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Handle a failed payment or a refund

Goal​

Get a customer whose card was declined paid up again, and give money back when it is owed.

Prerequisites​

  • You hold Sports & Leisure — receptionist or centre manager.

Steps​

A payment was refused

  1. Open Sports & Leisure → Billing → Subscriptions and choose the Past due view, or Instalments and the Failed view.
  2. Open the failed instalment. Why it failed is the payment provider's reason — Card declined, for example — and Next attempt is when it is tried again by itself. Every attempt is on its Payments tab.
  3. To take it now — the customer has given you a new card — select Take payment. When it is paid, the subscription is Active again.

Refund a payment

  1. Open the payment from Billing → Payments (or from an instalment's Payments tab).
  2. To refund all of it, select Refund.
  3. To refund part of it, first type the new total refunded into Refunded — 10 to give back £10 of £45 — then select Refund. It is Partly refunded; refunding again later gives back the rest.

What happens behind the scenes​

A refused payment is recorded, not lost: the instalment is Failed, a payment row says what the provider answered, and the subscription is Past due until every failed instalment is paid. It is tried again every Days between attempts until the plan's Attempts at a payment are used up; after that nothing is tried by itself, and Take payment is how it is taken.

If the payment provider does not answer at all, nothing is recorded — nobody can know whether the money moved — and the next try asks with the same reference, so the customer cannot be charged twice.

A refund asks the payment provider first. If the provider will not refund — or cannot, because not every provider refunds every kind of payment — nothing about the payment changes, and the message says why.

Troubleshooting​

  • "… is paused, so nothing is taken from it." — resume the subscription first.
  • "The payment provider did not refund it: …" — the provider's own reason follows; the payment is unchanged.
  • "A refund cannot be more than was paid." — Refunded is the total given back, not the amount to add.
  • "A payment is a record of what a provider did, and is not edited." — only Refund changes a payment.
  • "This payment was taken at the till for sale …" — a till’s payment is refunded from its sale, so the two say the same; see Refund or void a sale.