Having issues with recording new payments for registrations paid with credit cards

Question

I am running CiviCRM (4.6.9) on Joomla (3.4.5), and am having issues changing registrations for events and posting payments due to changes to the registration options for an event.

We have a lot of events with options. We use price sets pretty heavily to cover all of those options. If a user registers for an event, and pays with a credit card all works as it should. However if that same user comes back to us and wants to change their registration, by wanting an additional option like attending a banquet, the status for that event for the user gets changed to Partially Paid. This is where it all break down for us.

If the user chose initially to pay offline (by sending us a check), instead of by credit card, we can at this point open the Event record for editing, and see a Record Payment link right there where we can click, record a new payment that we took offline and everything is perfect.

For the user that paid with a credit card, we don't see that Record Payment link. If we return to the event listing for that user, click on the More link and choose Record Payment, we immediately get an ugly looking error. The error is:

An error has occurred.
 0 <div id="crm-container" class="crm-container" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> @import url(/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/css/civicrm.css); @import url(/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/bower_components/jquery-ui/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.min.css); </style> <div class="messages status no-popup"> <div class="icon red-icon ui-icon-alert"></div> <span class="status-fatal">Sorry but we are not able to provide this at the moment.</span> <div class="crm-section crm-error-message">No payment information found for this record</div> <p><a href="https://www.uhms.org/administrator/" title="Main Menu">Return to home page.</a></p> </div> </div> <script language="JavaScript"> function toggle( element ) { var className = element.className; if ( className == 'crm-accordion-wrapper collapsed crm-fatal-error-details-block') { element.className = 'crm-accordion-wrapper crm-fatal-error-details-block'; } else { element.className = 'crm-accordion-wrapper collapsed crm-fatal-error-details-block'; } } </script>

For watever reason the error is not displaying right. If I look at the jumbled mess of an error I see the following:

Sorry but we are not able to provide this at the moment. No payment information found for this record

Why does this functionality work fine for events paid offline, but not events paid with credit cards? It also works fine for event registrations that are created through the backend, even if I choose that it is paid with a credit card.

How can I fix this? Or work around this?

Has anyone else run into this?

Any help or guidance would be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

I don't have the same error, but a similar issue with workflow for processing additional cc registrations where we can't "submit a credit card edit to an event registration" to add these items for folks. That would be ideal.

Last year we worked around by either having them run through registration again for only the additional item or submitting a credit card registration for the additional item in the back end, then consolidating the line items in one record, updating the amount paid, forcing the status 'registered' at the top, and deleting the second event registration.

This caused a bunch of problems for example the event report dollar amount was off because when editing event registration line items you can't add in discount codes or edit the event total, only the contribution total. Therefore only the contributions dollar amount with that financial code was correct.

In the end the event ran and the badges printed. Not a great answer but this is what we ad-hoc threw together and wanted to say you aren't the only one who has had this workflow issue for events.

Answer 2

My answer to this would be the same as to your latest question in this regards (Credit Card Payment after Editing Event Registration with more Choices):

Your use case is quite valid, however, the assumption that once a contribution has been marked as completed, there should be no need for further payment processing, and, AFAIK, is meant to preserve data integrity. That said, aside from what Pete suggested, the only other way I can think of would be for you to charge the amount due directly via your payment processor portal (i.e. outside of Civi), and then update the pending contribution to a status of completed and include the transaction ID for good measure. In this way, your event income reporting will remain accurate without having to cancel the participant registration and re-record it.

I do like the thought of an extension that provides more flexibility as Eli suggests, but that request would either need to come with funding if you would like the core team to handle it, or through contributed code from the community.

Hope this helps! Tamar