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Advice for Event Managers on Cancellations & Postponements
24 March 2020
Cancellation and Postponement is big right now
With the COVID-10 announcements event managers are asking about their options and responsibilities. This discussion of cancellation and postponement covers both event cancellation and your garden variety ticket cancellation.
What if you cancel your event?
You are obliged to refund all bookers who have paid for the event you cancelled and credit all bookers who have not yet paid for the event you cancelled. With Events Pronto client book direct with you. You manage cancellations. You are not stuck with ticketing agency style double inside charges.
What if you postpone your event?
If you postpone your event you can offer people the opportunity to transfer their ticket to the new date or to receive a refund. Once again you have a lot more flexibility in your response options than the traditional agency. If people request a refund you must provide it.
What if a booker cancels their booking or individual tickets?
Whether a person who has cancelled a ticket or booking is entitled to a refund depends on the terms and conditions you specified when you set up the event. So, take care when you set up your Event Booking form. Events Pronto advise that you tick the boxes to specify that:
- There are no refunds
- There are no transfers
How do I issue a refund?
The Events Pronto platform provides you the ability to record credits or refunds. If you are Xero integrated it will pass these credits or refunds into Xero. It will not physically issue a refund. That is something you do through your credit card processing service or via internet banking.
How to refund via credit card processing
If the booker paid by credit card the simplest way to refund them is to log into your credit card processing account (e.g. Stripe, Payment, Windcave) and process the payment from there. Depending on your credit card processor there may be a charge for processing refunds. If so, you might want to weigh up the time savings of doing it this way against the costs of the payment processors fees.
Issue a refund via internet banking payment
People who paid by internet banking never actually shared their bank account details with you. If the event is cancelled, or you feel obliged to refund them for other reasons simply email offering the refund and asking for their bank account number so you can use your internet banking to record that the refund has been made. It is possible to use this method both for those who paid by internet banking and those
Recording the credit or refund in Events Pronto
Good record keeping is essential. As you issue refunds be sure to mark them in Events Pronto. Similarly, if you want to credit customers who haven’t paid (this effectively cancels out their invoice)
- Go to bookings. Search the event, booking or ticket that is being cancelled.
- If the event is cancelled or the whole booking is cancelled click the ‘Cancel” button beside each affected booking.
- Immediately you do this you will have the opportunity to record the credit or refund.
- If you are Xero integrated, your actions here will be transferred to Xero. Remember that recording the credit or refund in Events Pronto does not sent it to the customer or issue money back to them. Events Pronto clients can email support@eventspronto.co.nz for details of how to do this.
If you need to cancel a very large event or a large number of events and the task of processing credits and refunds is worrying for you please contact us. There may be automated options available in some circumstances.
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