Towards the end of this week, we officially push out Version 4 of Elevent. This marks the end of the Beta status of the new Box Office—and the legacy Box Office will be officially put on a raft, set out into the river, and someone will shoot a fire arrow at it and it’ll burn ceremoniously on a little boat and we’ll all feel sad. If only for a minute.

The last real chunk that needed to be made anew was refunds. The next time you do a refund, it will likely look completely different to you—and much better.

New Refunding is massively faster, less error-prone (and nothing is more error-prone than refunds), and will help with more reliable refund and exchange reporting.

Notably, donations can now be refunded as well.

Be cautious with this newfound power--if you auto-send tax deduction letters with each donation, you'll want to inform donors that they cannot claim the deduction if refunded.

Refunds in the older Box Office were just plain overelaborate. You can still refund only some items within an order and can refund only some of the amounts in an item, but we did remove the ability to refund a partial, custom amount of a sales tax or service charge. That’s just far too detailed and it was so very rarely done.

To keep up with industry standards and the ever-changing nature of ticketing, we are also no longer refunding Elevent fees on refunds. The dollar amounts involved are rarely significant, but what this does is greatly reduce many of the issues with refunds and reporting. Refunding a multi-party payment involved 3 separate operations—and now refunds involve just a single operation. It’s a huge improvement, system-wise and for clear, consistent reporting.

We ran the numbers and there’s nothing to suggest significant financial impact here. We are also forgoing any fee increases again this year, despite escalating inflation. If you still have concerns about this impact, you may consider applying a service charge on the act of refunding and incorporating that into your Refund/No-refund policy. Elevent support service charges on refunds and exchanges already.

Learn about new refunds here. Please visit the revamped Box Office Documentation section.