How do I process a refund through Caterpay?

You can perform a refund from Caterbook for an existing Accepted Caterpay payment (transactions change state from Captured to Accepted by the acquirer overnight, therefore in most cases, a refund can only be actioned the following day, directly from within Caterbook).  

To perform a refund, go to the Finance tab from within the booking.

Don't try and refund a Caterpay transaction with a "Miscellaneous Refund" transaction type. It won't refund the guest. This transaction type should only be used as a record of a refund that was made outside of Caterbook, often using a transaction type that was different from the original payment - a cheque payment being refunded from Cash for example.

In the screenshot below you'll see two red arrows forming a circle at the end of transaction where tokenised card from an OTA was charged. Clicking this icon will enable you to process a refund for any amount up to the original value, within 180 days of the charging date.

If you wanted to refund the initial payment on the same day, and it has not yet been Accepted by the acquirer and you need to issue a refund, you have a number of options, which you can access from your Caterpay MMS account.  Go to the Transactions screen from within the account and locate the Captured transaction.  Click the Choose option to the left-hand side of the entry.

• You can Cancel the sale entirely - unlike refunding which pays back money received, this prevents the original transaction from ever being settled.
• You can Capture the sale - Which means you can change the transaction value to a lower amount - effectively giving a partial refund.
• You can perform a Credit - this allows you to make a separate credit to the cardholder, which will be processed even if the original payment fails.

Note that any changes made in MMS do not unfortunately update Caterbook. This is actually one scenario where it might be appropriate to record a balancing "Miscellaneous Refund", as the refund was made outside of Caterbook. You can record a note about the refund, indicating it was processed in MMS.