When you define a publication, you can choose whether to automatically refund a credit balance or to keep it and apply it to the next renewal. If you choose the automatic refund option, QuickFill generates a refund for any credit balance larger than the minimum refund amount you defined on the publication definition billing screen (click here for details on defining the minimum dollar amount to be refunded).
However, even if you choose not to give automatic refunds, you may sometimes want to issue a refund anyway. Use the 'Refund' transaction for this purpose.
If you process your credit card payments online through QuickFill then refunds (or partial refunds) of those payments are also processed online, as soon as you request them. Credit card refunds that were processed outside of QuickFill, say with a terminal supplied by your bank, are not processed immediately but are instead listed on a report produced by the 'Refunds' update. Using the information on that report you can then issue the refunds using your credit card terminal. Refunds of payments made by check or wire transfer are also listed on the 'Refunds' update report so that you can issue checks for them. We recommend that you run the refund update on a regular basis regardless of how you process your credit card payments..
Refunds that have not yet been processed can be undone using the 'Undo Refund' transaction, at least until you run the 'Refunds' update. After that time the refund is marked as completed and cannot be reversed. But you can enter a payment transaction in the same amount to make the account balance come out the way you want.
Like payments, refunds apply to individual orders, not to an entire subscription. So if a customer has a subscription with a credit balance on more than one order, you'll need to enter separate refund transactions for each order.
To issue a refund manually, you must first use 'Lookup' to locate the order for which you would like to process a refund. Once you are on the "Lookup (Orders)" screen select 'Refund' under 'Transactions' on the main menu.
A box, with the following field will appear.
Refund amount
Enter the amount you want to refund in this field.
After you've entered the amount, click "OK," and QuickFill will update the subscription history. The next time you run the refund update, you'll see this refund included in the report.
Since the 'Refund' transaction is not a batched transaction, it is recorded in the miscellaneous batch. Click here for details on the miscellaneous batch.
Error messages
There is no credit balance.
You are trying to issue a refund for an order that does not have a credit balance. Although you can do this, it's not common. You don't need to use 'Refund' for a subscription you're about to cancel. The 'Cancel' transaction lets you specify whether you want to issue a full refund or a refund of the unearned balance. (Click here for details on the cancel transaction.)
Refund is not equal to the credit balance.
The amount of the refund you specified doesn't equal the amount of the credit balance. QuickFill warns you because it assumes you want to issue a refund only in an amount equal to the credit balance.
There is at least one future paid order.
This warning appears when you issue a refund for an order with a paid future order. Because, as a rule, you issue manual refunds only in response to customer complaints, QuickFill assumes that any future paid orders might be candidates for refunds as well. In any case, this message just lets you know that a future order(s) exists.
You can't refund more than they paid (less prior refunds)
You can't issue a refund for more than the total amount the customer paid for the order. If you're trying to issue a refund for a subscription that has more than one order with a credit balance, use a separate refund transaction for each order.