Issuing registration refunds can be required for any number of reasons. For example, having to cancel your event, or refund a product purchase that is no longer needed. Whatever the reason, ClearEvent makes it easy to issue refunds for any paid registration or product purchase.
Registration or product refunds can be whole or partial – that is, you can refund any amount up to the full original amount of the charge paid by the buyer (registrant). You can only issue a refund in ClearEvent if the payment was received online. Since manual (offline or on-site) payments were received outside of the ClearEvent app, any refunds of those payments need to be made outside of the ClearEvent app.
NOTE: Refunds can only be issued when a payment has been collected. There is no need to issue refunds for $0.00 registrations, or for registrations where a 100% promo code has been applied to a free registration. In these cases, simply decline the free registration.
IMPORTANT: Always attempt to refund participants through ClearEvent for online payments you receive. We do not recommend issuing manual refund methods (e.g., sending cash or a check) for online payment refunds. This is because if a registrant disputes the credit card charge or the charge is found to be fraudulent, you can receive a chargeback from the credit card company. This would result in the loss of both the disputed amount and the amount you manually refunded. By using ClearEvent to issue the refund, the original credit card used for the purchase will be refunded through Stripe, avoiding the possibility of a loss caused by a dispute or credit card chargeback.
Issuing a refund
How to avoid "Pending" refunds due to insufficient funds
Before issuing any refund, please ensure that your Stripe account has a sufficient Stripe balance available to cover the total amount you expect to refund. This will avoid any unexpected delays in refunding the registrant.
Also, keep in mind that for Stripe accounts created after Sept 14th, 2017, both the ClearEvent Service Charge and the Stripe Processing Charge are non-refundable. This means if you are looking to refund 100% of your registration fee, your event will need to cover these non-refundable service charges.
For example, to issue a full refund for a $100 registration fee where the ClearEvent Service Charge is $3.05 & the Stripe Processing Charge is $3.29, your event will need to cover $6.34 (= $3.05 + $3.29) in non-refundable service charges.
To refund a registrant:
Go to the Registration section > Edit Registrant > Payment tab for the registrant you wish to refund.
Click the Issue Refund button.
The Registration Refund page will be displayed for the registrant.
If the registrant purchased any products, you can enter the product quantity to refund in the Qty to Refund field for the desired product. By default, the full price of the product will be refunded, but you can override the value in the Amount to Refund column to issue a partial product refund if needed.
Enter any additional amount to refund to the buyer into the Registration Refund Amount field.
The total amount to refund cannot exceed the amount of the original charge. This includes the registration fee and any purchased products.
Enter a Refund Public Note to share with the buyer. You may also enter a Private Refund Note, which only event managers can see.
Choose a Refund reason. If you suspect that a charge you received may be fraudulent, please choose the Fraudulent option in the dropdown list. This will report the charge as fraudulent to Stripe and help them to better identify and prevent future fraudulent charges).
Choose a Refund action. After a refund is issued, you can specify an action to either Decline or Cancel the registration.
Click the Submit Refund button to issue the refund.
A refund confirmation email will be sent to the registrant/buyer that will be similar to the following:
Event Managers with the Registration Manager, Event Owner, or Event Admin roles will also receive a refund notification email when the refund is issued.
Stripe Processing Charges and refunds
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 and refunds
ClearEvent Service Charges are non-refundable and must always be covered by the event should the event wish to issue a full refund to the registrant.
Refunding older registrations:
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 registrant'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 registrant 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 registrant for a charge made a long time ago, it's always a good idea to check with the registrant 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 registrant a check of your own, or otherwise settle up with them directly. However, we generally advise against settling up directly, since if the registrant'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 registrant 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
Other refund tips:
Partial refunds: Entering partial refund amounts are allowed. Issuing a partial refund for a registration fee or product purchase can be useful if your refund policy specifies any holdbacks, restocking fees, etc.
Expired or canceled credit cards: If the credit card of the registrant that you have refunded is expired or canceled at the time of the refund, the registrant's new card will be credited with the refund. In the rare case that the registrant doesn’t have a new card, the bank will usually send the refund to the registrant's bank account. In the worst case, the bank won’t know what to do and will send the refund back to Stripe, at which point Stripe will contact you via email to ask how you would like to handle the refund.
In the event you issue a refund to a registrant that results in a negative balance in your Stripe account, the refund will show as “pending”. The refund will not be sent to the registrant until your Stripe balance is repaid and brought back into the positive and the full refund amount is available (either from new charges that increase the balance on your account or from a wire transfer to Stripe). Please see here for details based on the business country.
Stripe submits refunds to your registrant's bank immediately, but depending on the bank processing time, it can take anywhere from 5-10 business days to show up on your registrant’s bank account. If there are insufficient funds available in your Stripe account, refunds will also be delayed until funds are added.
Refunds can’t be canceled. If you’d like to charge the registrant again after a refund has been issued you can ask the registrant to submit a new registration, or you can manually create a new Stripe Charge from your Stripe dashboard and associate it with the Stripe Customer.
Refunded product quantities are returned to inventory and will become available for purchase by new registrants.