Deep Dive – Refunds

Most refunds are usually processed as a result of a registration withdrawal. Even for events which don’t allow refunds under normal circumstances, there will be some circumstances where processing a refund is inevitable. Refunds fall into two categories:

1. Registration withdrawal.
2. Other type of refund (e.g. cancelling a merchandise order or discounting an existing registration).

Irrespective of the type of refund to be processed, the Cart Editor is the screen you will use to handle it. However, if the refund is due to a registration withdrawal, it is good practice to process the withdrawal first on the Registration Editor and then take care of the refund.

Cart Editor

To process a refund, you need to be in the Cart Editor screen for the cart in question. You can access the Cart Editor in many ways but the most common way is to find the registration you want to work with and selecting Cart Editor from the actions menu.

Whenever you open the Cart Editor – or make any changes to cart contents or cart payments – Director will assess the current state of the cart by comparing the total value of the Cart Contents and the total value of the Cart Payments:

• If the value of Cart Contents is greater than the value of Cart Payments, the cart has an amount owing and the Cart Editor will prompt you to make a payment.
• If the value of Cart Contents is less than the value of Cart Payments , the cart has been over paid and the Cart Editor will prompt you to process a refund.
• If the value of Cart Contents is equal to the value of Cart Payments , the cart is balanced and the system will not prompt you to take any action.

The objective is always to keep all of your carts balanced – either by making payments or refunds, or by adjusting the contents of the cart to suit.

Prompting a Refund by Editing the Cart Items

To make a refund, you will need to adjust the Cart Contents or Cart Payments such that the payments total is greater than the contents total. The most common scenarios is to adjust the cart items to reflect the change to the charges being made. For example, if you are processing a withdrawal and the entrant is due a 50% refund, the easiest way to handle this is to:

1. Open the Cart Editor
2. Click on the Cart Items tab
3. Click the edit icon next to the Registration cart item
4. Change the Amount field to be half of its current value
5. Update

When the screen is refreshed, Director will warn that a refund is due, show the amount, and prompt with two red buttons; one to process a refund online and one to process the refund offline.

Important! If you are making multiple changes to the cart (such as two registration withdrawals or one withdrawal and a refund of merchandise items), make all of your changes to the cart items first and then process a single refund at the end. It’s way easier and tidier. You don’t need to process the refund immediately when Director asks you to.

Processing the Refund

To bring the cart back into balance, you now need to process a refund and this can be done in one of two ways.

• An Online Refund means that Director will communicate directly with the e-commerce gateway to process a refund back to the original credit card used for the transaction. This is by far the most convenient method.
  
  Important! Online refunds can only be made when the original payment was made using a credit card and the total amount of refunds given on a particular credit card transaction cannot exceed the original value of the transaction.
  Important! In some rare circumstances – such as when the card holder has been issued with a new cart – the ecom gateway will not be able to process the refund for you. In these circumstances, you’ll be shown an error message and you’ll need to process an Offline Refund.
  Important! In some cases, you may need to request access to online refunds via your merchant account issuer.

• An Offline Refund can be used to record a refund that you will action externally to the system. For example, you might send the entrant a refund by bank transfer or even hand them cash. In each case – even though you do not need to – you should still record these refund transactions in Director for your records.

When the refund has been completed, the e-receipt will show the updated details and the entrant can access this from Dashboard.