Refunds (Statements)

Statements Content

Please be aware that the article below discusses Advanced Billing's refund functionality in our classical statement billing. Please refer to this help article if you are looking for information on the refund aspect of our Relationship Invoicing.

Refunds processed against subscriptions fall into two categories in Advanced Billing:

Regular Refunds: These are refunds that are processed normally through your gateway. The funds will be returned to the subscriber via the original payment method. A request to process a regular refund will transmit a request to the payment gateway for processing.

Refunds that are processed via the gateway use the ID of the original transaction to perform the refund. When a refund is performed, the returned funds will be placed back on the original card that was used to complete the purchase.

External Refunds: External refunds are refunds that are not processed through your gateway. External refunds inidcate that you’ve refunded the subscriber elsewhere.

Some examples of external refunds would be any of the following scenarios:

You issued a check in-person for a requested refund for a subscriber
You issued a refund via the gateway and would like to reflect this refund on the subscription

Viewing Refunds

When you elect to view refunds in the transactions tab, you can easily view all refunds by filtering for the correct transaction type.

In this case, we’d use the example below of filtering for just refunds:

Note that external refunds are denoted by the usage of “external” in the application. Regular refunds are just displayed as refunds in the application.

To view a transaction, click on the ID of the transaction on the left side of the transactional view. From here you will be able to view the individual details of a specific refund.

When viewing a refund that’s processed via your gateway, you’ll receive a number of data points about the refund. Most importantly, a gateway transaction ID will be captured by the application and can be used to track the refund via your specific gateway portal.

For example:

A refund is processed via Stripe with the gateway transaction ID of 1234ABCD.
You may look up the transaction ID 1234ABCD in the Stripe gateway console for more information about the refund.

Response Data

Bundled with the refund request for the transaction, you’ll also see the response from the gateway. Two important pieces of information can be viewed in the refund response data:

success: Success indicates if the transaction was successful or not at the gateway. In the event of a failed refund, success will be equal to false.
test: Test indicates the mode of the site when the transaction was placed.
- If the site mode = true, this indicates that a transaction was placed in test mode.
- If the site mode = false this indicates that the transaction was placed in live mode.

Response data from a gateway for a refund

External Refunds

An external refund that is recorded in Advanced Billing will have the following effects:

The subscription’s revenue is reduced by the amount of the refund entered
The subscription’s balance (i.e. amount due) is NOT changed
Advanced Billing does NOT interact with the payment gateway or touch a credit card in any way

Viewing External Refunds

When viewing external refunds, the only data shown is related to the following categories:

Subscription: The ID and name of the subscriber
Date: The timestamp of the external refund
Amount: The amount of the external refund
Memo: The memo that was entered at the time the refund was recorded.

Deleting Refunds

Three rules apply when deleting refunds:

Only external refunds may be deleted.
External refunds can be deleted if the current billing period is still open.
External refunds may only be deleted from the subscription view. You may not delete a refund from the transactions tab.

To delete a refund, select the subscriber’s name or ID from the transactions tab. In the subscription, select the transactions tab. Select “Actions” from the right side of the transaction page, and Delete the external refund.

Select the subscription ID or subscriber name

View the transactions for a subscription