How to make a refund via Online Transaction Refunds (back to the parents bank account / card)

This only applies for payments made up to 180 days ago.

Refund a transaction made on School Gateway

• Go to Payments.
• Click on the required Payment Request within Payments (that the parent made the payment against).
• Click into Online Transaction Refunds.

Hint: Remember to change the date range in line with when the original payment was made. 

• You will need to amend the date range to the date the payment was made.
• You will now see a list of Online Transactions available for you to refund. (It is only possible to refund one transaction at a time)
• Once you have found the Online Transaction that you would like to refund, click Yes next to that transaction.
• If the option to refund is greyed out and you are unable to select Yes on a payment you wish to refund, it will mean the payment has not yet cleared from the payer's bank account, so cannot yet be refunded. Payments can take up to 7 days to clear from the payer’s account, so please wait until this time has elapsed before attempting to issue a refund.

• Once you have selected the Online Transaction that you would like to refund, Click Refund in the top right hand corner of your screen.

• You will then be presented with a warning message asking you to confirm you are sure you would like to process the refund.
• It will also remind you that for each Online Transaction that you refund, you will incur a Transaction Charge.

• The system will then confirm that your refund has been successful and the transaction will be greyed out. This is because there is nothing left to refund for that Online Transaction.
• However, if you have chosen to do a partial refund, it will display the remaining balance for you, should you wish to refund the remaining balance at a later date.
• They will then receive the refund back to their original payment method within 5 working days.

Parent/carer has added more than 4 items/instalments to basket and paid for them in one transaction

Unfortunately you are limited to refunding only 4 of these via Online Transaction Refunds. If this is the case you will receive the following error maximum refund limit reached. The remaining items/instalments would need to be recorded as a refund via manual transactions and you would need to give the parents the refund as cash/cheque.

So to confirm, if a parent paid for 5+ instalments separately (i.e. checked out on separate dates/times), you would still be able to refund all of these. It is only if a parent paid for 5+ instalments or payment items at once (i.e. added them all to their basket and checked out) that you would be unable to refund all of them - for example, if a parent paid for 3 trip instalments and made two dinner money payments at the same time, you would only be able to refund a combination of 4 of these - whereas if they paid for them all separately, you could refund them all.

Unfortunately, this is a limitation imposed by the payment providers. As advised above, in those cases you would need to refund the remaining amounts via cash/cheque and record manual transactions in Schoolcomms to reflect this.

For further instruction in refunding via Manual Transactions see here.

When refunding via manual transaction you will need to refund the parent/carer with either cash or cheque.

Please be aware that the manual transaction process is purely an internal accounting procedure and does not refund monies or transfer monies between bank accounts.