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Use Case: Refund a Collected Fee

You can refund a fee mistakenly charged to a Merchant or when client satisfaction hinges upon the reimbursement of a fee or set of fees. When this happens, it’s critical to understand how to issue a fee refund quickly and correctly to provide the best client experience to your Merchants. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to refund a fee to a Merchant that was previously collected.

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Partial view of the Transaction Details page where individual fee line items can be refunded.

Objective

Refund a Fee to a Merchant that has already been processed and collected.

Audience

  • Facilitators

  • Referrers

Environment

  • Portal (Sandbox)

  • Portal (Production)

Prerequisites

Prerequisites:

  • You must have a fully boarded Payrix account to perform any of the actions described in the use case guides.

  • Make sure you’re familiar with the following terms and information:

    • Fee Types - The different categories of fees that can be created and charged.

    • Fee Structure - Overview of the basic layout for a Fee configuration.

      • Fee Schedules - Available time or event-based triggers used to initiate a Fee charge.

      • Fee Rules - Options to further refine the criteria of the Fee Schedule.

      • Fee Modifiers - Options to redirect the Fee collection flow and who will pay the Fee.

      • Fee Collection Process - Overview of how Fee payments are collected and where they can be found.

Warnings

Warnings will provide insight or advice to avoid issues related to risk, visibility, and overall performance of the product during this use case.

Warning: This process is only applicable to Merchants on Net Billing. Merchants under Statement Billing cannot use this process.

Warning: This process only applies to fees (fee entries) that have been fully processed and settled. Pending fee charges must be fully processed before a refund can be issued.

Warning: Fees charges that are Refunded from a Referrer to a Merchant are immediately debited from the Referrer’s Available Balance and credited to the Merchant’s Available Balance.

Warning: Ensure your account has sufficient funds to issue the refund. Fee Refunds can trigger a negative balance which can cause additional platform fees and negative disbursements (or “debits”) to be assessed to your business account to cover the negative balance (depending on your Facilitator’s grace period).

Tips

Tips will provide suggestions to streamline or better prepare you to apply this use case tutorial.

Tip: When refunding the Fee, always locate the “opposing entry”, the negative amount debited from the Merchant, to ensure the fee amount you’re refunding is correct and the initial charge is aligned with the reason for the refund.

Additional Resources

  • For more information about fees and your account, see the Fee Management page.

Refunding a Fee

Issue a Fee Refund from the Transaction Details page

Click here to issue a refund for a fee in the Transaction Details page.

Step 1: Navigate to the Payment History page (under the Payments category).

Step 2: Locate the transaction you’d like to refund fees for and click on the listing to access the Transaction Details page for the transaction.

Step 3: Click the Fees tab to reveal all related Transaction Fees for the associated transaction.

Step 4: Click the Refund button located next to the specific Fee entry you’d like to refund to the Merchant.

Issue a Fee Refund from the Balance Details page

Click here to issue a refund for a fee in the Balance Details page.

Step 1: Navigate to the Merchants page (under the Management category).

Step 2: Find the Merchant you want to refund and click on the listing to access their Merchant Profile page.

Step 3: In the Merchant Profile page, click the Merchant’s Available Balance tile to access their Balance Details page.

Step 4: From the Balance Details page, locate the processed Fee charge by referencing the Date and Event listed for each entry in the Entries section.

Step 5: From the Entries section, click the opposing entry’s listing to reveal its Entry Details page once you’ve verified you’ve found the correct Fee charge.

Issue a Fee Refund from the Merchant Profile page

Click here to issue a refund for a fee in the Merchant Profile page.

Step 1: Navigate to the Merchants page (under the Management category).

Step 2: Find the Merchant you want to refund and click on the listing to access their Merchant Profile page.

Step 3: In the Merchant Profile page, scroll down to the Profile menu and click the Fees tab to access the Merchant’s Fees page.

Step 4: In the Fees tab, locate the fee you’d like to refund under Active Fees and click on it to access the Fees Details page.

Note: If the Fee was charged using a no longer active fee, you can click on Inactive Fees and follow the remaining steps to achieve the same result.

Step 5: In the Fees Details page, scroll down to the Entries section and click the opposing entry’s listing to reveal its Entry Details page once you’ve verified you’ve found the correct Fee charge.

Note: If necessary, you can re-verify that the entry is correct before refunding by cross-referencing the entry on the Merchant’s Balance Details page or looking at each Entry listing “Event” field to find the matching fee event (fee schedule) description.

Step 6: From the Entry Details page, click the Refund button at the bottom of the page to open the Refund lightbox.

Step 7: Within the lightbox use the pre-filled Refund Amount field value to issue a full refund or enter a lower amount to issue a partial refund. Then, click the Refund button to complete the fee refund.

Result: The refunded fee charge is immediately debited to the Merchant’s available balance from your available balance. The Entry Details page for the fee charge will display as “Refunded” with a status badge next to the Entity Details page title to confirm the refund was issued.

Conclusion

Once you’ve completed your Merchant’s fee refund, you can verify the completion of the refund processing by accessing your Balance Details page and reviewing your Entries section. Verify processing completion on the Balance Details page using the following criteria to validate:

Confirming your fee was sucessfully refunded.

  • The From Entity Name & From Entity ID field values will display as the Merchant name and Merchant Entity ID that was originally assessed the Fee.

  • The Description field will auto-display “Refund for entry t1_etr_{yourRefundEntryId}”

  • The Event field will auto-display “Entry Refund”.

  • The Amount field will be a negative amount matching the amount you refunded.

  • The Event ID will match the original fee charge Entry ID, (e.g. “t1_etr_{originalFeeChargeEntryId}”)

References

Click the links or items below to access any of the following pages:

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