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Forty questions organisers actually ask us

Written by the people who answer our support chat, not by a marketing team. If your question is not here, WhatsApp us and we will add it — that is genuinely how most of this page got written.

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01 · Getting started

Setting up, and whether this fits your committee

Seven answers for the first week — before you have taken a single entry.

Most organisers publish a single-category event in under 30 minutes using a ready template. A multi-day fest with 40 sub-events, age groups and separate fee slabs usually takes one focused afternoon. If you send us your event circular, our onboarding team will build the first draft for you free of charge and hand it over for review.
No. If you can create a Google Form you can run SportzContest. Everything is point-and-click, and the only place IT gets involved is if you buy the white-label domain add-on and need a DNS record added. Most of our school accounts are run by a sports teacher and two student volunteers.
Yes. The Starter plan is free forever with no card on file, and it covers a real event of up to 100 participants. Many organisers run their inter-house trials on Starter first, then move to Pro for the main meet once they trust the flow. See the full breakdown on our pricing page.
Over 20 category templates ship with the platform, covering cricket, football, athletics, chess, badminton, dance, singing, quiz, photography, drawing, debate, coding, hackathons, gaming, robotics and general talent hunts. Each template arrives with the right entry form, scoring model and result format, so you are not configuring a rulebook from scratch.
Pro allows 10 organiser logins and unlimited volunteer scanner accounts. Season Pass and Championship allow unlimited logins. Roles are granular, so a gate volunteer can scan passes without ever seeing payment data, and a judge sees only their assigned panel.
Yes. Upload a CSV or Excel sheet and map the columns on screen — the importer flags duplicates and bad phone numbers before anything is saved. For messier archives such as scanned registers and result PDFs, the data migration add-on at ₹11,000 gets our team to clean and import it for you.
Every paid account gets a 45-minute onboarding call where we set up your first event live on screen while your committee watches. Before each event day we also run a 20-minute volunteer briefing over video, which is the session that reliably prevents gate confusion on the morning itself.
02 · Registrations & payments

Entries, fees, refunds and the money trail

Eight answers about the part your treasurer will read twice.

No. Registration, payment, QR passes and results all work in a plain mobile browser, which matters when half your entrants are on borrowed phones with little free storage. Only organisers and gate volunteers may optionally install our scanner app, and even that is not compulsory.
Yes, and you can mix both in one event. A captain can register a full squad in one form, add substitutes later, and nominate a coach who is not billed as a participant. Institution-level entries let one teacher submit 80 students at once from a spreadsheet.
UPI, credit and debit cards, netbanking and the major wallets. UPI carries no gateway charge and is what roughly 80% of Indian participants pick. You can also mark offline cash or cheque payments as received, which schools use for students without a family bank account.
Yes. Set date-based fee slabs, per-category fees, discount codes and automatic group rates such as "fifth entry from the same school free". Codes can be limited by count, by date or to specific institutions, and every redemption is logged for your audit.
Open the participant record and click Refund — full or partial. The money reaches the original payment method in 5–7 working days, the participant gets an automatic WhatsApp and email confirmation, and your entry count and start lists update immediately so nobody is left waiting at the marshalling area.
Settlements run on a T+2 working day cycle to the bank account you registered during KYC. Each payout carries a UTR number and a downloadable statement listing every transaction inside it, so your accountant can reconcile line by line against the bank entry.
Both. Set a deadline, a hard cap per category, or both, and registration closes itself at the minute you chose. Anyone arriving after that joins a waitlist and is promoted automatically the moment a withdrawal frees a slot, with a payment link valid for 24 hours.
Define age groups by date of birth cut-off, and the form assigns each entrant to the right category itself instead of trusting them to pick correctly. You can require a birth certificate or Aadhaar upload, restrict entry to specific institutions by email domain, and flag anyone who tries to enter two categories that clash on the schedule.
03 · Event day

Check-in, scoring and the things that go wrong at 9 a.m.

Seven answers for the morning everything has to work first time.

Check-in and score entry queue locally on the device and sync automatically the moment connectivity returns. Nothing is lost and duplicate scans are reconciled for you. This is the single most common reason organisers tell us they stayed — grounds and school fields lose signal far more often than anyone plans for.
About a second per person per scanner, and you can run as many scanners as you have phones. A typical school meet clears 1,100 students through three gates in under twenty minutes. Passes that are already used, refunded or belong to a different day are rejected on screen with a clear reason.
Yes. Volunteers can search by name, chest number or last four digits of the phone number and check the person in manually. Every manual check-in is logged with the volunteer name and timestamp, which keeps the audit clean when someone later asks how an entrant got in.
The scorer opens the event on a phone or tablet and enters results in the format that sport uses — balls and runs for cricket, sets for badminton, timings for track, points for gymnastics. Results publish to the public leaderboard the moment they are confirmed, and you can hold results back for a review window if your rules require it.
Yes. Every event has a full-screen display mode designed for projectors and LED walls, rotating between current results, the medal tally and upcoming fixtures. It refreshes on its own with no laptop babysitting, and the live streaming overlay add-on pushes the same data into OBS or vMix for broadcast.
Reporting time, venue and chest number go out on WhatsApp, SMS and email at whatever intervals you set — typically 48 hours, 12 hours and one hour before. If you shift a schedule, everyone affected is notified automatically within seconds rather than through a frantic round of phone calls.
Yes. Season Pass and Championship plans include a control room view showing every venue side by side — check-in numbers, events completed, results pending and which scorers have gone quiet. Federations use it to spot the one district that has stopped submitting results before it becomes a problem.
04 · Judging & results

Scoring panels, tiebreaks and disputes

Six answers about being fair — and being able to prove it afterwards.

Each judge logs in on their own phone or tablet and sees only the entries assigned to their panel, with your rubric on screen — for example technique out of 10, expression out of 10, costume out of 5. Scores lock once submitted, and the panel aggregate calculates itself using the weighting you set.
Yes, and blind mode is the default for panel events. No judge sees another judge's score until every score is in, and you can additionally hide participant names so only chest numbers appear. This kills the most common complaint at cultural fests — that one judge anchored the rest.
Set your tiebreak rules before the event and the platform applies them automatically — highest score on a nominated criterion, head judge's mark, count-back, or a manual jury decision. Whichever route is used, the result page records which rule broke the tie, so nobody has to reconstruct it later.
Every score, edit, override and login is timestamped and attributed to a named user, and the trail cannot be deleted by organisers. When a parent or coach disputes a placing you can show exactly who entered what and when, which in our experience settles the argument in about ninety seconds.
Public voting is available with OTP-verified phone numbers, one vote per number per category, rate limiting and device fingerprinting to catch bot farms. You control the weighting, so a common setup is judges 70% and public 30%, which keeps the audience involved without letting the biggest WhatsApp group win.
You choose: publish instantly as each result is confirmed, hold everything for a review window, or release category by category during the ceremony. Published results appear on the public event page, on the big screen and in a WhatsApp broadcast, and can be exported as a signed PDF for your records.
05 · Certificates & medals

The part participants remember years later

Five answers on generating, branding, verifying and re-issuing recognition.

Bulk generation produces around 5,000 personalised certificates in a few minutes, and most schools have them in participants' inboxes the same evening as the event. You can send them automatically the moment results are published, or hold them until a principal has approved the batch.
Yes. Upload your crest, sponsor logos and scanned signatures and place them where you want on the template. If you would rather not fiddle with layout, the ₹6,500 custom certificate design add-on gets our designers to build a certificate and medal-card set for you with two revision rounds.
Every certificate carries a QR code and a unique ID linking to a public verification page that shows the event, category, placing and date of issue. Colleges and employers can confirm a claim in seconds, and you can revoke a certificate if a result is later overturned.
The platform tracks the medal tally, who has collected what, and which trophies are still with last year's winners — the thing that always goes missing before a prize ceremony. We do not manufacture trophies, but our Championship customers usually plug in their own vendor and we generate the engraving list for them.
Yes, permanently. Certificates stay on the participant's result page and can be re-downloaded years later using the phone number they registered with. This alone removes a surprising volume of email to your office from students applying to colleges.
06 · Billing & security

What it costs, where your data lives, who can touch it

Seven answers for the people who sign the cheque and the people who worry about the data.

Starter is ₹0 forever for up to 100 participants, Pro is ₹7,999 per event for up to 2,500 participants with unlimited sub-events, Season Pass is ₹49,999 a year for unlimited events at one institution, and Championship is quoted to your federation. All prices exclude 18% GST — the full table is on the pricing page.
No commission at all. You keep everything participants pay, minus only the payment gateway's own charge — roughly 1.9% on cards and nothing on UPI — which appears as a separate line on your settlement statement.
Yes, 30% off every plan and add-on for registered NGOs and trusts running grassroots sport, and for government schools and departments. Email your 12A or 80G certificate or a request on department letterhead to info@catalystwebtrendz.com and the discount is applied permanently after about a working day.
In Indian data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad, encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with AES-256. Nothing is replicated outside India. Backups run every six hours and are retained for 35 days, and we test a full restore every quarter.
Minors' records carry extra controls in line with the DPDP Act: verifiable parental consent is captured at registration, photographs and contact details are hidden from public pages by default, and no behavioural advertising or profiling is ever applied to them. Schools can also switch off public result listings entirely and keep everything internal.
You do. Export the full participant list, payment records, scores and results to CSV or Excel at any time, on every plan including the free one. If you ever leave us, you take a complete export with you and we delete your data within 30 days of the request.
Starter gets email support with a two working day reply. Pro gets priority chat with a two-hour event-day response, Season Pass adds a named account manager at 30 minutes, and Championship gets a dedicated hotline answered within 15 minutes. Our median first response on live event days last season was 14 minutes.
Still stuck?

Three ways to reach an actual human

No ticket portals, no bots that ask you to rephrase. Our support team sits in our New Delhi office, and they have all run events themselves.

WhatsApp us

The fastest route for a quick question, a screenshot of something odd, or a "which plan do we need" sanity check. Send your event name and we can usually see the problem before you finish typing.

Median reply: 9 minutes, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. IST, seven days a week.

Open WhatsApp

Email support

Best for anything with attachments — entry lists to import, a certificate design brief, a purchase order, or a detailed question your committee wants answered in writing they can circulate.

info@catalystwebtrendz.com — replied within 4 working hours on paid plans, 2 working days on Starter.

Contact form

Event-day hotline

A phone line that only rings while your event is live, staffed by engineers rather than a call centre. Share the number with your gate lead and your scoring desk before the morning starts.

Answered in 15 minutes or less on Championship, 30 minutes on Season Pass. Activated automatically 12 hours before your event.

Talk to an expert

Prefer to see it working first? A 20-minute walkthrough answers more than this whole page — bring your messiest event and we will build it live on the call.

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Every question on this page came from a real conversation with a real committee. Send us yours and you will get a reply the same day, plus a spot on this page if it is a good one.

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