The Schools Alpine Competition (alpinecomp.nz) is an annual alpine ski and snowboard event held in Wanaka every September, bringing together school-aged competitors from across New Zealand. SAC has a fixed registration window, a firm event date, and a large number of participants across multiple competitive categories — all of which needed to be managed through a single, reliable online system.

We were brought in to build and manage that system. Here’s how it works.

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The Challenge

Event registration sounds straightforward until you look at what it actually involves for a competition of this scale. Competitors span different age groups and disciplines. Schools submit team entries rather than individual registrations. Entry fees need to be collected at the point of registration. The organising committee needs all of that data in a usable format, in real time, without having to manually compile it from emails or spreadsheets.

The system needed to handle all of this automatically — from the moment a registration was submitted to the moment the organising committee sat down to plan the event.

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The Stack

The site runs on WordPress with WooCommerce handling payments and Bitform Pro managing the registration forms. These two systems work in combination — Bitform captures the detailed registration data, and WooCommerce processes the entry fee at checkout.

Bitform Pro was the right choice for the forms because of the complexity involved. Registrations aren’t a simple name-and-email form. They’re multi-step, with conditional logic that adjusts the fields shown based on competitor age, category, and school affiliation. A junior competitor registering for slalom sees different fields than a senior competitor registering for a team event. Bitform handles that logic cleanly, and the form experience for registrants is straightforward despite the complexity underneath.

WooCommerce manages the payment side. Entry fees are collected securely at the point of registration via Stripe, with confirmation handled automatically. The organising committee doesn’t need to chase payments or reconcile who has and hasn’t paid — that’s all captured in the system.

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Automation and Integration

The part that saves the most time for the SAC organising committee happens after a registration is submitted.

Google Sheets integration — every registration automatically populates a shared Google Sheet in real time. The committee has a live, always-current view of registrations across all categories without having to log into WordPress or export anything. As registrations come in, the spreadsheet updates. By the time the registration window closes, the data is already in the format they need to plan the event.

Automated confirmation emails — registrants receive a confirmation email immediately after submitting, with their registration details and payment confirmation. The organising committee receives a notification for each new entry. Nobody has to manually send anything — it’s all triggered at the point of submission.

The combination means that once the registration window opens, the system runs itself. Entries come in, payments are processed, the spreadsheet fills up, and confirmation emails go out — without any manual handling required from the SAC team.

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The Outcome

Registration for SAC 2026, held in Wanaka this September, is open and running on this system. The organising committee has real-time visibility of entries, payments are collected automatically at the point of registration, and every registrant gets immediate confirmation without anyone on the committee having to action it.

For an event with a fixed date and a fixed registration window, having a system that handles the administrative side automatically isn’t just convenient — it frees the committee to focus on running the competition rather than managing a spreadsheet.

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Running an event and managing registrations manually? Get in touch — we can help you build something that handles it automatically.