Which payment processors support refunding payments from within CiviCRM?

Question

My client is certain that they have, in the past, initiated credit card refunds from within CiviCRM, such that it triggers an actual refund of the credit card payment to the cardholder.

In contrast, in their current setup, using Stripe, they must initiate the refund within their Stripe console at stripe.com and then ensure the refund is properly recorded in CiviCRM.

For which payment processors (Authorize.net, iATS, etc.), if any, would a staff user be able to initiate the refund process from within CiviCRM, without needing to separately initiate the refund in their payment processor terminal/console?

Answer 1

I know it's not helpful for figuring out who did it in the past, but in-app refunds is a feature that Alice has written for TSYS that we'll be including in the next major version. There is some coordination that needs to happen on how CiviCRM treats refunds, because if the payment hasn't settled, you're really voiding it rather than refunding it. CiviCRM doesn't distinguish the two, so we want to be sure that reconciliation isn't a mess.

Answer 2

CiviCRM Core doesn't support refunds via the payment processor extension/plugin, though there's a detailed spec here:

https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/financial/-/wikis/Refunds-via-payment-processors

Any payment processor that implemented it would be on their own, and I haven't heard of such a thing.

There seems to be a PaymentProcessor.refund API in CiviCRM Core which I think is a first step.

I can confirm that the iATS Payments plugin doesn't support refunds from CiviCRM and doesn't have any immediate plans to change that.

How do I process a refund for a credit card payment via iATS?

Answer 3

Been using CiviCRM since late v3....it absolutely boggles my mind this isn't core functionality but it just isnt possible.....