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The Multi-Tiered Refund Engine

UniTix empowers event organizers with a fully customizable, automated Multi-Tiered Cancellation & Refund Engine. Instead of dealing with messy manual disputes on social media or email, your cancellation rules are codified into your event settings, displayed transparently during checkout, and enforced automatically by our serverless logic.

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1. Enabling & Structuring Refund Policies

When creating or modifying an event in the Event Builder (society-dashboard/events), scroll to the Cancellation & Refund Policy section. You can toggle Allow Refunds on or off:
  • No Refunds (Strict): Once purchased, tickets cannot be cancelled by the student for financial reimbursement (though they may still transfer them if transfers are enabled).
  • Tiered Refunds (Dynamic): Students can cancel their reservations within specific time windows, triggering automated split distributions.

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2. Penalty Split Distribution Logic

For every cancellation window you define, the financial distribution across three entities must equal exactly 100%: Student Refund %+Society Cut %+Platform Cut %=100%\text{Student Refund \%} + \text{Society Cut \%} + \text{Platform Cut \%} = 100\%

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Breakdown of Entities:

  1. Student Refund (% Refunded to Student): The exact percentage of the original ticket price returned to the student’s payment account (PKR).
  2. Society Cut (% Kept by Society): The cancellation penalty fee retained by your society as compensation for holding the inventory slot. This amount remains part of your take-home revenue.
  3. Platform Cut (% Kept by Platform): The processing and gateway fee retained by UniTix (10% - 20% depending on tier) to cover payment reversal costs, SMS notifications, and database operations.

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3. Standard Time-Window Configurations

Our system evaluates cancellation requests based on the exact timestamp difference between the cancellation click and your event’s scheduled start time:

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4. Built-In Platform Safety Policies

To protect both students and organizers from edge cases, the UniTix backend enforces two immutable global rules:

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⏱️ 24-Hour Buyer’s Remorse Grace Period

If a student purchases a ticket and requests a cancellation within 24 hours of the original purchase timestamp (and the event is more than 48 hours away), they are automatically granted a 100% full refund. This protects students who accidentally selected the wrong tier or date during checkout.

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🛑 48-Hour Hard Cutoff Guard

Once the clock ticks below 48 hours prior to event commencement, automated cancellation requests are locked across all standard events (0% refund). This ensures your catering, venue seating, and security numbers remain stable during final preparations.

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5. What Happens When a Ticket Is Cancelled?

When a student triggers a valid cancellation from their dashboard (My Tickets -> Cancel Reservation):
  1. Status Update: The student’s ticket record immediately transitions from approved to cancelled (or refunded).
  2. QR Invalidation: The student’s digital QR token (qrToken) is permanently revoked, ensuring the cancelled pass cannot be scanned at the gate.
  3. Inventory Release: The venue capacity and specific ticket tier inventory count are instantly decremented (sold - 1), reopening one available slot for new purchases.
  4. Waitlist Trigger: If students are queued on the automated waitlist, our background allocation engine immediately reserves the newly freed slot for the first student in line and dispatches an SMS/Email notification.
  5. Ledger Reconciliation: Your dashboard Net Revenue card dynamically updates to subtract the refunded portion while retaining your society’s cancellation penalty cut.