Processing Payment Group Registrations

Approving Registrations

In the confirmation area of your payment group settings you can choose whether registrations require administrator approval or not. This is particularly useful for conferences if for any reason you would prefer to reject an application, or if you would like to ensure that you have a minimum number of registrations before accepting payments.

Donation groups, and subscription groups do not normally require administrator approval so this checkbox is unset by default.

If your payment group has new applications awaiting approval it will be highlighted as shown below:

These registrations can be processed as follows:

Click on the payment group where you have applications outstanding.
Click on the tab (this will be labelled donations, or subscriptions if you require approvals for other types of payment group).
The first list in this area displays new applications awaiting approval, the second displays already approved registrations.
Click on the applicant name to display the registration details, the registration details will open in a new window shortly afterwards..
The Summary tab shows the list of delegates attending and the options they selected.
Click on the Approve this registration link, then click the Approve button to confirm your selection. The registration will be approved and any payment due on approval will be debited from the credit card. You can view the state of all transactions by clicking the Receivables tab. For more information on this area see the chapter below called Processing Payments.

Processing Payments

In most cases payment for a registration is taken as soon as the application is approved. For donations and subscriptions approval is often automatic (so the payment is immediate), for conferences payment is usually taken when the administrator has approved the application, although this may be the deposit with final payment set to be taken in the future.

There may be some occasions when payments require manual processing by an administrator. This may be because payment was by cheque/cash, a registration has been amended or because the payment has failed. You can process these payments as follows:

Offline Payments

The payment details area of your payment group settings allows you to indicate if you are prepared to accept offline payments (such as cash or cheque) for the payment group. An administrator can indicate when an offline payment has been received as follows:

Approve the registration in the normal way as described in the 'Approving Registrations' chapter above.
Display the Receivables tab for this payment group, or for an idividu
The offline payment will be displayed in the list as .
Note: you can quickly locate transactions that haven't been paid using the Change Filter button
Click the link. This will open the Receivable Details window, which contains tasks to Add a payment and Amend receivable amount.
Note:.the Payment group permissions to Add a payment and Change Receivables are required to see these options.
Select the Add a payment option; enter a payment method (cash or cheque) and any remarks e.g. cheque number.
Click Add to confirm your actions. The Payments tab will be updated shortly afterwards.

Failed payments

The Receivables (Pledges on donation groups) tab of your payment group provides a complete list of transactions which have taken place so far. If a payment hasn’t completed for any reason the status column will indicate this by stating . Payments by cash/cheque are also displayed like this (see above).
Very similar to processing check payments can process these transactions as follows:

Click the status to open the receiavble details in a new window. The reason a card transaction failed is also displayed here.
If the payment failed becasue the bank declined the payment choose to Take a payment. Select the amount and the payment method you wish to use for the transaction and any remarks you wish to make about the transaction.
Note: you should ensure that you have the permission of the card holder before processing transactions on another credit card.
The results of any re-issued transactions will be displayed in the payments tab shortly afterwards.

In rare cases the payment may have no been received because we didn't hear back from the payment procesor in the alocated time. In these cases a message will be displayed requesting you contact us. Email support the full transaction data for the relevant receivable and we'll be able to patch up the data to say if the receivable was taken successfully or not.

Editing a Registration

The of your payment group settings has an option labelled 'allow changes to registration after completion'. Selecting this option allows the user to amend any choices they have made via the My Registrations area, and subsequently this may result in an adjustment to the overall cost. Administrators can also modify a registration through the Web Office by selecting the Edit this Registration task from the registration details page.
Any changes to a registration will appear in the of your payment group as an application.
Click the name of the applicant in the list to display it in a new window..
The application will indicate that this is an amended registration requiring approval. Click Approve this registration to confirm the changes and add any remarks to record any additional details. The History of the registration will be displayed showing the previous registrations and the current one. Only the current registration will be 'Active'.

Assigning payments to the 'Active' Registration

If a payment has been received for a previous registration that has now been superseeded you will need to reassign the previous payment to the new 'Active' registration. This can be done as follows;

If you haven't already, select the History tab of the appropraite registration.
If a payment has been made on the previous registration then it'll be displayed in the Assigned amount column. To reassign this payment to the current registration select the icon to the left of the assigned amount and a reassign payment window will be displayed.
Within the reassign payment window select the receivable you wish to reassign the payment to and the amount that you wish to reassign. Normally you would reassign the full amount, an example where you may not would be if you wanted to retain £10/$10 as an administrative fee for editing the registration.
Once you have reassigned the receivable the the receivable on the current 'Active' registration will be 'fully' or 'partially paid' but the receivable on the previous registration will still be displaying an outstanding amount. To correct this you need to amend the receivable amount. To ammend the receivable amount first select the icon for the appropriate receivable from benath the Receivable column. The receivable details window should be displayed shortly afterwards.
Next we need to change the amount for our selected receivable. This can be done in the following ways:
Void this receivable - This should be selected if you wish to set the current receivable to 0. This would be applicable if you'd assigned the full payment to the current active registration and no money was owed on the previous registration.
Void the outstanding amount of this receivable - This option will set the receivable to the current amount assigned to it. In the example above where £10/$10 has been retained as an administrative fee you could use this option to void the outstanding balance therefore setting the amount awed on this receivable to 0.
Amend receivable amount - This option allows you to set the receivable (amount owed) to whatever value you require.
All the options will ask you to input a reason why the receivable amount is being amended e.g.registration superseeded.

Issuing a Refund

You may need to issue a refund when a user has cancelled a service part way through the period they paid for or if they've edited their registration to a lower cost. For example if a user has subscribed to a webstream service on a monthly basis and they cancel their subscription part way through the month then your policy may be to issue a refund for the period that was remaining.

You can issue a refund as follows:

First select the appropriate receivable. This can be done from the History tab by clicking the icon for the appropriate receivable under the receivable column. Alternatively the receivable details can be displayed by selecting the label for the appropriate receivable from the receivables list displayed under on the Receivables tab of the registration or payment group.
Next select the Give a Refund a task (located in the lower list of tasks) and add the appropriate amount and the reason why the refund was given.
Next you need to balance the books so we need to tell the system that the donor/registrant doesn’t owe so much money now – they either owe nothing (full refund) or less (partial refund). If you've given a full refund you should use the void this receivable to amend the receivable amount to 0. If a partial refund was given then you should use the void the outstanding amount task to set the receivable to the correct amount.

Suspending and Cancelling Registrations

While you are waiting for a successful payment you may wish to suspend a person’s registration.

Manually Suspending Registrations

A registration can be manually suspended as follows:

Under the Registrations tab, click on the name of the person whose registration you wish to suspend, this will open up the registration in a new window.
From the registration click the Suspend this registration task; click the suspend button to confirm your choice adding any remarks to describe why the registration was suspended.
Membership of this group will be suspended, and no further payments will be processed. You can reactivate this registration using the reactivate this registration task.

Automatic Suspension

To save time you may wish to suspend users automatically when certain conditions are met e.g. when a payment is so many days overdue. Automatic suspension can be setup on each payment scheme, payment schemes are accessed through the payment schemes tab of the payment group settings. The options are located at the bottom of the scheme’s details. The main Payment scheme auto-suspension options are as follows:

Auto-suspend registrations: On card failure

If checked any card payment failure will immediately suspend the registration. You could use this option sparingly as the card failure may not be the users fault. An example where it would be useful would be if the registration gave the user access to premium content that they could download, in this scnario the user could have downloaded all the content before payment has been made so there would be no motivation for the user to sort out any payment problems as they longer need the service.

Custom Suspension Rules

Custom suspension rules can be created to allow for flexible control over when registrations are suspended. You can add a rule as follows:

First select the ‘Add Custom Rule’ button.
The criteria can then be selected from the following options:
Amount owed in this scheme – Total amount owed on a receivable within this payment scheme. This applies to all payment methods e.g. card, cash, cheque/check.
Amount owed across site – Same as above but checks the total owed for the booker across all payment schemes on the current site.
Receivable overdue number of days – If a receivable isn’t fully paid within the set number of days the registration will be suspended.
Group Membership - Checks the delegates group memberships. This could be used for example to stop a ‘partner’ who registers from being suspended if their payment is overdue, so you can choose to contact them individually instead.
Once you’ve applied some criteria you can add some additional criteria in 2 different ways depending on what you wish to achieve:
AND criteria – By selecting the ‘And’ button within the current ‘Custom Rule’ you can add additional criteria. This criteria will then be combined so both must be met to produce a suspension
e.g. receivable 5 days over due AND if they aren’t a member of the 'partners' group
OR criteria - Selecting the ‘Add Custom’ rule button creates a new Custom Rule. Criteria can then be added to the Custom Rule as above. If any one of the custom rule’s criteria is met then the suspension will take place.

Prevent suspension override

The automatic suspension options outlined above can be overridden for particular subscribers. If you select an individual’s registration details then in the list of tasks you’ll see an option titled ‘Prevent auto-suspension for this subscriber’. This task can be used to override the auto-suspension rules setup, for the selected registration.

Cancelling Registrations

Registrations can be cancelled by a user (if the 'allow changes to registration after completion' option is set on the payment group), in the My Area section of the web site under My Account->My Registrations tab, or by an administrator, in the Web Office, by selecting the ‘Cancel this registration’ task on the registration Details Window.

When a registration is cancelled any current and future receivables can be dealt with manually or auto-cancellation rules can be configured to save time.

Auto-cancellation options

These options allow administrators to setup how they wish current and future payments to be dealt with when a registration is cancelled. The default behaviour is that when a registration is cancelled, either by the user or an administrator, any future payments are stopped automatically but the money is still due i.e future receivables remain. This current behaviour enables absolute flexibility but manual work for administrators. For example when a registration is cancelled the normal behaviour may be to 'void' all future receivables to specify that no money is owed. Voiding them manually would take time but this can be setup to be done manually.

Auto cancellation options can be configured on the following:

Future receivables with no assignments (Payments scheduled to be taken in the future that are still owed)
Future receivables with assignments (Payments scheduled to be taken in the future that have already been taken)
Current receivable (current receivable i.e. the last receivable whose due date has been passed)

Different cancellation options are applicable for each of the type of receivables described above. The options available will be one of the following:

No action – Automatic collection of future money owed will be stopped but future receivables will need to be collected or voided individually. This is the same as the current behaviour.
Void – Amends the invoice amount to 0 for receivables meaning no money will appear as being owed on these receivables.
Void outstanding amount - Voids only the remaining money owed.
Complete Void and Refund – Voids the complete amount owed but also refunds any money received.
Proportional Void and Refund – As above but refunds only the proportion of the payment from which the benefit has been received. i.e.receivable amount/time period (days) multiplied by the days after the receivable due date?
Write off – Assigns a receipt so no money is owed on these receivables because the amount due is not expected to be received.
Delete – Removes any record of any future receivables.

These cancellation rules are applied when a user or administrator cancels the registration. If the administrator is cancelling the registration, in the Web Office, they also now have an option to override the default cancellation behaviour that has been specified enabling maximum control.