If you set a maximum number of teams in a class, Cup Manager handles it for you. The registration form shows, if you like, how many spots remain.

Once a class is full, the system doesn't shut registrations down completely — it clearly informs new applicants that they're being placed on a waiting list. From there you can pull in teams whenever a confirmed team drops out.

The system creates a waiting list for every class. It can show teams their exact position on the list, but that's entirely optional. Sometimes it makes more sense for the tournament to pick freely among the waiting teams, in which case you won't want to reveal positions.

All of this behavior comes simply from setting a maximum number of teams on the class.

Read more about how our registration system works here.

Almost every tournament ends up needing to merge classes at some point. Usually it's because too few teams signed up for a couple of classes, and it's better for everyone if they play together.

The naive fix is to move all the teams from one class into the other and delete the first one. But that creates problems — for one thing, it's very hard to undo.

What Cup Manager does instead is separate registration classes from draw classes. When you merge two classes, only the draw classes are merged — in the registration system they remain two distinct classes.

The link back is preserved, which brings a range of benefits:

• Even after merging, teams can still register for the original classes, while ending up in the draw for the merged class
• The merge can be undone afterwards, restoring every team to its original class
• The system also automatically names the teams after their original class. So if you merge U12 and U13 into U12/13, the teams keep their original class name at the end, e.g. "U12".

Tournaments often have different rules, offers and prices for teams depending on whether they're staying overnight or not. For example, it's common to give teams a lower registration fee if they're booking accommodation.

But accommodation is often booked only months after registration. To avoid the discount only kicking in once teams have already booked their stay, tournaments want to know as early as possible which teams will be booking accommodation.

In Cup Manager we have a concept called Team Types that solves exactly this.

For example, you can set up two team types: Overnight teams and Local teams.

When teams register, they must choose one of these types, so the information is collected in a structured way from day one.

The team type can then be used to automatically apply a discount to the registration fee, or to restrict which participant fees can be booked — so that only teams that chose Overnight are able (and required) to book accommodation.

This information also helps with planning, since you can see early on how many overnight teams to expect.

Read more about how our registration system works here.

Our accommodation planning solution also includes a smart way to plan meals. By setting up meal rules based on where teams are staying, the system can assign meal times to teams automatically.

You can configure it so that every team staying at School 1 eats breakfast at School 1, lunch at Dining Hall A and dinner at Dining Hall B. These rules can also differ from day to day.

Once you place teams at their accommodation, the system automatically links them to the right meals according to your rules. On top of that, you can of course add manual exceptions for individual teams whenever needed.

Teams' meals and accommodation can be presented neatly through their team account, so they can see in advance where they'll eat and stay.

You can export tailored lists for the dining halls so staff can see how many people are eating at each meal. Since the system also tracks special dietary requirements per team, staff get a clear overview of how many special diets to prepare for at every meal.

Pretty smart, right?

Of course Cup Manager supports discounts. There are manual discounts, where you as the tournament can give a specific team 25% off.

But we also have a system of smart discounts that are applied automatically based on criteria you choose. For example, you can easily set up a discount that gives everyone who registers before a certain date 20% off, or gives 450 SEK off to every overnight team.

These smart discounts are also "live" — you can even add them retroactively if you forget to set them up in advance.

Read more about how our registration system works here.

If you like, you can let teams provide arrival information covering how and when they'll get to the tournament. This is useful both for your own planning and for check-in, accommodation hosts and other logistics. You can also use the arrival information when scheduling the tournament, to make sure teams aren't given their first match before they've arrived.

You might also offer transfer from the airport or train station, whether for a fee or free of charge. Cup Manager also supports selling transfers right when teams submit their arrival information. Just ask us!

Besides arrival information, you can also let teams provide departure information to get the equivalent details for when they leave.

A running theme in Cup Manager is that we try to use the information we already collect to simplify things for you as much as possible. One example: in the registered-teams admin view, you can filter on just about any criteria you can think of.

Beyond the obvious — seeing all teams in a certain class, or all teams that chose accommodation — you can also filter by payment status, whether they've submitted arrival information, or whether they've entered their squad list.

You can even filter on things outside the registration system itself, such as all teams drawn into a particular group, or all teams playing on a particular pitch. Many other systems would treat these as separate, isolated modules. But having these deeper criteria available in one place means you find more information without hunting around. And since these same criteria are used for sending emails, it's important that they aren't needlessly limited.

Once you've filtered the teams the way you want, you can also sum things up — total payments received, number of players, number of teams. It's an overview that's hard to beat.

Read more about how our registration system works here.

A classic tournament structure sends the 1st and 2nd place team from each group to Playoffs A, and the rest to Playoffs B. What's called "2nd place in Group A" isn't a real team yet, just a placeholder — Cup Manager fills it in automatically once the group finishes.

Cup Manager also has full built-in support for automatically handling trickier setups, like advancing the best 3rd-place team into a playoff bracket. That's useful for balancing out playoff trees. The best 3rd place is likewise a placeholder, filled in with whichever 3rd-place team performed best across all the groups in the group stage.

We think it's important that you shouldn't have to manage this by hand mid-tournament, when there's already plenty else demanding your attention. Instead, we've built it so that how teams advance is decided as soon as the draw is made. During the tournament, the system handles all of that advancement automatically.

And naturally it's not limited to best 3rd place — it works dynamically for things like 3rd-best 2nd place too.

To rank these teams and work out, say, which 3rd-place team is best, Cup Manager simply applies the same rules used for the group table. If the groups are different sizes, that's not quite so straightforward, since it could become advantageous to land in a bigger group. For that case, there are 3 strategies to choose from:

• Rank as normal even though group sizes differ. Simple, but not entirely fair.
• Divide each criterion by the number of matches played, so teams are sorted by, say, goals per match first. A bit fairer, but not perfectly so.
• Discard all matches played against the lowest-ranked teams in the larger groups. The fairest option.

On top of the standard participant fee, we've built a system that lets teams easily book hotel rooms. Teams can search for rooms for, say, 15 people, and the system will show the cheapest room configuration at each hotel — whether that's 5 triple rooms or a mix of different sizes.

You're always in control of how many rooms of each type are available. Every room type at every hotel can have its own price.

Set up this way, the whole accommodation assignment process runs automatically, placing teams into rooms across the hotels in the system.

There's also an option to require a deposit, so teams might, for example, have to pay 10% upfront to complete the booking.

You can read more about team accounts and accommodation bookings here.