Provide option to waive or cancel a fee/fine at the time a manual refund is entered

Holly Mistlebauer:speech_balloon: Yesterday at 1:01 PM
@channel: Hi RA SIG! I have a quick question about refunds. Right now if you manually refund all or part of a fee/fine balance, the remaining balance goes back to the original amount and the fee/fine remain opens. For example, a patron is billed 100.00 for a damaged item. They paid 50.00 already. The library decides to refund the 50.00 (could be for a variety of reasons). Right now FOLIO will refund the 50.00 and set the Fee/Fine Remaining Balance back to 100.00. The library will then need to manually waive/cancel the fee/fine to have it removed from the patron's balance. At an RA SIG meeting awhile back we discussed this and there was interest in automatically canceling fees/fines that have been refunded rather than leaving them open. Thoughts? I have been hesitant because of concern over situations where part of the fee/fine is refunded but perhaps the fee/fine needs to remain open. Are there any cases you can think of? Thanks for your help...
7 replies

Erin Nettifee 1 day ago
Why does it reset it to $100? Is that a bug? Or is that designed behavior?

Gordon Goldner 1 day ago
Based on my understanding of how fees/fines are modeled, it is best to think of them as subaccounts, so a refund is actually just a debit on the account, it's not so much resetting, as just being added back in. (edited)

Erin Nettifee 1 day ago
oh ok - so it's refunding the $50 the patron paid, not waiving the additional $50 to bring it to fully paid?

Erin Nettifee 1 day ago
If I'm understanding that correctly, one scenario that could apply is a problem with a payment method. Suppose a patron pays $25 of a fine with a check, and the check bounces. I need to refund what they paid because I didn't actually get the money and I don't want it to look like the check was actually cashed.
Is that a scenario that might apply here?

Holly Mistlebauer:speech_balloon: 10 hours ago
@Erin Nettifee : It was designed to work this way. The example you gave is a good reason to not change this. Maybe the refund modal should ask the user if they want to cancel the fee/fine?
New

Erin Nettifee 9 hours ago
I guess - I don't see that as being high priority work at all, but if you could have the option to have it immediately move you into the cancellation workflows, it would save a click or two.

Holly Mistlebauer:speech_balloon: < 1 minute ago
@Erin Nettifee: Thanks...I will create a JIRA for future work...