The Irish Chess Union

Carts, Items, Refunds and the Sales Ledger

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This help page is for ICU officers, such as the treasurer, who deal with payments and refunds. It explains how to search for information on previous purchases and how to make refunds. Most of these website features require the user to be logged in as Treasurer or Administrator).

Payment Status

Users make online purchases by filling a Cart with one or more Items before paying with their credit card. Offline purchases are similar except that an ICU officer fills in a cart on behalf of a user (see Process Offline Payments). If the payment is successful, the cart and all its items change status from Unpaid to Paid and at that point all items become Active. For example, if one of the items is a subscription then the person subscribed becomes a paid-up member of the ICU.

Carts and items can also have a 3rd status of Refunded and carts can have a 4th status of Part refunded (individual items can only be wholly refunded).

Paid and Part refunded are Active statuses while Unpaid and Refunded are Inactive.

Refunds

A suitably privileged user (typically the treasurer or webmaster) can refund (or revoke - see the next section) one or more items in an active cart as follows:

• Search carts or items to locate and then view the relevant cart (see below).
• Click the Refund... button which will bring up a list of items with checkboxes.
• Check all the items to be refunded and click Refund.

If the original payment was made online then the refund to the payer's credit card will be initiated automatically, without any further action required. Depending on details of the payer's bank, the process may take some days to complete and the refund will not necessarily show up in the payer's statement, instead the original payment may simply drop off.

If the payment was made offline then the refund is also offline, in other words arrangements must be made to manually refund the payer (see the section below on revokes).

The refunded items change status from Paid to Refunded and therefore become Inactive. For example, if one of the items is a subscription then the person subscribed immediately ceases to be a paid-up member.

The cart to which the refunded items belong also changes status to either Refunded to Part refunded depending on whether there are any remaining items with status Paid.

Revokes

A refund (see previous section) involves two changes:

1. an update of records in the ICU database to indicate that one or more items in a cart have been refunded,
2. an automatic reimbursement to the payer's credit card (via the ICU's payment processor, currently Stripe).

However, the second change, the automatic reimbursement, is not always possible. When the reimbursement has to be done manually (by the ICU sending a cheque, for example) then the operation is termed a revoke (rather than a refund).

The different scenarios when a refund and/or a revoke is possible are as follows:

• Old payments made before 24th July 2014 that predate the current version of the ICU website can neither be revoked nor refunded.
• After 24th July 2014:
  • Cash/cheque payments can only be revoked.
  • Credit/debit card payments can be refunded if they were processed by the current Stripe account.
  • Credit/debit card payments processed by an old Stripe account can only be revoked.

See Stripe in the Overview of the ICU Websites for why the ICU's Stripe account may sometimes change.

To perform a revoke the administrative user follows the same set of steps as above for a refund except that the button to click will be labelled Revoke rather than Refund. The changes to the ICU database are the same for a refund and revoke, the only difference is that with a revoke the payer doesn't receive an automatic refund. It's the responsibility of the user who revoked the cart item(s) — usually the treasurer — to ensure that the repayment is completed manually.

To summarize:

• DO NOT send a manual repayment for a refund as otherwise the payer will be reimbursed twice.
• DO send a manual repayment for a revoke as otherwise the payer will not be reimbursed at all.

In the searchable list of previous refunds, the type (Refund/Revoke) of each item is indicated.

Transfer a Payment to Another ICU ID

This is relevant when people pay for the right thing but for the wrong person. An example is when an already existing member erroneously joins as a new member thus creating a duplicate. It would be nice if, once such an error is discovered, the payment could be transferred from one ICU ID (in the example, the duplicate ID) to the correct one (in the example, the pre-existing member's ID). Sadly, in the current implementation, that is not possible.

The way to handle this type of scenario is to refund the relevant part of the payment (in the example, the subscription) and to instruct the payer to try again but this time make the correct payment (in the example, resubscribe the existing member).

In the example scenario, where a duplicate has been created, one more thing needs to be done and that is to mark the duplicate record as such. This involves setting its Master ID to the ID of the original record and has to be done by the webmaster (the treasurer isn't authorized to make such changes).

Search Carts

1. Login, click the Admin drop-down button on the right of the top navigation bar and then click Carts. If you don't see either of these options, then your account is not authorized to access them.
2. Enter enough information in the search boxes and menus to locate the cart:
   • Status: Note that Active means Paid or Part refunded while Inactive means Unpaid or Refunded.
   • Name: Some part of all of the payer's name.
   • Email: Some part of all of the payer's email address.
   • Date: When the payment was made.
   • Cart ID: Payer's are sent their cart ID the confirmation email.
3. Click Search.
4. For more information about any cart in the search results, click its ID (in the leftmost column).

Carts records are available from 24th July 2014. For information on subscriptions before that date search items (see below) or use Subscribed Members.

Search Items

1. Login, click the Admin drop-down button on the right of the top navigation bar and then click Items. If you don't see either of these options, then your account is not authorized to access them.
2. Enter enough information in the search boxes and menus to locate the item:
   • Type: Subscription, Entry or Other.
   • Status: Note that Active means Paid while Inactive means Unpaid or Refunded. Individual items cannot be Part refunded.
   • Payment Method: How the original payment was made.
   • ICU ID, Last Name or First Name of the member for whom the item was paid.
3. Click Search.
4. For more information about any item in the search results, click its cart ID (in the rightmost column).

Additional notes:

• The only item records retained from the previous web site are subscriptions and they do not belong to carts.
• Information about subscribers can also be obtained from Subscribed Members.

Sales Ledger

The Sales Ledger (sign in to activate link) is accessible by any signed-in member, not just the treasurer, and presents a summary of all active items, online and offline combined, broken down into seasons (the last 10, but not going back further than 2006-07) and types: subscriptions, entries (e.g. NCC) and other (e.g. foreign rating fees).

There is also a table showing the number of subscriptions for each season and each subscription type. Figures for both online (PayPal or Stripe via the website) and offline (cash or cheque via the treasurer or membership officer) payments are given. For example "895/52" means there were 895 online subscriptions and 52 offline.