How to process an order cancellation and refund (for non-continuous payments)

In order to process a cancellation and refund on ADvance, you first need to navigate to the party record on which the order exists. If the order is a gift or company donor order, you need to navigate to the billing party.

Once in the party record, go to the order you wish to cancel and refund by clicking on it.

From the order screen, click on the Actions drop-down menu and select ‘Cancel order’:

You will then see the cancellation screen:

On the cancellation screen, you need to select a cancellation reason from the pre-defined list of reasons.

You must also leave a mandatory message in the ‘Comment’ box. This comment will appear in the Customer diary for the party for which you are processing the cancellation and refund. This can be useful in future if you need to obtain information relating to the cancellation/refund.

Note
If the order is already cancelled and you only wish to apply for the refund, then go into the cancelled order and select ‘Refund order’ from the Actions drop-down menu.

Next, you need to choose whether or not you would like a confirmation email automatically sent to the customer to advise them of the cancellation and refund by selecting one of the two options.

If cancellation email is switched off at the brand level then this an email will not be sent regardless of what is chosen. 

You can then choose if you wish to cancel and refund ‘Individual entitlements’ or the ‘Entire order’.

‘Individual entitlements’ will allow you to cancel and refund just one element of the order, e.g. just the Online, Print or Digital part of the order.

‘Entire order’ will cancel and refund all elements together.

Under ‘Order Details’ you will see the following breakdown:

In order to proceed with the refund, you must enter the amount you wish to refund into the refund box (D). Normally, you’ll enter the calculated remaining amount (C) as this means you will only be refunding the value of any products not yet received by the customer. However, you can enter any amount as long as it does not exceed the total order value. *See below for further details on how the remaining value is calculated.

For example, you might have a 30-day cancellation period in which the customer has already received an issue. In this instance, the value attributed to the issue they have received will already have been fulfilled, however, your cancellation policy may state that they will get a full refund if they cancel within 30 days so you would enter the full order value into the refund amount box. 

Once you have entered the amount and selected options, click the ‘Submit Cancellation’ button to complete the cancellation and refund.

Note
A real refund can only be applied to credit/debit card payments. All other payment types will be refunded on the system but no actual money will be refunded.

Paying the money back to the customer?

If the order was paid by credit or debit card directly through the system, then at the point of clicking ‘Submit cancellation’, you will receive a prompt asking if you wish to process the refund back onto the customer’s payment card.

Selecting ‘yes’ will perform a real monetary refund – your bank account will be debited and the amount will be credited back to the bank account linked to the customer’s payment card.

If you select ‘no’ then a dummy refund will be carried out on the system. This means that the refund is recorded on the system and the reporting figures will be adjusted accordingly but no actual money is refunded to the customer. If a real refund is required, this will still need to be supplied to the customer by other means.

Once the order has been cancelled, its status will change from ‘Live’ to ‘Cancelled’ and the order will be found under the ‘Cancelled’ tab of the orders section of the party record:

If you click into the order and go to the ‘Payment’ tab, you will see the refund listed under ‘Additional Payments’.

Note
The refund will appear on the Bank Transaction Detail report against the date the refund was processed and will be listed under the payment type ‘refund’.

*How is the remaining liability amount calculated?

The remaining liability amount is the total order value minus the amount that has been fulfilled so far, either by Print or Digital issues being run in the IFR process and fulfilled or Online access duration passing.

How is liability fulfilled?

When an order is created, the total payment amount is split between the different products and entitlements on the order based on the variant settings, e.g. 50% to Print and 50% to Online. It is then fulfilled throughout the duration of the order’s lifespan in different ways, depending on the product type.

Print/Digital issues

Any amount attributed to a Print or Digital entitlement is divided equally by the number of issues due and is then fulfilled, bit-by-bit, each time an issue is run or fulfilled on the system.

Online/App access

Any amount attributed to an Online or App entitlement is divided by the number of days for which the order runs and is then fulfilled, bit-by-bit, each day until the full duration has passed.

How will a refund alter the liability reports?

If you refund the remaining liability on an order, the liability for that order will then become zero.

If you refund more than the remaining amount then the order will have a negative liability value.

If you refund less than the remaining amount, the leftover amount will remain as brought forward liability and will not be fulfilled. You would have to apply a further refund to zero it and remove it from the brought forward figure.

Note
If you are cancelling and refunding in order to make an adjustment to an existing order then please read the following page: How to make an adjustment to an existing order .