How to refund a ticket

Blanca Castillo
Blanca Castillo
  • Updated

What does it mean?

So you need to do a ticket refund because a customer wasn't able to take a tour? That's fair enough, but how do you register this refund in Palisis? 

Here we explain how and where you can register your refunds in our system. 

You need to be aware that there is a difference between a voucher refund and a ticket refund. This article here only talks about ticket refunds (meaning only transactions done by your operation). 

 

What should I do?

There are a few different ways to refund a ticket, which makes sense since there are also a few different transaction types that you can do. Here we list the different transaction types and we describe how to do a refund.

Transaction Types (Sales channel that allows this kind of payment)

Cash (Box Office and Device): You can register the refund in Palisis and need to give him the money either directly or you pay it into his bank account, which you would have to do outside of Palisis. This refund you can do with either the device or in the back office.

 

Credit Card (Device, Box Office and Webshop): As long as the transfer was made through one of our payment providers you can always carry out the whole refund transaction within the Palisis System. The process will be explained further down.

 

Pay Pal (Webshop): Pay Pal is a tricky one. At the moment we don't have an API that is able to process the refund within Palisis. So you need to make a refund within Palisis for the correct bookkeeping and then do the refund within Pay Pal so that the customer receives his money back. You can always access the Pay Pal reference if you search for the booking or a single ticket within that booking.

In this picture, the reference is highlighted.

This obviously is an important question since it determines where and how you can refund. So the next question is where can you process a refund in our system. You can refund from the device, the back office, or even the box office.

A quick side note in regards to the used terminology. There are 2 terms in Palisis that are used differently. Cancel vs. Refund. Now the question is what is the difference between these two terms? 

Cancel: Well a cancel is basically the annulment of a transaction. A cancel will "remove" or basically cross out a booking entry. It's used to adjust cash settlements. Also, a cancellation can only be done if the cash settlement has not been accepted.

Quick example: So your sales staff tells you that he by accident issued a ticket wrong, and he brings you the ticket back as proof, in that case, the cash settlement is wrong because instead of the 20 Euros in cash he brings you a ticket with the same value. So you need to adjust it and remove 20 Euros from the cash settlement. You can do this by canceling the concerning ticket.

The cancelation is registered in the system with the date it takes place rather than the date of the sale.

In the following two pictures, you can see what happens to a cash settlement with a canceled ticket.

Picture 1: we have in the cash settlement a single booking of 40.00 EUR paid with a credit card.

Picture 2: we cancel the booking.

Picture 3: we have 0 EUR in our cash settlement.

Refund from the booking screen: 

If you issue a ticket, afterward refund it without changing the sales user and the original cash settlement is still open, then the refund will appear in this same cash settlement and the amount will be deducted from the total. If the original cash settlement is already closed, then the system will create a new cash settlement with the refund transaction. 

Picture 1: we have in the cash settlement a single booking of 40.00 EUR paid with a credit card.

 

Picture 2: we refund the ticket from the booking screen. We need to select the payment and the tickets to be refunded. Additionally, it is mandatory to provide a comment before proceeding.

Picture 3: the refund is performed by the sales user in a new cash settlement because the original one was already closed.

However, if you select a different user at the moment of doing the refund then:

  • If the selected sales user already has an open back office cash settlement for the same combination of device or back office, then the refund will be placed there.
  • If the selected user doesn’t have any open back office cash settlement at that moment for me combination of device or backoffice, then the system will automatically open a new back office cash settlement and the refund will be placed there. This new cash settlement will remain in the status “open”.

Please note that it's not possible to process a refund from the cash settlement screen; you'll need to navigate to the booking screen for that action.

 

Refund with the device:

How to do the refund with the device? All you need to do is to scan the QR code on the receipt. Then the device will ask you if you want to cancel the ticket (see picture). You then proceed by clicking "Cancel Ticket" on the device and depending on the transaction you either give the money in cashback to the customer or follow the steps on the device it will lead you through the necessary steps to refund the money back onto the card.

 

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You can partially refund a ticket/voucher by entering a price in the field labeled Manual AmountAny comment added to the refund will be visible in the Palisis back office (Operations>Tickets & Bookings): 8.png

 

Refund within the box office:

Before I show you where to refund, I think I should let you know if there are any limitations with the device. And I'm happy to tell you that as long as you have permission to refund you can refund any booking (unlike with the device). 

So how can you refund in the box office? 

You need to click on "Bookings" in the top bar. Then you will come to the page you see in picture 1. listed under "Recent" you will be able to see the last 250 bookings as long as you have a settlement open. If there is no open settlement this list will stay empty. You can also just search for a booking and will then be able to see bookings from other users and closed settlements as well.

 

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By clicking on the booking you will then be forwarded to the booking details, which you see here in the second picture. And if you scroll down to the bottom you will be able to choose if you want to refund or cancel the booking (ticket). The difference between these two processes was explained earlier. Now, what happens when you click on "refund"? I'll explain with the help of the next picture.

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What can you see in the following picture? Well on top you can see the booking information when the booking was made, how many tickets are included and in this case specifically how big of a refund was already made. So this is a special case where I already did a partial refund on one of the tickets in the booking. 

Underneath you can see the refund details, which you will have to fill in. So you have to decide how many tickets you want to refund or even the whole booking. If you want to disable the tickets, which we highly recommend, and the amount that you want to refund. You must add a comment on why this ticket was refunded and then you can click on "refund". 

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So this is how you refund tickets at our box office. The last part which is left to show you is the back office.

Refund within the back office:

So it is important to know that there are different places in the back office where you can refund but what happens and the process of how your refund is always the same. 

 

So before I show you the process I'll show you the different places where you can refund. So the first one is if you go to Operations > Tickets & Bookings enter the ticket or booking ID that you want to refund and then click on the refund button.

 

So what do you need to do at this point? You need to select the payment account, sales user, refund time, a comment (mandatory) and how many tickets you want to refund, by turning on the selectors. Then you need to decide if you want to disable them and the amount you want to refund. It is also possible to do only a partial refund. 

Please be aware that in a credit card refund, the funds are returned to the customer's credit card.

Now there is one addition that I need to make. Not all users can make refunds and there's a special permission that allows you to make a refund in somebody else's name. 

If you're allowed to make refunds in somebody else's name then you will be able to select a sales user and a refund time:

You can select the date and time to which this refund should be registered in our system. You can only choose a date and time that lay in the past. And you can select the sales user for which you want to do a refund. 

If you select a different sales user from the original one, then:

  • If the selected sales user already has an open back office cash settlement for the same combination of device or backoffice, then the refund will be placed there.
  • If the selected user doesn’t have any open backoffice cash settlement at that moment for the me combination of device or backoffice, then the system will automatically open a new backoffice cash settlement and the refund will be placed there. This new cash settlement will remain in the status “open”.