Refund a booking
Full or partial, and whether the spot goes back on sale.
Refunds are manual. Arvald never refunds anyone on its own, whatever your cancellation policy says, so a refund happens because you decided it should.
Issuing one
Open the booking under Payments and choose Refund. It returns money to the player's card through the payment processor and cannot be undone.
You get two decisions.
How much
Full returns the whole amount. Partial returns an amount you type, anywhere between the smallest unit of the currency and the full amount.
Partial refunds are the honest answer to most real situations: a player cancels a little late, you refund half, everyone gets on with their lives.
What happens to the spot
If the spot is still live, you also choose:
Free the spot. Cancels the booking so someone else can take it.
Keep the booking. The lesson still goes ahead.
The default follows what you are most likely to mean: a full refund defaults to freeing the spot, a partial refund defaults to keeping the booking. Both are yours to change.
Keeping the booking after a partial refund is the common case, for example when you drop the price after a session ran short. Freeing the spot after a full refund is the common case when a player pulls out and you would like to resell the time.
You can also add an optional reason, for your own records.
Refund in Arvald, not in the processor's dashboard
Issue refunds from the Arvald booking panel.
A refund made in the processor's own dashboard is not lost. It reports the charge back to Arvald, which matches it to the payment and marks it Refunded or Partly refunded, so the money side of the record stays right on its own.
What that cannot carry is the rest of the decision. The booking stays Confirmed and keeps its spot, because a refund by itself does not say whether the lesson is still happening, and no reason is recorded against it. You are left with a row reading "Confirmed, Refunded", which is a real and sensible state if you meant to keep the booking, and the wrong one if you were trying to free the spot for somebody else.
Refunding here asks you both questions at once. That is the whole reason to prefer it.
What can and cannot be refunded
Card payments taken online can be refunded, and partly refunded ones can be refunded again until the money runs out.
Offline payments cannot be refunded through Arvald, because the processor never held that money. Return it however you received it and cancel the booking.
A cancelled booking with a paid card charge can still be refunded, so cancelling first does not trap the money.
Nobody is told
The player is not emailed about the refund. The processor may send its own receipt depending on your settings there, but Arvald sends nothing, so if the player should know, tell them.