Refunded transactions are a universal component of online fundraising and payment processing. Despite this, there is no common standard for when and how to report refunds of transactions. Most conversion tracking systems (Google, Facebook) do have minimal support for conversion adjustments, but we at Frakture have not seen extensive use of them. As such, most revenue and ROI calculations in the wild do not include refund amounts.
At Frakture we lie at the intersection of common marketing practice and good revenue reporting. To try to accommodate both practices, we provide both revenue and refund data, and allow you to determine which refund practice you want to use.
For every transaction, Frakture will attempt to record a refund_amount if that transaction has been refunded,* but we do not use refund_amount to adjust original gift amounts or subtract from gift counts. In your warehouse, the “revenue” and “amount” numbers reflect all transactions, without refunds. To obtain the transaction sum less refunds, just subtract refund_amount to get the final net value.
<aside> 💻 EXAMPLE: select (SUM(amount) - SUM(refund_amount)) AS amount_less_refunds from transaction_summary
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In Frakture's standard reports, we use the non-refunded totals unless specifically labeled otherwise.
** Note that systems might vary significantly in whether they can even record a refund, and some such events — for example, refunds issued directly via a payment gateway — will lie beyond Frakture's view. Frakture cannot guarantee that the warehouse will capture all refunds.*