Issuing Refunds – LoveAdmin

In some circumstances, you may wish to refund a contact. For the refund to show correctly in your Financial reports and to complete correctly, you will need to make sure that you initiate the refund from within your LoveAdmin account. This is particularly important when refunding a PayPal payment to ensure that the refund credits the contact's account and that no additional fees apply to the refund - to find out how to do this, follow the steps below:

Issue a Refund

Step 1: On this page you will see a search. Search for the contact you wish to refund by entering their First name or their Last name in these fields and click ‘Go’.

Step 2: A list of previous transactions will appear. Identify the transaction you wish to refund and click ‘Refund’ on the line of the transaction. You will then be asked to enter the amount you wish to refund and click ‘Confirm’. You cannot partially refund an online transaction, you will only be able to refund the full transaction value.

Important notice - when refunding an online payment, the system will refund all payments relating to the transaction. So, for example, if Mum, Dad, Jonny and Janey paid for their separate memberships in one transaction, refunding Dad's payment will purge refunds for Mum and the kids too.

Step 3: Once you have refunded a payment, the system will ask if you want to delete the payment request. Please select the appropriate answer.

If you do not delete the request and the contact is pre-authorised, the system will not re-attempt to take payment. The payment request would need to be deleted and issued again if you wish to take payment.

Alternatively, for the contact to see the outstanding amount in their account, their pre-authorisation would have to be cancelled.

Once you follow these instructions you will have successfully refunded a transaction on the system.

Important notes:

Before making a refund for a payment made using PayPal, you first need to permission LoveAdmin.com to make refunds from your organisation's PayPal account. The instructions on how to do this are attached to this help article.

Always ensure that PayPal refunds are issued from within the LoveAdmin system, and not directly from your business PayPal account; this will result in the payments being refunded back to LoveAdmin, and not to the members.

Refunding online payments taken via PayPal will return the full amount paid back to the payee and all transaction fees will be refunded too.

Payments made by GoCardless will refund the gross amount to the payee, however, it will not refund the transaction fees to the organisation.

PayPal does not support refunds older than 180 days.

Refunds via PayPal process within 3-5 working days.

Refunds via GoCardless, if processed before 11 am will reach the recipient the same day. If after 11 am, they will reach the recipient the following working day.

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Why Can't I Issue a Refund?

There are a few common reasons why you may not be able to issue a refund:

The payment was made by Direct Debit and the payment is still being processed by GoCardless and has not yet credited your account.
The payment was made by Credit/Debit Card and permission to give refunds in your PayPal account have not yet been set up.
The payment you wish to refund is part of a consolidated payment and the system will only allow you to refund the whole consolidated amount.

This guide will show you the steps you will need to take to identify the cause in each instance.

The GoCardless payment is pending:

When you go to ‘Financials’ > ‘Issue Refund’ and search for the name of the person you wish to refund and the transaction you wish to refund does not show, this means that the payment is still pending.

Only payments that have been paid out to your account will be displayed in the list of transactions you are able to refund. You will need to wait for the payment status to update to ‘Paid’ to be able to refund it. Depending on when the transaction was initiated, you have up to 4:00pm the next working day to cancel a payment from within your GoCardless account.

You can check the status of the payment and the date the amount is due to be paid out to you in your GoCardless account. To check when the payment will complete and if you are still able to cancel the payment click here for our article on cancelling payments.

I can’t refund a PayPal payment:

When you go to ‘Financials’ > ‘Issue Refund’ and search for the name of the contact you wish to refund, and you click on ‘refund’ and you get an error message this means that you have not set up your PayPal account to allow refunds through the system.

Step 1: Login to PayPal account.

Step 2: Once logged in, click this link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/customerprofileweb?cmd=_profile-api-access

Step 3: Click ‘Add / Edit API Permissions’ (in some accounts it may say ‘Grant API access’).

Step 4: Enter ‘dave_api1.thesportsbusiness.com’ in the box and click ‘Lookup’.

Step 5: Select the refund tick boxes in the list provided and click on Add.

Please note - PayPal does not support refunds older than 60 days.

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Why Can't I Issue a Part Refund?

It is not possible to issue a partial refund on any payment that has been made online. You will only be able to refund the full transaction.

Issuing a partial refund is only possible for payments that have been marked as having been made 'offline'.

Important notice - when refunding an online payment, the system will refund all payments relating to the transaction. So, for example, if Mum, Dad, Max and Megan paid for their separate memberships in one transaction, refunding Dad's payment will refund Mum’s and the kids too as one consolidated amount.

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