When a donation needs to be returned,, a duplicate, a mistake, or a donor request,, you refund the payment. Refunds are an administrator/staff action, and the money goes back to the card or bank account the donor originally used.
1. Open the payment in Payments.
2. Choose Refund.
3. Refund the full amount, or enter a smaller amount for a partial refund.
4. Optionally choose a reason,, duplicate, fraudulent, or customer request,, and add a note.
5. Confirm. CoolPay sends the refund to the donor's original payment method and records it on the payment.
• Full or partial, -you can refund the whole payment or just part of it. You can't refund more than the payment's remaining refundable balance.
• Only settled payments can be refunded. A payment has to have actually gone through (succeeded/settled). A payment that failed was never charged, so there's nothing to refund,, see Fixing Failed & Missed Payments.
• There is no "void." A refund is the way to reverse a payment in CoolPay.
• Refunds run through the payment, not the contribution. You don't edit the contribution's dollar amount by hand; refunding the payment is what reverses the money.
• Refund fields on a CoolPay contribution are read-only. On a contribution's record, the Refund Information fields (Refunded, Refund Amount, Refund Date, Refund Reason, Refund Note) are automatically filled in and locked once that contribution is tied to a CoolPay payment. This keeps the contribution in sync with what actually happened on the payment, instead of letting someone edit the refund details by hand and have them drift out of sync. To change a refund, refund the payment itself as described above.
• Manually entered contributions are different. For contributions that were not processed through CoolPay (for example, cash or check gifts entered directly on the contribution), the Refund Information fields stay editable so you can record a refund by hand.
• ACH takes longer. Bank (ACH) refunds settle over a few days, like the original charge.
• The contribution's timeline shows the refund. A refund adds a "Refund Recorded" activity to the related contribution, with the amount, date, and reason (if one was given). This appears whether the refund came back from the processor or was recorded manually on the contribution.
• Refunded contributions stay out of GL batches. Once a contribution is marked refunded, it's excluded from GL batch creation and from being added to an existing batch, so refunded gifts don't get swept into your QuickBooks export. See GL Batches.
A contribution's timeline can also show its underlying payment processing history, such as when the payment was processed, failed, or refunded, pulled directly from the payment processor. This gives you a fuller picture of what happened with the money behind a single gift without having to open the payment record separately.
• Payments and Payouts
• Fixing Failed & Missed Payments
• CoolPay Overview
• GL Batches
