Refund a donation

Return a donation-form or checkout-link gift to the donor, in full, from the donation detail dialog.

A donor asks for their money back, or your team takes a gift you cannot accept. Refund it from Together and the money goes back to the card or bank account it came from, funded by your own Stripe balance.

Before you start

• You need the ADMIN role. EDITORs and VIEWERs do not see the control.
• The gift must have come through a Together donation form or checkout link, and still be Confirmed. Gifts synced from NationBuilder, Raisely or CiviCRM, imported gifts and manually recorded gifts carry no Stripe payment Together can reverse, so no refund control appears on them.
• Refunds are all-or-nothing. There is no amount field, and no way to undo one from Together.
• A gift that already carries a refund of any size - a partial refund issued from the Stripe dashboard, or a chargeback you lost - has no refund control at all. The button is simply not there, rather than there and disabled. Email hello@alltogether.giving to have the remainder refunded: the charge sits on Together's Stripe account, and the Express dashboard your organisation holds cannot issue a refund.
• A gift paid by bank transfer has no refund control either. Its detail says "Contact Together support to refund a bank transfer." - email support@alltogether.giving and Together refunds it for you. See How a bank transfer gift works.

Steps

1. Open Donations, or the donor's record under Donors, and click the gift to open its detail.
2. Check the Financial section: the amount you are about to send back is the one shown against Amount.
3. Click Refund donation. The confirm names the amount, says the money returns to the original payment method in 5-10 business days, and repeats that the platform fee is not refunded.
4. Click Confirm refund.

The donation moves to Refunded and drops out of your totals, your cap arithmetic and any disclosure obligation it was holding open. It stays visible under the Refunded filter on the donations list, and its detail now carries a Refunded line with the date the money went back.

What the refund costs you

Together keeps its platform fee on a refunded donation, the same way it does on a chargeback. The payment was processed on the day it was made and the cost of processing it is not recoverable afterwards. Stripe's own processing fee stays with Stripe either way. The donor gets the full amount they gave.

If your CRM holds a copy

When the gift was written back to NationBuilder, Together marks that copy as refunded at the same time and dates the note. If the connection is disconnected, expired or the write-back had not run yet, the dialog stays open and says exactly what happened so you can annotate the gift in your CRM by hand. There is no retry: the refund itself has already landed.

What gets recorded

Every refund writes two entries to the audit log: one naming you and the Stripe refund id at the moment the money moved, and one for the donation's change of state. Between them they answer who refunded what, when, and for how much.

Together does not email the donor about a refund. Stripe sends its own refund notice, and the amount appears on the donor's statement.

What to do next

• Check what came back by filtering the donations list to Status = Refunded: Read the donations list.
• Reconcile the month against your payouts, where refunds net off the settlement they fall in: Reconcile a payout.
• Review who did what in Review the audit log.