Cancelling entries and credit
An exhibitor sometimes enters the wrong dogs, picks the wrong event, or simply changes their mind after paying. This chapter explains how to cancel a paid entry, what happens to the money, and how the exhibitor uses it again.
It is written for whoever runs the show from the office computer. The exhibitor does nothing except read the message that arrives and enter again.
Money never goes back the way it came
Whatever the exhibitor used to pay — card, bank transfer or cash — a cancelled entry does not produce a refund on that channel. The amount is placed in the exhibitor's credit, and the exhibitor spends it on the next entry. No card transaction is ever reversed.
This is a deliberate choice and it cannot be changed from the interface: there is no button anywhere that sends money back to a card. Say so plainly when an exhibitor asks — the answer is not "we will see", it is "it becomes credit, and you use it next time".
Credit belongs to one organization
Credit is not a single pot. Each amount is held towards the organization that received the payment, and it can only be spent on shows of that same organization. An exhibitor with credit at two organizations has two separate balances.
The exhibitor's record shows a single Credit amount, and that figure is the sum of every balance. It answers "how much do I have altogether", not "how much can I spend here". The second question is answered by the credit movements list, which names the organization on every line.
This distinction is the source of nearly every phone call about credit, so it is worth having it clear before the call arrives.
Deleted or cancelled
There are two ways an entry can be undone, and they are not interchangeable:
| The entry is | What happens |
|---|---|
| not paid | it is deleted — nothing was collected |
| paid | it is cancelled — it stays, and becomes credit |
The application chooses for you. The delete command refuses a paid entry, and the cancel command refuses an unpaid one.
Cancelling a paid entry
When it can be done
Cancelling is possible while the entries of that event are still open and the show has not ended. Once the entries are closed the dogs have catalog numbers and have been distributed to the rings, and undoing that is a different operation altogether.
Only an administrator can cancel. The exhibitor cannot do it from their own pages: they contact you and you carry it out.
How to do it
- Open the entries page and find the entry. The status shows whether it is paid.
- Double-click the row to open it.
- Press Cancel entry. The button is only there on a paid entry that has not already been cancelled.
- Confirm.
The confirmation asks a single question. If you want to record why the entry was cancelled, write it afterwards in the Cancelled note field, which appears on the entry once it is cancelled.
What the amount is
The amount credited is the entry amount — the full price of the entry, the same figure the exhibitor saw before paying.
The card commission is not included. In the example above the entry amount is 114.00 and the fee is 1.50, so the exhibitor paid 115.50 and gets 114.00 back as credit. The organization has already paid that commission to the bank and does not get it back by cancelling, so it is not given to the exhibitor either. On entries paid by bank transfer or cash there is no commission and the question does not arise.
What happens to the entry
The entry is not deleted. It stays in the lists, marked as cancelled, because it is the record of money that really was collected.
What changes is that its dogs are moved aside. From that moment the entry counts nothing towards the show:
- it no longer appears in the statistics, the catalog, the exhibitor cards or the ring assignment;
- its dogs become free to be entered again for the same event — which is the point of cancelling;
- the list of dogs it contained is still visible on the entry, under Cancelled dogs.
The entry remains marked as paid, because it was. It is the cancellation that removes it from the show, not the payment status.
This is also why the paid switch has no effect on an entry paid by card. Turning a card payment back to unpaid used to be a way of making the entry deletable, and the money collected would then have disappeared without a trace. Cancel the entry instead: the amount goes to the credit and stays visible.
The exhibitor is told
An email goes out automatically, in the exhibitor's language, saying which entry was cancelled, how much was credited and what the balance now is. You do not need to write to them separately.
If the address is wrong and the message bounces, the cancellation still stands: the money has already been returned to the credit. Only the notification fails.
Spending the credit
The exhibitor does not have to ask for the credit to be used. It is applied on its own during registration, before the payment step, and the amount shown at the end of the wizard is already net of it.
Only the balance towards the organization of that show is available. If the exhibitor has fifty euro with another organization, that money does not appear and cannot be used.
When a registration covers several events, the credit is used up one entry at a time, starting with the earliest event. So the nearest show is covered first, and what is left over goes towards the next one.
- An entry covered in full by credit has nothing to pay, and no card commission.
- An entry only partly covered keeps a balance to pay, and if the exhibitor is paying by card that entry carries the commission.
An entry that the credit covers entirely is recorded as paid straight away. There is no payment to make, so there is nothing for you to confirm afterwards.
One organization at a time
A single registration cannot mix shows of different organizations. If the exhibitor selects events belonging to two of them the registration is refused, and they must register separately.
The reason is the credit: each entry would have to draw on a different balance.
Where to look at the credit
Open the exhibitor. The record has four tabs — personal data, dogs, entries and credit movements. The Credit amount field on the first tab is the total across all organizations, and it is read-only.
The credit movements tab is the one that answers the useful questions. Every line carries the date, what caused it, the amount, the balance afterwards, the organization and the note.
Correcting a credit by hand
The credit figure cannot be typed over. It is the sum of the movements, and changing it directly would leave the total saying one thing and the list saying another. A correction is therefore made by adding a movement.
- Open the exhibitor.
- Go to the credit movements tab.
- Press the + above the table.
- Choose the organization, type the amount, write the reason, and confirm.
Organization — which balance the correction applies to. Credit is always held towards one organization, so this cannot be left empty.
Amount — with a sign. A positive amount adds credit, a negative one takes it away. A balance cannot be pushed below zero: the correction is refused if it would.
Note — required. A correction without a written reason is exactly the line nobody can explain six months later.
Corrections are available to administrators only, and they leave a line in the list like any other movement. Nothing is ever overwritten or removed.
If something does not work
The Cancel entry button is not there. It only appears on an entry that is paid and not already cancelled. On an unpaid entry there is nothing to give back, and the entry is deleted from the toolbar instead.
Cancelling is refused. The entries of that event are closed, or the show has ended. Both are checked when you confirm, not when the button is drawn, so the refusal can arrive at the last moment.
The exhibitor says the credit does not appear when registering. Almost always the credit belongs to a different organization. Open the credit movements tab and look at the organization column: the balance is only usable on shows of the organization named there.
The registration is refused with a message about organizations. The exhibitor has selected events belonging to more than one organization. They must register separately, once per organization.
The paid switch has no effect on an entry paid by card. This is intentional — see above. Cancel the entry instead.
The total credit does not match the movements. It should never happen, because every movement writes both. If you do see it, do not try to correct the total by hand: it cannot be typed anyway. Add a manual adjustment with the difference and a note saying what you found, so the discrepancy is recorded rather than hidden.