Refunding an event ticket
How a member asks for a refund, what your refund window does, and what happens to the money when you approve one.
This article is for the administrators who run an organisation's Portava portal.
In short
- Members request a refund from their ticket. Requests wait under Approvals, then Refunds.
- The money comes back out of your Stripe balance. Portava’s commission is returned; Stripe’s processing fee is not.
- There is no refund workflow for memberships.
Refunds on event tickets run through the Approval Centre, so a request is never lost in an inbox and the decision is recorded.
How a member asks
A member opens the ticket under My tickets in the member portal. A Need a refund? card shows your policy wording and a Request a refund button. They must give a reason, and they are told the amount, that it goes back to the card they paid with, and that an approved refund takes 5 to 10 business days to arrive. Only a paid ticket can be requested, and only once.
Your refund policy
Under Portal settings, then Membership, the Approval policy card has a Refunds section:
- Full refund window: a number of days before the event. Requests made earlier than that are inside policy. Leave it blank and every request is judged on its own.
- Policy wording: shown to the member before they ask. Leave it blank to use Portava’s default wording.
A request made later than the window still reaches you, flagged Outside policy. The member is told before sending that it will be looked at individually.
Deciding
Open Approvals, then Refunds. Refunds belong to the billing access area and can only be decided by administrators, never by content managers. For each request you can:
- Approve refund. The dialog lets you refund the full amount or part of it, up to what was paid, and asks you to confirm because it cannot be undone.
- Request information. The member answers from their ticket and the request returns to the queue.
- Deny refund, with a reason the member sees.
The member is notified either way, and the status on their ticket moves from Approved to Processed once the money has actually left.
Where the money comes from
Tickets are charged to your organisation’s own Stripe account, so a refund comes out of your Stripe balance. Portava’s commission on the ticket is returned to you in proportion. Stripe’s processing fee on the original payment is not, so you recover slightly less than the refund itself.
If a ticket was paid by bank transfer, cash or another method, or your portal has no Stripe account connected, approving records the decision and tells the member. No money moves: return the payment the way it was taken.
Memberships
There is no refund request workflow for memberships. If you need to return a membership payment, do it from your Stripe account or by the method it was paid.