How To Issue A Ticket Order Refund:
Open the ClearEvent Event Manager App and go to the Tickets section > Ticket Orders tab.
Locate the Ticket Order that you wish to issue the refund for and click Edit.
Click on the Issue Refund.
You can now setup the refund by following these steps:
Select a reason for the refund (optional).
Edit the message to the Ticket Buyer. You can also add a private (internal) note about this refund). (optional)
Chose to refund and/or cancel the ticket. You can also edit the amount refunded per ticket up to the amount shown in Available To Refund. The amount can be anything above 0. The default behaviour will be to do a full refund and cancel the ticket when checking off to refund a ticket.
If you want to refund at the order level (e.g. give a % off the order rather than any specific ticket) then input it in Other Amount To Refund.
Click Issue Refund and review the amount to be refunded before submitting the transaction.
A refund confirmation email will be sent to the ticket buyer. Event Managers in the Ticket Manager, Event Owner, or Event Admin roles will also receive a refund confirmation email notification.
NOTE: You can also quickly issue a full refund using the toggle called Issue a full refund? This will default to refund and cancel all tickets in the order at the full amount available to refund. You can not edit the amount to refund per ticket if choosing this option. You can choose not to cancel a ticket always.
Stripe Processing Charges
For Stripe accounts created after Sept 14th, 2017, the Stripe Processing Charge is non-refundable. The event will be responsible for covering these fees when issuing a full refund. For all newly created Stripe accounts this will now be the default refund behavior.
For Stripe accounts created prior to Sept 14th, 2017, the Stripe Processing Charge will be refunded. For full refunds, the Stripe Processing Charge will be completely refunded. For partial refunds, the amount Stripe refunds is based on the partial refund amount entered.
ClearEvent Service Charges
ClearEvent Service Charges are non-refundable and must always be covered by the event.
Refund Processing Times
Typically refunds take 5-10 business days before they will appear on the ticket buyers credit card statement. You'll want to let the ticket buyer know that the refund has been issues and when they can expect the refund.
Refunding Older Ticket Orders:
The refund timeline will be different for each payment method used, but generally speaking for card payments there's no technical time limit to issuing a refund through ClearEvent (using Stripe). ClearEvent does recommend you create refunds no more than 90 days after a payment was created. The main reason for this is that while Stripe can send funds back to your ticket buyer's bank at any time, as time goes on it becomes harder for Stripe to predict how the bank will handle the refund on their end. Stripe is generally confident that up to 90 days, any refund you issue will behave as expected.
Refunds issued a little while after this - say, 100 or 120 days instead of 90 days - will very likely work fine. Refunds issued much longer after this - say, 6 months later - will have a sharply increased likelihood of experiencing some issue and may fail.
The most common reason for this is that the ticket buyer has closed or changed that credit card account and the account Stripe is sending funds back to is no longer valid. In cases like this, the bank will still often be able to figure it out (many will send a paper check to their former cardholder), but some don't know what to do.
If you ever need to refund a ticket buyer for a charge made a long time ago, it's always a good idea to check with the ticket buyer first to make sure that the credit card account is still active. If it isn't active any longer, your best bet would be to cut the ticket buyer a check of your own, or otherwise settle up with them directly. However, we generally advise against settling up directly, since if the ticket buyer's account is still active, there is a chance they could issue a chargeback through their card issuer even though you also directly sent them a refund. This could cause you to effectively refund them twice. It's best to only recommend settling up directly if the ticket buyer no longer has the account and/or an automatic refund through ClearEvent fails.
It is not possible to route a refund from one payment method to another one - say to a new credit card at a different company, or to a spouse or partner's credit card.
You can learn more about frequently asked questions (FAQs) about refunds here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/refunds-faq
Lastly, it is best to add funds to your Stripe account before issuing the refunds. This way the process will go faster as if the account goes into negative, some of the payouts may get stuck in pending status until your bank account is debited. You can learn how to do this here: https://stripe.com/docs/add-funds
Keep Your Budget In Sync
The budget will automatically track refunds done and include a line in the Expenses as shown below:
