Bulk Refunds and Voids / Cancelling an Event

Hero has a smart feature that can process refunds, voids and write offs in bulk. This is particularly useful when an activity or event is cancelled and payments have already been made.

The bulk process works in the same way as that for an individual but can be applied to a large selection of students. Group filtering and individual student selection caters for variable conditions for different groups of students.

Voids can be partial, so can cater for the cancellation of a portion of an activity i.e. one swimming lesson out of the entire block. 

This article covers cancellations and voids. For information regarding your end of year Write Offs refer to the separate article - Writing off Line Items in Bulk

CANCELLING AN EVENT OR ACTIVITY

The cancelling of an event is a two step process beginning with the refunding of any payments followed by the Voiding of the line item balance.

Step 1: Refund the Payments

1. Navigate to the Administration menu. If you have a wide-screen device this will already be visible on the left-hand side of your screen. If not, click on the Administration menu icon at the top left-hand side of your screen.

2. Under the heading Administration click on Finance.

3. Click LEDGER ITEMS to display a table of the current ledger items for this year. 

4. Click VIEW LINE ITEMS on the line that contains the line items that you wish to process.

5. Filter your list by group or year level if required, using the filter options above the line item table e.g. perhaps only a particular class is not going to attend.

6. Select the students from this group to be processed by clicking the checkbox. You may select students individually or select ALL students for this Ledger Item by clicking the checkbox in the column heading. 

If you have a large number of students with payments, you may select ALL and the process will ignore those without payments.

7. Click REFUND PAYMENTS FOR SELECTED LINE ITEMS.

8.  Enter the refund information - all fields are mandatory including the comment:  

• Enter the Maximum refund amount- the process will not refund more than what has been paid.
• Click REFUND or TRANSFER TO PIA - Refund is used when paying the money back to the caregiver, Transfer to PIA allows the funds to be reused at a later date.
• Enter a Comment - reason for the refund. 
• Enter the Date - date of the refund.

The table displayed will show all students selected and the amounts that will be refunded.

9. Click NEXT. 

10. The confirmation screen will be displayed showing how many items will be refunded along with the total value.  Click CONFIRM to process or CANCEL to go back.

11. Your refunds will be processed. Click DONE.

All payments have now been removed from the line items so the debt is ready to be wiped.  

Step 2: Cancel the Debt

There are three debt removal options:

• Write Offs - these remove all 'outstanding' debt that is being removed subject to BOT approval.  This process is designed to cater for line items that contain payments e.g. a partially paid school donation. These are covered in the article - Writing off Line Items in Bulk.
• Voids - These can only be applied if all selected line items have zero credits i.e. all payments have been refunded or no payments exist.  Use for cancelled activities, removal of erroneous line items or writing off donations that have no associated payments.
• Partial Voids - These will cancel a fixed amount of the line item. This amount is entered by the user and will apply to all line items selected. Use this to 'reduce' the debt on line items i.e. part of an event is cancelled or a line item cost has been reduced or to write off the remaining portion of a partially paid donation.

The process of Voiding a line item will not remove the line item value but will create a Void transaction that will result in the outstanding balance being zeroed or reduced.  

To process the void: 

1.  Select the students to be processed as above. You may individually select students or select ALL students for this Ledger Item by clicking the selection box in the column heading.   

2.  Click CANCEL SELECTED LINE ITEMS.

3. If all payments have been refunded, both the Void and Partial Void options will be available. But, if some payments are still remaining on your selected students, then only the Partial Void will be available and the amount to be voided will not be able to exceed the lowest amount outstanding. If you do have this situation then process those with balances by selecting those students individually.

4. Select VOID to cancel the full outstanding amount. Enter your reason and date.

5. Select PARTIAL VOID if you are only voiding part of the balance. This option will require you to enter the amount to be voided.  

6.  Click CONFIRM to process.

7.  Don't forget to do your Journal postings to your external accounting package (or send them to your accounting provider to do for you).  This ensures your external package balances with the Ledgers in Hero.  Here is the Help Article link to help you with that: Posting-to-your-External-Accounting-Package