Refunds and cancellations

When an order should not go ahead, or a customer should get money back, you cancel or refund it. Both are done from the order, and both keep a clear record of what happened. This page explains the difference and walks through doing it.

Cancel or refund?

They are the same action, and the order tells you which applies:

• If nothing has been paid yet, cancelling simply reverses the order. There is no money to return, so it becomes Voided.
• If money has been paid, you are refunding: the order returns some or all of it and becomes Refunded.

You can act on a whole order, or on a single line item to reverse just one part (for example refunding one ticket out of several). Cancelling items one at a time is how you do a partial refund.

What happens when you cancel or refund

Orders → (an order)

Cancelling or refunding opens a dialog where you choose the refund terms before confirming.

Start from Cancel or Refund on the order (or Cancel on a single line item). Before confirming, you choose:

• Whether to refund to the card. For a card payment taken through the platform, turn this on to send the money back automatically. For payments made another way, see Non-card refunds below.
• A fee to keep back, if any. You can retain a fixed amount or a percentage, for example to hold back a booking fee. The retained amount is added to the order as a separate line so it stays on the record.
• Whether to release the stock. Turn this on to return the reserved tickets or add-ons to availability so others can buy them. Leave it off to keep them held.

Confirming records the outcome and produces a credit note.

Caution

If you plan to keep back a fee when refunding or cancelling, make sure that policy is clearly set out to customers before they buy. We recommend publishing your refund and cancellation terms on your site, for example a terms and conditions page, before you sell any tickets. See Custom pages in the Website docs.

Credit notes

Every cancellation or refund of a paid order produces a credit noteA record of value taken off an order after it was placed, for example when an item is cancelled or refunded. It shows how much came off what the customer owed, and how much (if any) was returned to them. A credit note is created automatically whenever you cancel or refund part or all of a paid order.: the record of what came off the order. It shows how much was taken off what the customer owed, and how much was actually returned to them. Credit notes are listed on the order’s Credits and refunds tab and never removed, so the order always shows its full history.

Non-card refunds

The platform can only send money back automatically for card payments taken through it. For a payment made another way, a bank transfer or cash, EventDrake records the credit note but cannot move the money.

Caution

For a non-card refund, return the money to the customer yourself (for example by your own bank transfer), then cancel or refund the order in EventDrake to record it. The credit note is the record that the refund is owed or has been made; the actual payment happens outside the platform.

Cancelling a whole order

Cancelling an order that has not been paid releases any held card authorisation, so the customer is never charged, and (if you choose) returns its stock to availability. Because no money changed hands, there is nothing to refund. This is the clean way to reject an order that should not proceed. Rejecting through an order confirm rule does the same thing automatically.

When an order or item cannot be cancelled

Sometimes a line item, and so a whole order, cannot be cancelled or refunded yet. A whole order can only be cancelled if every one of its line items can be; if a single line is blocked, the order is blocked too.

The most common reason is a ticket with other things booked against it:

• A ticket cannot be cancelled while add-ons or merch for pickup are booked against it.
• If those add-ons or merch are on the same order as the ticket, the system handles it for you and lets you cancel the order as a whole.
• If they are on a different order, for example an add-on the person bought later in its own order, you deal with those first. Open the ticket’s details, cancel the other items booked against it, then come back and cancel the ticket or its order.

This stops you removing a ticket that another booking still relies on.