Transaction Approvals & Refunds

For organizations that choose to sell their LMS inventory to Learners, one of the first E-Commerce decisions they will need to make will be which forms of payment (i.e. credit cards, PayPal, Wire Transfers, Checks and Purchase Orders) their 'store' is willing to accept.

If the organization does elect to allow payment in forms that are not instantaneously processed, in the way that credit cards or PayPal are, then they will also need make a second decision as to whether or not their portal will be configured to delay a Learner's access to their purchased Course until their funds can be received and verified by the Admin's Accounting department.

As described in Settings, the handling of deferred payments is governed by the Course Delivery Type option found in Absorb's E-Commerce Settings. When it is turned 'On' (and the delivery mode is set to Optimistic) Transactions automatically allow immediate Course access regardless of whether the Learner's payment has been successfully received or not. Alternatively when it is turned 'Off' (and the delivery mode is set to Pessimistic instead) access to the Course will not be provided to the Learner, until their verified payment has been received.

Most organization's choose the more secure Pessimistic setting in order to ensure they receive payment for their commercial training products. This in turn makes it necessary to provide the Admin with the means to either allow or deny the LMS purchase, once the Transaction's settlement status has been confirmed, which is handled through the use of the Transaction Report's Approve and Decline options.

Actions

When working with a Transaction that is awaiting authorization, the Actions available for use by the Admin are:

Element	Image	Description
Approve		This button will change the Status field of any Transaction in the Transaction Report (awaiting authorization from the Admin's Accounting department) from Pending Approval to Completed. Once this is selected the Learner will receive a Payment Approval Messagewhich includes the link to their Course that they can launch in order to start their training.
Decline		This button will change the Status field of any Transaction in the Transaction Report (awaiting authorization from the Admin's Accounting department) from Pending Approval to Declined. Once this is selected the Learner will be denied access to their purchased Course.

Refund

Instructions

Absorb's E-Commerce module has been explicitly designed to bypass the work of processing any financial transactions for any LMS purchase made with a credit card, thereby allowing our customers to use their own Payment Gateway instead. As a result, no monetary aspect of any LMS Learner Refund (or purchase) made with a credit card is handled by Absorb in any way.

Based on this configuration, if an LMS customer does require a Refund the Admin will need to access the administrative side of their Gateway and do the reimbursement work there. Only once the repayment is successfully processed does the LMS come back into play.

Similarly, in the case of an alternate means of payment being used to complete the purchase (e.g. wire transfer, check, purchase order, etc.) the Admin will have to liaise with their Accounting department to have the Refund processed and repayment issued to the customer.

Regardless of which reimbursement situation takes place the Admin must enable the Refund indicator for the Transaction, once repayment has been issued, so that it is recorded inside the LMS. This is owing to the fact that there will be no way afterwards to discern that Refund has taken place without running a refund report on the Gateway (if it is offered by the merchant's provider) or consulting with the Admin's Accounting department as to the status of the Transaction.

An optional final step once this is done is to generate a new Receipt for the records of both the Admin's organization and for the Learner, if and as required.

When working with a Transaction that involves the processing of a Refund the Actions available for use by the Admin are:

Actions

Element	Image	Description
Mark Refunded		This button will change the Refunded field of a selected Transaction in the Transaction Report from 'No' to 'Yes' to indicate that the purchase of the LMS item(s) has been refunded back to the Learner.
Undo Refund		This button will change the Refunded field of a selected Transaction in the Transaction Report from 'Yes' back to 'No' to indicate that the purchase of the LMS item(s) has notbeen refunded back to the Learner and the recorded Transaction still represents a successfully completed purchase.