right.

A referee who has expenses but no matches still gets a proper bill — the match table is simply left out. A referee with neither matches nor expenses produces nothing at all, which is deliberate: no empty bills are manufactured.

Matches where the referee was registered as not having turned up do not count towards the fee. A match in a class with no fee set still appears on the bill, priced at zero.

Hidden matches are a special case: they still count towards the fee and still appear on the bill, even though they are left out of the Match Count column and the Has Matches filter. So a referee can show a match count of zero and still have an amount to pay out.

Profixio can email the referee bill straight to an external accounting system instead of you forwarding it by hand. Put the address the accounting system reads into Economy System Email under Expense Settings.

Once an address is configured, finance reviewers get Send to Economy System on the rows of referees whose claim is finance-approved, and as a bulk action for a whole selection. Only finance-approved claims can be sent — a claim still waiting for a review is refused with a message saying so.

The action queues the message rather than sending it while you wait, so the confirmation says the invoice has been queued. If some of the referee's receipts could not be read, the bill is still sent and you are told which ones were left out.

Without an address configured, the action is not shown anywhere.

Whether the accounting system then produces a payment is outside Profixio. Profixio's part ends with the email.

If the message cannot be sent, the claim is put back to finance-approved so you can try again — it is never left looking as if it went out when it did not.

Export above the table produces an Excel file with one row per referee: name, email, mobile, referee number, match costs, other expenses, match count, amount to pay out, account number, payment state and amount already paid.

The export follows the table: whatever filter, search and sort order you have on screen is what ends up in the file. Filter to "ready for payment" and the file contains exactly the referees you are about to pay — which is what makes it usable as a payout list for the bank or the accountant.

The file is named after the tournament's referee billing and the moment you exported it.

Edit on a referee's row opens a small form for the things you need for a payout but that the referee may not have filled in:

• Account Number and Email — the payment details. Always editable.
• Paid Amount — for recording that you paid a different amount than the system calculated.
• Eco Status — for correcting a payment state you set by mistake. Only shown when expense claims are switched off; with claims on, the state follows the claim instead.
• Expense Lines — free lines with a Description and an Amount that you add with Add Expense Line. This is how you pay something that has no match fee behind it and no claim from the referee: a travel allowance, a per-diem, a fixed sum for a course. Amounts may be negative, which turns the line into a deduction. Also only available when expense claims are switched off — with claims on, corrections belong in the claim review instead.

Everything here is saved on the referee, so it flows straight into the amount to pay out, the bill and the export.

Editing is open to both the referee coordinator and the finance reviewer.

The fee grid and the expense settings are separate: fees apply whether or not expense claims are switched on.

Work through this in order:

1. The referee is not in the list at all. The list holds referees registered in this tournament. Someone set up on matches but never registered as a referee here will not appear — check the tournament's referee registrations first.
2. The amount to pay out is zero. Either the referee has no matches, or the classes they refereed have no fee. Switch on the Has Matches filter to tell the two apart, then open Setup Costs and check the class and role in question.
3. Fewer matches than expected. Matches the referee was marked as not having turned up for do not count towards the fee. The match count column counts only this tournament and leaves out hidden matches — but hidden matches are still paid for, so the count and the amount can disagree.
4. The fee is right for one role but not the other. Fees are per role. A referee given the assistant role on a match earns the assistant rate for that class, even if they normally referee as the main referee.
5. No Mark Ready or Mark Paid buttons. Expense claims are switched on for this tournament, so payment follows the review workflow instead. Look at the Submission Status column.
6. No Review button on a referee with a claim. The claim is still a draft — the referee has not sent it yet.
7. You can open a claim but there are no approve or reject buttons. The claim is waiting for the other reviewer. Anyone with access can read a claim at any stage; only the reviewer whose turn it is can act on it.
8. Send to Economy System is missing. Either no accounting address is configured, or the claim is not finance-approved yet, or you do not hold the finance right.
9. You cannot pay someone. Filter on Missing Account Number and Missing Email before every payout run and fix those rows with Edit, or ask the referees to complete their own details.

Referee costs is a calculated screen: every row adds up matches and expenses. On a tournament with several hundred referees and a few thousand matches, some operations are heavier than others.

If a page or an action never finishes and you end up on an error page:

• Narrow the list with a filter or a search before you sort by Match Count or export.
• Keep bulk selections modest. Downloading or sending bills for a hundred referees in one go builds a hundred PDFs in a single request.
• Retrying the same click repeatedly makes it worse rather than better; wait for the first attempt to finish or fail.

If it keeps happening on a specific tournament, report it with the tournament name and roughly what you were doing — the pattern matters more than the error page.