There are some situations that may arise where you need to refund a payment to a client that didn't originate in Shepherd.
For instance, if you have credit balances migrated over from your previous practice management software; or if you began using Shepherd Pay after you've generated some credit balances with another merchant processor.
Whatever the reason, here is how to facilitate a refund of funds that were not received using Shepherd Pay.
Make sure you have the complete card info you are refunding ready to go.
Note: You won't be able to use a card that is saved in Shepherd for this.
Log into the Shepherd Pay portal
Navigate to the 'Process Transaction' panel
In order to facilitate the refund, the merchant processing support team will need to manually grant your account additional refund capabilities. Call 732.323.8300 and inform the team that you will be processing a refund for a payment that was made before you were a Shepherd Pay customer. They will then unlock the refund option on your account temporarily.
Note: Shepherd Pay is powered by Banquest Payment Systems. When you phone in the request, you will be speaking to a Banquest team member on behalf of Shepherd Pay.
Verify that the credit option is present at the top right of the Process Transaction screen. You may need to refresh the portal.
Enter the client's information and the card information on the Process Transaction screen.
Enter a total to refund/credit and click "Process Transaction"
And that's how it's done! Now, this takes care of the actual refund to the client's card, however, because this transaction wasn't processed through Shepherd, you will want to record it manually in Shepherd to keep your accounting up-to-date and accurate!
Here's how to record the refund in Shepherd:
Navigate to the client profile
Select the dropdown arrow next to "Take Payment"
Select "Issue a Refund"
Normally, when you are processing a refund to a card, you would select "Shepherd Pay" as the option to process the transaction through the integration. However, since this has been processed manually through the portal, we will just select the card type that the money was refunded to (eg. 'Visa' or 'Mastercard'). This will bypass the integration but still record that the refund happened.
Type in the amount that you refunded via the Shepherd Pay portal and select "Refund Credit Balance"
And that's it! You've refunded a credit balance that didn't originate through Shepherd Pay and recorded it into the client's financial record!