Processing refunds doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you need to refund a membership, a donation, or a store purchase, your Membership Organization dashboard gives you the tools to handle it all — quickly and with full visibility. Before you can issue any refund, though, there’s one key thing to get in order: your Refund Reserve. Read on to learn how to fund your reserve and walk through the refund process step by step for each transaction type.
Refund Reserve
In order to issue a refund, you must first have enough funds in the Refund Reserve. You can find the refund reserve under Financial >> Chargeback/Refund Reserve in the Membership Organization Dashboard.
There are three ways to fund the reserve:
- Add Money Via Credit Card: Directly add funds to your refund reserve via credit card. With this option, you will incur a small processing fee on the credit card payment. This may be necessary if the refund is urgent and all funds have recently been released or if you will not be processing additional membership registrations in the near future. We also offer additional payment methods for directly adding funds, such as ACH Transfers and Check payments.
- Set Additional Refund Reserve Hold. This will set a required reserve to hold back a set amount of money from future transactions until that required reserve is reached.
- Move Money to Refund Reserve. If you are awaiting the payment of a balance owed (which you can view under Financial >> Financial Summary), then you can set aside some of that future payment into the refund reserve.
Once you have enough funds in the Refund Reserve to perform the refund, you can initiate the refund.
Refunding Memberships
To refund a membership, find the membership using one of the membership reports in the dashboard, and click Manage.
From the Membership Purchase Details, select Refund Membership.
Enter the amount you would like to refund. You can enter a custom refund amount or use the quick select buttons to pre-fill the Full Amount paid or Full Less Processing Fees in the Refund Amount field.
Membership Status/Notes
Next, you must select if you would like to mark the membership as refunded so that it is no longer active or if you would like to leave the membership as active. You can also enter internal refund notes.
You can view refunded members from your Membership Purchasers report (Reports >> Membership Purchases) by filtering the Membership Status under the More Search Fields to “Refunded”.
Learn more about refunding memberships in this help article.
Refunding Donations
To refund a donation, navigate to the donation report under Donations >> Donation List in the Membership Organization dashboard, find the donation, and click Refund.
Confirm the refund amount, add optional internal notes and click Issue Refund.
Note: We only allow for full refunds on donations, which includes any processing fees paid. Donations cannot be partially refunded.
Learn more about issuing refunds for donations in this help article.
Refunding Store Purchases
To refund a store item, find the purchase in the Store Orders report under Store >> Store Orders and click into the Order No.
On the Store Order page, scroll down to the itemized table at the bottom. Use the checkboxes on the left hand side of each item to select which items you will refund and click Issue Refund.
Enter the amount you would like to refund. You can enter a custom refund amount or use the quick select buttons to pre-fill the Refund Amount with processing fees paid. You can also enter internal Refund Notes.
Click Issue Refund.
Learn more about issuing refunds for store items in this help article.
Sales Tax Refunds
The sales tax refund is NOT included in the general refund amount field. If you want to specify how the refund maps to line items for sales tax purposes, fill in the amounts below. If left blank, we take the safe route and will refund the least amount of sales tax possible. For sales tax remitted by you, the amount of the sales tax refund will be charged to your refund reserve.
Refund Report
View a report of the refunds processed for your Membership Organization under Financial >> Financial Summary >> Refunds.
This report will provide a list of each refund processed, including the refund ID, recipient, description, date/time initiated, refund amount and any refund notes added when issuing the refund.
You can also view a summary of the total refunds processed. Note: The “Excused Fees” line in this summary will include any sales tax refunded by RunSignup. This amount was not removed from your refund reserve.
No Bulk Refunds
There is currently no way to process bulk refunds for Membership Organizations. Each membership must be refunded separately, even if multiple memberships occurred in the same transaction. In addition, memberships, donations, and store items must be refunded separately.