When an item has been paid by a participant, it becomes locked in the form. That prevents the participant to unselect the item and protects the inventory for the organizer, helping them plan the event.
It is sometimes necessary to cancel a paid item. For instance, if the participant wants to cancel this option or switch to another item.
In this case, the organizer has the ability to cancel the item, provide a refund, which will allow another item to be selected.
How to cancel an item
You can cancel one item of a registration, such as a workshop, an add-on or a ticket option, and keep the rest of the registration.
Go to Registration > Registrations, then click the participant.
Click Cancel item next to the field of the item.
If the field has more than one paid item, select the item to cancel, then click Next.
In the table, check what the participant paid for the item.
If the window asks Would you like to issue a refund?, select Yes or No. See the next section.
Click Next, then click Confirm.
The item is cancelled and removed from your data. The other items of the registration don't change. A conditional field that depends on the cancelled item can become hidden. It is now possible to select another option for this field in the registration form.
Note: you can also cancel an item whose payment was forwarded to the participant and not completed yet. No refund is involved: the item is removed from the forwarded transaction, and the transaction is deleted if it held only that item.
Refund the cancelled item
When the item was paid by credit card or PayPal, the Cancel item window asks Would you like to issue a refund?
Select No to cancel the item without a refund.
Select Yes to refund all or part of the item, then enter the Amount.
The amount must be more than 0. It can't be more than the item total, or more than the amount paid minus earlier refunds on the transaction. If the amount isn't valid, an error shows and Next doesn't go to the next step. To refund the whole item, enter the amount of the Total column.
Fourwaves calculates the taxes of the refund for you. It splits the amount between the subtotal and each tax, in proportion to the item price. The This refund row of the table shows the result.
For example, a participant paid $152.25 for an item, and you refund $145.00:
Description | Subtotal | GST | Total |
Registration type: Student/postdoctoral fellow | $145.00 | $7.25 | $152.25 |
This refund | -$138.10 | -$6.90 | -$145.00 |
The refund goes back to the card or PayPal account that the participant paid with, as explained in Full vs. partial refund.
You can't undo a refund, as explained in Can I undo a refund?
For an invoice, a cheque or a bank transfer, the window doesn't offer a refund. To refund these payments outside Fourwaves, see Refunds on invoice or offline payments.
Note: when Fourwaves collects the payments for your event, the window doesn't offer a refund after the event's end date. See Full vs. partial refund.
Switch a participant to another item
For example, you can move a participant from a cheaper virtual option to the in-person option.
Cancel the paid item, as described above.
Click Edit registration and select the new item.
Click Continue to payment.
Select a payment method, then save.
Fourwaves charges the full price of the new item. It does not subtract what the participant paid for the cancelled item. Choose the payment method that fits how you want to cover the difference:
Skip payment: no charge is made. You collect nothing in Fourwaves, so you cover the whole new item. Only organizers see this option.
Forward payment: the participant receives a notification to pay the new item.
A card or Invoice payment method: the participant pays the new item in full.
To give back what the participant paid for the cancelled item, enter a refund amount when you cancel it. This works only for payments by credit card or PayPal.
Remove an item from an unpaid invoice
An item on an invoice that is not paid yet stays locked in the form. To unlock it, delete the transaction.
Go to Payment > Transactions.
Select the transaction of the participant.
Click Delete, then confirm.
You can delete only transactions with the payment method Invoicing or Transaction pending (a forwarded payment). You can't delete a transaction paid by credit card. To give money back for a card payment, refund it instead.
You also can't delete a transaction created with Skip payment. To remove one of its items, cancel the item instead.
If you delete a forwarded payment, the items it held are also removed from the registration. If you delete an invoice, the items stay selected in the registration but are no longer locked.