Refunds that actually refund

It rains all day Thursday. By five o'clock the pitch is standing water, the session is called off, and forty people who each paid £8 to be there need their money back. You open the payments dashboard, refund the lot, and everyone is square inside a couple of days.

Then your treasurer asks the awkward question: what did it cost the club to take forty payments and hand every penny of them straight back? On most club platforms, the answer is not "nothing".

Where the fee goes when you refund

Refunding a member returns the money they paid. What it usually does not return is the fee the club paid in order to take that money in the first place. That is the norm across the industry, not a quirk of one product.

Spond's help centre sets the choice out plainly. One of its refund options is described like this:

The other option refunds the member the amount minus the fee. So a club cancelling a session picks which of two people is out of pocket: itself, or the member who showed up to a waterlogged pitch. Neither option makes the fee disappear.

Why the industry works this way

It is worth understanding where that fee actually went, because nobody here is being greedy.

When a member taps a card, the card networks, the issuing bank and the payment processor all take a cut, and they take it at the moment the payment is authorised. By then the work is done. The money has moved, the fraud checks have run, the risk has been carried. When the payment is refunded a fortnight later, none of those parties hand their share back. The cost is real, it has already been incurred, and somebody has to carry it.

A platform that passes that cost through to the club is doing the ordinary, defensible thing: charging for what it was itself charged. Any treasurer who has read a merchant statement will recognise the logic immediately, and it is hard to argue that it is unfair.

So the interesting question is not whether the cost exists. It plainly does. The question is who absorbs it.

What ClubPal does

ClubPal absorbs it.

Refund a payment and the whole ClubPal fee comes back with it, in proportion to the amount refunded. Refund in full and the entire fee returns to your club. Refund half and half of it returns. That includes the slice of the fee covering card processing, the slice the networks keep regardless, which ClubPal wears rather than passing on to you.

There is nothing to claim, no form to fill in and no support ticket to raise. It is part of issuing the refund.

What that is worth in pounds

Back to the rained-off Thursday. Forty members at £8 is £320 taken. At 20p + 3.5% per transaction, the ClubPal fee on those forty payments is £19.20.

Refund the forty in full and the members get their £320 back and your club gets its £19.20 back. Taking the money cost nothing, giving it back cost nothing, and the line in the accounts for that session is zero.

Where the fee is kept, the same cancellation carries a price. Either the club is down the fee on forty payments for a session that never happened, or, on the other option, forty people each get back a little less than the £8 they paid, and a few of them will ask why. Neither conversation is one you particularly want to have about weather.

One washed-out Thursday is a modest sum. A winter of them, plus the injury withdrawals, plus the tour that did not fill, plus the family that moves away in March, is a line item. Clubs running on subs and session fees do not have much margin to spend on the privilege of giving money back, and they certainly should not be discouraged from doing the right thing by a cancellation charge in disguise.

There is a knock-on effect worth naming too. When refunding costs the club, refunding becomes a decision rather than a reflex. Committees start weighing whether it is worth it, offering credit towards a future session instead, or quietly hoping nobody asks. When refunding costs nothing, you refund because it is the right call, and the member gets their money back without anybody doing sums first.

None of this is free for us. It is free for you, which is the whole point. A club that cancels a session for a good reason should not be paying for the decision.

Refunds are issued from Admin > Payments > Dashboard, in full or in part. The refunds documentation has the step by step.