How and when ticket money reaches you
Version 2026-08-21 · Accepted once, by version, before your first payout
These terms govern the money side of selling tickets through GrandRSVP: when we pay you, what we hold back, what we deduct, and what we need from you before any money moves. You accept them once, by version, before your first payout.
They are written plainly on purpose. The hold periods below are not us being difficult — they are what makes it possible to refund your buyers when something goes wrong, which is an obligation the Consumer Protection Act places on you as the supplier.
You are the supplier of your event for the purposes of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008. GrandRSVP operates the ticket shop and collects the ticket price as your agent. The contract for the event is between you and the ticket buyer.
It follows that the obligations to the buyer — to hold the event, to honour cancellations under section 17, and to refund with interest and incidental costs under section 47 — are yours. We build the machinery; we do not assume your duties.
Ticket money is collected into GrandRSVP's payment account and held for you until it becomes payable under these terms. We record the amount owing to you per event and show you the whole waterfall on your Payouts page.
We do not pay interest on money held. Money is held no longer than is necessary and, in any event, never longer than thirty days after the end of your event.
Funds for an event become releasable five business days after the event ends.
The reason is section 47 of the CPA. If your event does not happen, or happens materially differently, every buyer is owed a refund plus prescribed interest plus the costs directly incidental to the breach. Money already paid away cannot fund those refunds — which is why the whole industry holds it. Quicket pays three working days after the event, Webtickets batches to the Wednesday after the event week, and Howler pays within a week while withholding a portion. Our schedule sits in the same range.
Ten per cent of the amount otherwise payable is withheld past the main release, as a buffer against late chargebacks and late refund claims.
The holdback is released twenty-one days after the end of your event, less any refunds or chargebacks that landed in the meantime. It is your money throughout; we are holding it, not earning it.
In no case will any part of your money be held longer than thirty days after the end of the event.
You may ask for up to sixty per cent of the net amount to be released before the event. Because that money would otherwise be sitting there to refund your buyers, we will only release it against security.
The security is a deed of suretyship signed by a natural person — you, or a director, member or trustee of the organiser entity — who binds themselves personally for the amount released, up to a stated cap.
The deed must be signed by hand and uploaded, or signed with an Advanced Electronic Signature as defined in the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002. A ticked box or a typed name will not do. Section 6 of the General Law Amendment Act 50 of 1956 requires a suretyship to be embodied in a written document signed by or on behalf of the surety, and because it requires a signature without specifying its type, section 13(1) of ECTA is widely read as demanding an Advanced Electronic Signature. We would rather hold security that works than security that is convenient.
Early release is discretionary. We may decline it, or offer less than you asked for, and we are not obliged to give reasons.
Before your first payout we verify who you are and that the bank account is yours. We require identity or company registration details, proof of address or business address, and a bank confirmation letter.
We also run an Account Verification Service check with the banks, which confirms that the account number, the branch and the account holder's identity match. A failed AVS check blocks payout until it is resolved. It is the cheapest defence there is against paying the wrong person.
Changing your banking details resets both verification states and the checks must be passed again before the next payout. Account-takeover fraud almost always begins with a quiet change of bank details.
We may be required to treat these checks as customer due diligence under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001, and to report suspicious or unusual transactions. We will not tell you if we have made such a report; the Act forbids it.
Once funds are releasable you request the payout from your Payouts page. We approve it, pay by electronic funds transfer to your verified account, and record the payment reference against the payout.
We pay in South African Rand only, to a South African bank account held in the name of the verified organiser. We do not pay to third-party accounts, at any request, ever.
From the money collected we deduct our commission and booking fee as disclosed on our pricing page, refunds already made to buyers, and any chargebacks already lost.
Every deduction is itemised on the payout: gross collected, refunds, fees, holdback, net. You see the whole waterfall before you request payment. The payment gateway's own transaction charge is shown for reconciliation; it is met out of our commission and is not deducted from you again.
While we hold your funds we execute buyer refunds directly against them. That is faster for the buyer and cheaper for you than a claim after the fact.
Where a refund or a chargeback lands after we have already paid you, the amount is recovered from your next payout for any event. Where there is no next payout, or it is insufficient, the amount is a debt due by you to GrandRSVP on demand and we may set it off against anything else we owe you.
Chargebacks carry the payment provider's dispute fee, which is recovered the same way. We defend chargebacks where the ticket was scanned at the door, and we will give you the scan record for your own response.
Section 54 of the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991 governs agency. Because we sell as your agent, the supply of the ticket is made by you as principal: you account for output VAT on the ticket price if you are a registered vendor.
GrandRSVP accounts for VAT on its commission and booking fee only, and issues you a tax invoice for those.
Section 54(3) requires an agent to furnish the principal with a statement of the supplies made on their behalf within twenty-one days of the end of the month in which they were made. We produce that statement from the payout record.
If you are a registered vendor, give us your VAT number. If you are not, that is fine — but if ticket sales take you over the registration threshold, the liability for output VAT is yours, not ours.
We may withhold or delay a payout where verification is incomplete, where we have reasonable grounds to suspect fraud or a legal obligation to hold, where an unusually high level of refund or chargeback activity is running on the event, or where the event has been cancelled or is the subject of a credible complaint that it will not take place.
Where we withhold, we tell you why and what would resolve it, unless the law prevents us from saying so.
You must disclose your cancellation terms before checkout. Any cancellation fee you charge must be reasonable on the Regulation 5 factors, must never be one hundred per cent, and must not be charged where the cancellation follows the death or hospitalisation of the person the booking was for.
You must not sell more tickets than the venue's lawful capacity. Over-selling is a section 47 breach, not an inconvenience.
You must deal with buyer complaints in good faith and within a reasonable time. Persistent failure is grounds for us to stop selling your events.
For attendee data you are the responsible party and GrandRSVP is your operator under POPIA section 21: we process attendee information only on your documented instructions and only to run your event.
For your own organiser and banking information we are the responsible party. That data is protected under POPIA section 19 with appropriate technical measures — bank account numbers and identity numbers are encrypted at rest and are never displayed back to anyone, including you, beyond the last four digits.
You must not upload attendee personal information you have no lawful basis to process, and you must honour access and deletion requests from your attendees.
Collecting money for on-payment to a third party makes GrandRSVP a Third Party Payment Provider in the beneficiary service provider category described in the South African Reserve Bank National Payment System Department Directive 1 of 2007. That status carries registration and sponsoring-bank requirements which we are in the process of satisfying.
The Reserve Bank's draft activity-based Authorisation Framework, still in draft at the date of this version, would require re-authorisation, segregated client-money accounts, and a limit on how long beneficiary funds may be held. The schedules above are set well inside the limits that framework contemplates.
These terms carry a version date. When we revise them you will be asked to accept the new version before your next payout, and the version you accepted is recorded against your account.
These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa.
Payout questions: payouts@grandrsvp.co.za. Your live figures, the gate checklist and the request button are on your Payouts page.
Your buyers are governed by the ticket purchase terms. See also the general terms of service and privacy policy.
Template pending review by a qualified South African attorney. GrandRSVP's collection of ticket money for on-payment to organisers is likely to require registration as a Third Party Payment Provider with PASA and a sponsoring-bank arrangement. Do not rely on this wording until that review is complete.