Refunding a booking/course

This guide will show you how to refund a booking or course booking. 

It's important to note that this is a 2-step process so the financials are kept accurate:

1. Cancel the booking: the booking amount will be credited to the client's Account Balance

2. Create the refund: using the amount that was just added to the client's Account Balance.

   1. Refunds directly back to the client’s credit card are also possible if you’re using the integrated BookingTimes online payment system.

This article will outline both of these processes.

Cancel the booking 

Steps

1. Navigate to the relevant Booking.  

2. Click Cancel Booking in the side menu. See the Cancelling a booking article for more details.

Create the booking refund

For extra details regarding credit card refunds through the BookingTimes online payment system, please see the Refunding to a credit card section further in this article.

Refunding to a credit card

Please ensure you have the correct booking selected at step 1 that you wish to refund, in order for the refund to be correctly processed back to the same credit card that was used to purchase the booking. This will ensure that the credit card transaction ID is automatically populated.

Steps

1. Ensure you still have the booking selected from the previous step where you cancelled the booking

2. Select New in the top menu and then select Refund 

4. Enter Refund Description

5. Enter Refund Value in the appropriate field (Cash, Credit or Other)

   1. Note: If you enter a value into the Credit field, it will automatically add the transaction ID details to refund back to the card that the original booking was purchased with. Please see the Refunding to a credit card section further in this article for more details.

6. Select whether to deduct from the client's Account balance (if you cancelled the booking previously this amount should be on the client's Account Balance ready to be refunded)

7. Click Refund

8. Select Email Refund from the side menu to notify the Client

Issue the refund

If you're not using the BookingTimes online payment system to issue a credit card refund, ensure you actually do the refund for the appropriate payment method.

For example:

• For cash, give the cash to the client

• For credit card payments that do NOT use BookingTimes online payment system, go to your credit card provider and issue the refund

• For EFT/other, organise the transfer of funds

Refunding to a credit card

If you are using the BookingTimes online payment system, you can do an online refund automatically directly back to the credit card.

• The credit card transaction ID will automatically be added for full traceability and to avoid any disputes.

• You may choose whether or not to refund the surcharge.

• You may choose to automatically send funds to the card, or you may manually transfer them afterwards.

The key point is to ensure that you have selected the original booking/sale that was purchased with the credit card, so that we can refund back to that same card, and with full traceability of the transaction ID that is allocated.

Finding the original booking/sale

1. Go to the relevant client profile or booking and click on the History tab.

2. Here you will see the full list of bookings/sales for that client, and those which have a Transaction ID (Trans # column) were paid by credit card.

3. If we wanted to refund the Booking on Mon 10/06/2024 for the Automatic Lesson below, we would select that record, and then trigger the refund process from there as described earlier in this article.

Please refer to the Troubleshooting refunds article if a refund is declined.