u/AnnoyedOwlbear

Hey folks. My kidlet has been recommended for a Japan trip - they've consistently been the best kid in their class in Japanese for years now, and have been put forward for the school trip. I have to now come up with the money over the next six months. It is a lot of money, even though it is 'cheap' because the school is helping. It is 'AnnoyedOwlbear would get their car repaired if they had this' money. Kid is not old enough to legally work a job.

I'm very happy to help kid fundraise, but draw the line on having me do it all and hand it over, given the fact that if I knew how to do this, my car would have working locks and I would have a new Daniel Smith set of watercolour paints.

What ideas do people have for fund raising? I was wondering about Bunnings sausages, but we're not an organisation, we're just a family. Do they allow that? All ideas are welcome, I really want to help my kid do this - my own family actually fucked off to Europe without me when I was younger, and that really fucking stung, so I want to help my own kid get what I couldn't.

These are the things that tripped me up.

1. There appears to be a disconnect between help files on Google Play, probably because there are so many. Some say 'You can set up an app however you want and change it all later' - these are depreciated. If you are going to do a single charge non-subscription App that doesn't have internal fees, you MUST start as fully paid.

2. You cannot start closed testing without setting up your banking details. Internal testing yes, but not the closed testing that gets you approval.

3. This process will take 2-4 days. You do this under Google Play Console > Settings > Payments Profile. After entering your banking details, Google will deposit a small amount of money in your account. If your bank is like mine, this notification will not show up for 2 or so days, online or not, and it will LOOK like nothing has happened. You have to wait. Once that is deposited, it will then ALSO look like nothing happened - you must wait at least 2 days for the change to propagate through the system.

4. When deleting an app (if you set it up for free like I did, because I didn't want to charge my testers and because Google informed me I could change it all later), you must include the prefix of your Transaction ID. Help files that I found stated strictly to REMOVE the prefix - so strictly that I never tried with it and after 4 days had to submit to google help. Include the prefix (or just try everything - I was very frustrated and confused by this point).

5. You should wait for a while after setting everything up, because even with the financial authority setup in the Payments Profile, it does NOT appear to propagate at the same time to whatever system allows you to create promo codes for your testers. My ability to create them was 2 days delayed after authority had apparently passed.

6. If you do not set up financials first, then when you try to add countries to your app testing - you will get a strange error that says you cannot save changes to added countries. This error does not reference how long it takes for authority to propagate, and instead implies you haven't set a cost for the country or you're missing tax somewhere.

7. Whatever you set as your application name is set in stone - if you've been forced to delete and reset it, you cannot use it again.

8. If you have been forced to delete and reset it, you WILL need to go through the 14 days approval with 12 testers all over again.